Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

Canadian director Matt Johnson got his start online all the way back in 2007, as the co-creator/star/director of the cult web-series Nirvana The Band. Eventually picked up by a short-lived offshoot of VICE and turned into a full two-season television series in 2017, Johnson’s star has been on the rise ever since distributor NEON released Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie earlier this year to overwhelming success. A direct continuation of the show, the film’s ecstatic reception seemed to prove that once-niche creatives who made their home online are soon to break out into the mainstream.

Johnson’s is hardly an isolated case. This has been a strange summer for cinema: most of the classic IP fare has bombed hard while low-budget films from internet creators become the season’s real success stories. Backrooms, the debut film from 20-year-old director Kane Parsons, based on his viral YouTube series made $400 Million off its meager budget, and ignited a mini-revolution in Hollywood. No longer ashamed of the Internet (or at least finally realizing how to milk it), studios are lining up to fund projects from online creators at a breakneck pace. Aware of shifting tastes, Hollywood has thrown up a smoke signal and is attempting to evolve.

Complementing Backrooms’ success was Obsession, another horror film from an internet creator, this time YouTuber Curry Barker. While thinking about Obsession for more than ten minutes makes me want to jump into moving traffic, ignoring its (seemingly) organic success would be a mistake. Made on a $750,000 budget, Obsession has since cleared north of $425 Million. The less-than-discerning taste of American audiences notwithstanding, there is clearly a shift in what gets “butts in seats.” Led by a cinephilic renaissance among audiences under 35, this ever increasing group of audience members loudly rejects so-called “corporate slop” in exchange for smaller, auteur-driven work.

In theory, all of this should be good for a healthy film culture: increasingly boring blockbusters and their company-man directors are going the way of the western, to be replaced with a more diverse, younger, and hopefully authentic crop of filmmakers. But taking a serious look at what’s coming out of this “Creation Revolution,” it becomes clear that the voices being elevated are not exactly unique. Curry Barker, whose agent still allows him to do interviews for reasons passing understanding, frequently cites The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as his biggest influence — every horror director since 1974 has had the same influence, how exactly is Barker’s voice different than those who came before him? Obsession is a fairly ugly film that relies on an unoriginal story (Barker said he got it from a Simpsons episode) and a thematically confused ending. Or, to put it more simply: normal Hollywood genre-fare.

Which brings us back to Johnson, whose skills behind the camera far outclass those of Barker, making his latest misfire all the more infuriating. His newest film, Tony, which releases nationwide on August 21st, is a paint-by-numbers Anthony Bourdain biopic set during a pivotal summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Based off the first two chapters of Bourdain’s autobiography Kitchen Confidential, Tony follows the misadventures of its eponymous chef (Dominic Sessa) after he stalks a girl whom he harassed in a bar across state lines, eventually finding himself rejected, stuck in P-Town with no money, and caught up in a lie about a writing fellowship he did not get. Tony is forced to work for a brass-yet-fatherly local chef (Antonio Banderas) who teaches him a thing or two about cooking, and of course, life.

If you know anything about the setting, the first thing you’ll notice about the film is a distinct lack of gay people, despite taking place in 1970s P-Town, one of the gayest places in world history. A third-act reveal of a waitress’s lesbian relationship is played off as a moment of growth for Tony, and a few crowd shots show gay couples reduced to nothing more than set dressing. It would be fair to say that Bourdain’s book doesn’t concern itself much with queer love, but wouldn’t a more interesting filmmaker make sure the setting of his story was truly captured? Meanwhile, Johnson’s treatment of Tony’s love interest, played wonderfully by Emilia Jones, is quite basically sexist. She exists solely to move Tony’s character forward, and her complete lack of agency is so intense that it is honestly shocking — have we not moved past this type of storytelling? I understand that Johnson is a member of the internet’s Chud Protection Service, but that shouldn’t give him carte blanche to make a film so limited in perspective.

I won’t deny that it is inherently impressive Johnson was able to make such a competent film with his hand halfway down his pants, but I must question why exactly a film like Tony even exists. Bourdain’s entire mythos was built on an abrasive, counter-cultural, anti-establishment ethos. Flattening his early life into a safe, early-2000s-coded prestige crowd-pleaser is an insulting choice. After 15 years of scrappy filmmaking and guerrilla chaos,Johnson isn’t just a victim of studio sanitization here, he actively chose to make a generic, middle-of-the-road movie. Sick of spending years in relative obscurity and teaching at the University of Toronto just to get by, Johnson clearly reached for the easy A24 paycheck and delivered a safe crowd-pleaser that completely abandons the rule-breaking edge that made his name in the first place, and erases fans who powered his rise.

The fact is, like most online creators, Johnson’s biggest fanbase is either queer or female. There are of course straight men who like his work, and it is obvious they are his target audience, but spend even one minute in the Tumblr-esque fan groups he inspires, and it’ll be clear who keeps the lights on. Johnson does not have a responsibility to cater to this audience, but it is somewhat insulting how tone-deaf and lazy Tony feels. The second Johnson was given a larger budget, he actively erased queer history and made no effort to present a legible female character. By choosing to make something this aggressively normal, Johnson proves that when internet auteurs get elevated by studios, they aren’t necessarily changing Hollywood, but rather making it easier to sell us back the same crap. And the fans who got these creators where they are now? Well, Hollywood isn’t exactly knocking down doors to court them.

Look at The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act, released a few weeks after Backrooms, by the primarily YouTube based Glitch Productions. A feature-length finale to their wildly popular web-series of the same name, The Last Act sold out so fast that its initial one-weekend run was extended, and hundreds of additional theaters were added. All in, The Last Act made close to $50 Million in its short two-week run, with no marketing or backing from any established industry creative to speak of. Directed by trans filmmaker Gooseworx, The Last Act did not receive the same weeks of credulous reporting about being the future of Hollywood that Obsession did, despite proving the same theory, and Gooseworx has not been swept up into the A24 machine like Johnson.

A recentVariety profile by Matt Minton highlighted trans and non-binary directors like Vera Drew (The People’s Joker), Louise Weard (Castration Movie), and Avalon Fast (CAMP). As the article details, these filmmakers aren’t waiting around for A24 or NEON to call, because they know those companies aren’t interested. Instead, trans filmmakers are explicitly building a new, parallel industry outside the studio system, and recognizing that traditional Hollywood will never accommodate their radical art.

Meanwhile, the Internet’s favorite special little boy is busy making biopics. I wish him good luck with his mid-career turn towards prestige, but am sorry to say: I’m not buying it. Hopefully, audiences won’t either.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Never quite understood the attraction for Matt Johnson but would ruin their life for a shot with Jay McCarroll

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window subscribers,

As I’m sure you know, last week saw the release of Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Despite my carefully constructed persona as a Serious Thinker and watcher of Important Cinema, seeing the trailer — which featured Spider-Man beating up the Hulk — was enough to convince me that I simply had to see the film. I’m happy to report it was exactly as mediocre as I anticipated, and in a welcome surprise, it also continued Marvel’s tried-and-true practice of producing new and innovative military propaganda, this time by depicting Peter Parker as distinctly to the right of Peter Thiel.

The movie is certainly a marked improvement over the last few Feige-generated Spider-Man flicks, but I must admit that the ravenous reaction to it has caught me a bit off guard. On the surface, all the flaws that made “Marvel Fatigue” the talk of the town are still front and center in this latest film. It has multiple exhausting crossovers, its bloated runtime drags ad nauseam, and it fundamentally looks no better than a Disney+ show. Yet, in less than a week, Brand New Day shattered records, making over a billion dollars at the box office whilst garnering some of the most glowing reviews Marvel has received in years.

The natural question is, if audiences are supposedly exhausted by the Marvel formula, why did they turn out in droves for a movie that still heavily uses it? I think it is because the film employs a masterful use of semiotics that previous MCU films never bothered with. Brand New Day isn’t actually a radically different movie than anything Marvel has made, but by weaponizing the visual shorthand of a “classic” Spider-Man, the film can trick our subconscious into feeling an unearned emotional response. This allows the film to escape the pitfalls of the modern MCU without having to actually do anything different.

Functioning as a soft reboot, Brand New Day explicitly jumps the timeline forward five years, catching Peter up with the rest of the MCU and finding him alone, depressed, and broke. Stopping just short of winking at the camera, an extended opening montage screams as loudly as possible that this is the old Spider-Man you know and love. Instead of doing the “hard” narrative work of maturing Holland’s Parker, the film simply co-opts the world-famous iconography of Spider-Man to fake it, something easily proven by the opening montage’s decision to (painfully!) recreate a few iconic Spider-Man covers.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton is using the visual language of superheroes, and the knowledge that everyone who’s anyone has seen a Spider-Man movie, to his advantage. He puts Holland in a hand-sewn red-and-blue suit, tosses him into a shiity apartment, and a few scenes later lets him finally speak in a “New York” accent, and just like that he’s got all the signifiers of a Classic Spider-Man. Don’t worry about the fact that the suit is still packed with tech, the crappy apartment has an entire science lab, and the New York accent is unmistakably Brooklyn, not Queens. Spider-Man is such an iconic character that a few hints are all the Cretton needs to trick us into thinking we are watching something much better.

The most egregious example of this is Peter suddenly developing organic webbing, something the Tobey Maquire films are quite famous for inventing. The film uses this to trick our subconscious into feeling like Holland’s Peter has grown up. The climatic battle at the end, wherein Peter’s embrace of the organic webbing allows him to reach the “true power” he always had, is a very unsubtle way to signal to the audience that those old Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies they remember being better are coming back. Holland literally has to learn how to be Tobey Maquire’s Spider-Man in order to save the day. It is frankly absurd.

This absurdity extends well past the visual language of the film, and is in fact baked into the narrative. The emotional “stakes” of Brand New Day hinge on the audience’s preexisting attachment to Peter and MJ’s relationship. Ignoring the fact that Zendaya wasn’t even confirmed to be MJ until the last scene of Homecoming, the two didn’t get together until the back half of Far From Home, and they were separated again by the end of No Way Home, Brand New Day spends roughly thirty minutes of its runtime framing their prior relationship as one of deep intimacy and maturity. In the theater, this almost makes sense: it’s Peter and MJ, so of course they love each other (magic spells notwithstanding). Audiences have seen a million versions of this story, why should they question this one?

But if we zoom out to look at the film’s larger thematic message, a glaring contradiction emerges. Brand New Day is, at its core, a movie about self-reliance and moving on. The text wants to tell a story about Peter Parker finally stepping out of the shadows of mentors, billionaires, and gods to find his own independent identity. The film’s script insists that Peter is moving on, but its semiotics trap him in a perpetual loop of looking backward. As an audience member, we are simply forced to maintain a certain level of cognitive dissonance in order to enjoy the film. The meta-textual admission by Feige and Holland that the previous MCU Spider-Man movies were not really all that good flys in the face of Brand New Day’s incredibly maudlin emotional core.

I do think Brand New Day offers some clues as to how Marvel is navigating its new, heavily demoted status in culture. They are clearly acutely aware that the era of shiny, government-approved superheroes solving big-picture problems feels increasingly out of touch. Audiences are currently craving a street-level, working-class struggle; we want heroes who worry about making rent as much as fighting villains, and characters who help their neighbors rather than flying to space. But a multi-billion dollar corporate behemoth will not (and really, cannot) show working-class authenticity. They are more than happy, though, to mass-produce the signifiers of it.

Knowing they were in a rut, Marvel took advantage of the organic desire for a grounded hero, without bothering to do the work of writing one. This is quite craven considering he already exists, but one billion dollars later, it seems like they will get the last laugh.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Does in fact own one of the comic covers that was poorly recreated in this film

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

Today, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey releases in theaters worldwide. The first film to be shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, Nolan’s newest outing continues his now world-famous fetish for formats. While Tarantino has feet, Hitchcock has blondes, and Del Toro has strange bug things, Nolan’s obsession with large-format IMAX projection is so crucial to his work that he has managed to turn it into a feature in and of itself. This presents an interesting contradiction in his filmography: despite making broadly populist, mass-consumer blockbusters, Nolan’s particular proclivity — and the fact that only 41 theaters in the world are equipped to play his latest in its purist form — means that 99% of people who see his movies are watching them “wrong.”

This contradiction represents a wrinkle in the century-plus status quo of film viewing. Dating back to its original invention, film was thought of as a form of mass communication. Its inherently reproducible nature meant that there was no “original copy” to be seen; contrary to plays or paintings, film was capable of meeting the viewer where they were. In 1936, German theorist Walter Benjamin first identified this shift, arguing in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the very nature of film’s production fundamentally changes its value to an audience.

As Benjamin explains, prior to the technological developments which allowed for reproduction, art was instilled with a “cult value.” A painting could be copied, sure, but it would have been considered a fraud, a forgery, lacking in a certain “aura” that gives the original piece its meaning. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” he wrote, going on to describe the distance that art maintained from the masses as crucial to its value. Tucked away in a Church or behind a rope in a gallery, experiencing art was treated as an almost sacred ritual. Film freed us from this oppressive structure, for the first time democratizing art as something to be experienced by all. A teenager sitting on a sticky seat in a run-down one-room movie house gets the exact same film as a critic viewing a private screening in L.A. It is an art for the masses, defined not by a cult status but rather its “exhibition value.”

Film’s enduring standing as modern society’s dominant form of art can be credited in no small part to this liberating structure. Benjamin’s essay was written at a crucial point in history, and he identified the crisis that many old artforms found themselves in when confronted with the revolutionary power of film. It now made less and less sense for an average person — in Benjamin’s perspective, the proletariat — to subscribe to “cult value.” Art was now everywhere, and seeing it was a social experience that allowed us to organize around shared ideals and narratives.

That structure went largely unchallenged until the COVID-19 pandemic brought it to a screeching halt. With the public locked indoors and unable to go to the theater, new movies began releasing straight to streaming, eliminating the need to leave your house. As you may remember, Warner Brothers made the unprecedented decision to release their entire 2021 feature film slate in theaters and on HBO Max on the exact same day. Filmmakers — especially those dedicated to the theatrical experience — now had to confront a culture whose values were changing. Christopher Nolan, who very publicly cut ties with Warner as a direct result of their anti-theater posture, was in a unique position to help redefine what cinema meant. After years spent building up cultural prestige and influence, Nolan released Oppenheimer in theaters during the summer of 2023 and embarked on an impressive campaign to convince the world to see it in theaters.

Not unlike a priest, Nolan inspired a devout following, and going to theaters became a renewed sign of social prestige, a signifier that you were cool, serious, thoughtful. It was a surprising turnaround for a theatrical industry that was seeing cracks before the pandemic even started and seemed like a good sign for film in general: people were coming out in droves to see a three-hour period piece, and by all accounts, enjoying themselves. This was motivated in no small part by a huge marketing push to educate audiences about the difference between IMAX and standard projection. When Nolan’s Odyssey film was first announced, the only detail we had was that the entire film would be shot with 70mm IMAX cameras. In many ways, Oppenheimer can be seen as a initial test for Nolan’s theory of cinema. Last summer, when tickets for the first public screening of The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm theaters were released a full year in advance and sold out within minutes, he was proven right. Clearly, there was a sustained appetite for this premium format.

But in attempting to prove the worth of a theatrical cinema, has Nolan turned back the clock on film’s most progressive innovations? In the lead-up to the film’s release Variety reported on the absurd lengths that fans are going to in order to see film in IMAX 70mm theaters. Among the many fans interviewed, one claimed that they delayed their pregnancy to see the film in its proper format, a decision they made last summer, before any footage had even been seen. Others (including me, obviously) will be watching the film at ridiculous times, like 3 A.M., while some are driving cross-country for a specific theater. A cursory scroll through any ticketing site will show showtimes sold out four weeks in advance, proof of a fervor surrounding this film bordering on the religious. The “cult value” that film destroyed so many years ago seems to be making a comeback.

Just this week, Disney announced that tickets for Avengers: Doomsday, a film that releases in December, will go on sale starting July 20th. Not all of the seats will be up for grabs, though, only those in “Infinity Vision” certified theaters. If you have never heard of “Infinity Vision” before, don’t fret, because Disney made it up just a few months ago. After being boxed out of IMAX screens by Warner Brothers’ Dune 3 (which releases on the same day as Avengers), Disney simply created a new format out of whole cloth. If you read between the lines of their purposely vague announcements, it becomes clear that “Infinity Vision” will just be a certification given to existing auditoriums that meet certain standards. Tickets for showings in these theaters will be more expensive, but according to Marvel, the experience will be more authentic. While the “aura” of pre-film art may have been restrictive, at least it was real.

In Oppenheimer, Nolan uses the real-life scientist as an avatar to explore the lengths man will go to in order to satisfy ambition. Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer ends the film on a realization: despite his own intentions, building a nuclear bomb set off a chain reaction that he could never control, pushing the world into an arms race that can only end with death and destruction. The stakes for Nolan may be lower, but he too has unleashed a monster that cannot be contained. The crisis that film faced after COVID was real, and what he is now doing may very well have saved cinema — but what happens when someone builds a bigger camera?

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Thinks The Prestige is Nolan’s best, if anyone was wondering.

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

On Monday, reports surfaced that executives at Netflix are entering a state of mild existential panic over a fatal design flaw in their growing empire: their original series lack staying power. According to data first reported by Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg, Netflix is suffering from a massive, platform-wide “sophomore slump.” After starting strong with highly watched, discourse-driving first seasons, the streamer is finding that audiences are ghosting by season two. The live-action One Piece shed 30% of its viewers for its second season, while The Night Agent lost half its audience by season three. Season two of the previously limited series Beef tanked by 70%, while the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender plummeted 60%. Allegedly, Netflix executives simply cannot fathom why.

This crisis comes at a brutal time. After a frantic, failed bid for Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this year left Netflix empty-handed, the company has spent months stuck in a glaring rut characterized by slower growth, diminished prestige, and a losing battle for our finite attention spans.

To be fully honest, I’ve always harbored a deep-seated hatred for the streamer—a rage that goes well beyond reasonable qualms with their artistic output. Despite being the undisputed titan of the entertainment world, Netflix consistently casts itself as a plucky underdog. Spend more than a minute reading an interview with co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and you will feel an incandescent irritation building at his ability to gaslight. This is a man who has spent years insisting that up is down, forever passing himself off as a lowly, everyday film fan just trying to make “content” accessible. When confronted with the reality that people actually want their television episodic and their movies big and loud, Sarandos merely deflects, pointing to Netflix’s massive subscriber count as the only validation his strategy needs. This arrogant, Silicon Valley-informed attitude has long defined Netflix’s public persona, and it has repulsed me from the start.

Now, as is typical, the world seems to finally be coming around to my position, which makes the executive sweating all the more satisfying. Netflix’s current problems are not a mystery. While they may be in crisis, it is one they manufactured entirely by design.

The fact is, Netflix has spent the past fifteen years blitzkrieging its way to market dominance by sacrificing everything that actually makes an audience care about television. Focused entirely on hyper-growth, the streamer abandoned traditional 13-plus-episode seasons, abolished predictable yearly release schedules, and rarely bothered hiring more than a skeleton crew of writers for a temporary “mini-room.” Outside of their massive, star-driven flagship titles, they hardly market new seasons, leaning instead on an opaque algorithm to feed potential viewers whatever happens to be fresh that Tuesday. This cheap, stripped-down mode of production reliably delivered mountains of content each week, keeping Wall Street happy and cementing the myth of Netflix’s inevitable victory in a war of their own creation.

But the streaming wars are over, and Netflix has a real problem: they won.

Legacy studios have retreated to traditional theatrical windows and weekly episode drops, having realized that burning billions to replicate Netflix’s model was a corporate suicide pact. Yet, after a decade of chasing mindless growth for growth’s sake, Netflix must now reorient into something it has never had to be: a stable, trustworthy home for culture. Left to their own devices, they are being forced to contend with a simple, fatal fact: they broke TV.

The streamer’s hallmark innovation was, of course, the binge model. Guided by the data-heavy metrics of Silicon Valley, Netflix crafted shows around a single variable: immediate streams. This instant-gratification delivery system paid enormous dividends for a rapidly growing tech venture. Releasing a season all at once engineered an artificial scarcity of social relevance—watch all ten hours in forty-eight hours or be locked out of the discourse. Once the platform had you hooked, its expansive library of licensed Hollywood history was there to keep you trapped. Like a casino obscuring the exit doors, all Netflix had to do was let the psychology of digital addiction take care of the rest.

But the binge model never provided a foundation for sustainability. A binged show leaves the human brain almost as quickly as it enters it. When a tech platform drops a second season two or three years later—assuming the consumer even hears about it through noise of modern society—the odds are high that whatever memory or interest they possessed has completely evaporated.

To compound this, Netflix has spent years tacitly encouraging “second-screen viewing.” Noting that Gen Z is usually scrolling TikTok while a show is running, the platform began explicitly altering their shows to be followed with only a passing glance. To visually and narratively engineer your own art to be ignored is a bizarre creative strategy; to then feign confusion when those same audiences don’t remember the plot well enough to return for season two is pure absurdity.

Ultimately, Netflix forgot that much like film, music, or video games, television shows have to teach us how to watch them. Sitcoms historically used laugh tracks to cue the punchline and clear the runway for the next joke. Dramas paint flashbacks in a sepia haze to mark a jump in time. Sometimes this grammar is built right into the structure, like the reliable weekly loops of a monster-of-the-week series.

But Netflix changed the vocabulary entirely, replacing traditional storytelling with the language of pure momentum. Episodes no longer require distinct narrative arcs; they simply dissolve into the next chapter via auto-play countdowns. By systematically engineering away built-in pauses—like theme songs, title sequences, and end credits—the interface strips away our time to digest. Netflix successfully retrained its audience to believe that speed, optimization, and endless consumption are the ultimate goals of watching TV.

This shift explains their recent, cynical legal pivots. During its high-stakes antitrust defenses before regulators, Netflix repeatedly hammered home a highly specific, eye-raising argument: it couldn’t possibly be considered a monopoly because its greatest, most lethal competitor wasn’t HBO, Disney, Paramount, or Peacock, but rather YouTube—a platform that consistently ranks as the single most-watched destination on American television screens. Squeeze out the traditional studios all you want, the legal defense argued, but look how much time the public spends scrolling user-generated feeds instead of streaming premium narratives. How can Netflix be a monopoly if it is locked in a daily, existential battle with YouTube for the same finite hours of a consumer’s day?

Although those of us living in the real world may be quick to see that YouTube (a user-generated video host) and Netflix (a premium multimedia production powerhouse) are fundamentally different products, dismissing the claim entirely misses the more interesting truth underneath it. Netflix simply no longer sees itself as a participant in the television or film business. It sees itself as a player in the attention extraction economy—full stop.

Netflix isn’t arguing that YouTube makes competing television. It is conceding that under its own regime, television has been completely stripped of its artistic exceptionalism. It has been flattened into pure, undifferentiated “content”—an interchangeable unit of digital attention, no different than a music video, a prank compilation, or a vlog. In fact, Netflix recently proved this by licensing short-form lifestyle clips from publishers like BuzzFeed and Vanity Fair to sit right alongside their multi-million dollar dramas. Their recent integration of licensed podcasts reinforces the point. Netflix doesn’t care if you watch a prestige drama or a 30-second clip, as long as your eyeballs stay inside their digital ecosystem.

Television used to be a central part of our social fabric; it was how families bonded at night, and how co-workers greeted each other in the morning. It required patience, rewarded attention, and allowed us to share a narrative rhythm over weeks and months. Netflix successfully broke that rhythm in exchange for hyper-growth and market dominance. Now, standing alone at the top of an empire built on fleeting impressions and half-watched backgrounds, they are realizing the horrifying truth of their victory. Rather than pondering how we got here, and attempting some course-correction, Netflix is going full steam ahead. They may have broken TV, but you can bet that they won’t try to fix it. That, I fear, will be up to us.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Once met Ted Sarandos and immediately (within seconds!) asked him about Zack Snyder.

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

When James Gunn was announced as co-CEO of DC Studios in October 2022 — tasked with soft-rebooting a cinematic universe that had already lurched through multiple false starts — otherwise reasonable, well-informed, and critical “cinephiles“ immediately believed every word out of his mouth. From the promise to focus on original ideas with strong scripts, to the supposedly independent nature of his creative control, so-called “free thinkers” assumed, with great excitement, that the man chosen to shepherd a multi-billion dollar franchise was not only One Of Them, but a true artist’s artist — one who would, above all else, honor the source material. Two months later, an oddly intimate video posted to social media unveiled 10 projects, all of which were certainly real and totally in the works, to thunderous applause. Particularly celebrated was Gunn’s plan to adapt Tom King1 and Bilquis Evely’s 2021–22 comic book miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which he called “amazing” and “award-winning” pitching it as “a big science fiction epic.”

Now, just over three years later, Supergirl — which quietly dropped the Woman of Tomorrow subtitle somewhere in its development cycle — is out in theaters. And man does it suck.

Following Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), cousin of Superman (David Corenswet), the film opens with its hero in a bit of a rut: blacking out across the galaxy on a birthday pub crawl and dodging calls from Clark. With her is breakout star Krypto the Dog, whose presence in last summer’s Superman accounted for, at minimum, half of that film’s goodwill. For some reason, Supergirl immediately writes him off, poisoned by the film’s villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, who also steals Kara’s ship in the process. Krem had murdered the family of Ruthye, a thirteen-year-old girl, in the opening scene; she finds Kara and asks for help tracking him across the galaxy, ultimately to kill him as revenge. The three-way setup is at least efficient: Kara needs the antidote to the poison Krem wears around his neck, Ruthye needs someone to help her find him, and both of them need to cross the galaxy in order to learn a lesson or two.

Despite the frankly criminal choice to sideline Krypto, the film’s initial setup is not terrible. The road-trip nature of Kara and Ruthye’s quest could lend itself nicely to sci-fi epic, allowing the audience to see a multitude of planets, aliens, and ships. Instead, Kara travels from a gray, broken-down space bus to a literally dying planet and then finally to an empty world full of dirt. Many aliens appear on this very short trip, but they are all also gray and, save for one or two, simply speak English. There is an alien bar — long a staple of sci-fi adventure and reliably the most interesting locale in any such story — where a live band inexplicably plays a parody of “The Girl from Ipanema” and the lights are seemingly never turned on. Occasionally, Kara or Ruthye will be in a dimly lit ship, lying in a cave, or sitting in a cage.

One of Gunn’s key promises was that no film would go into production without a strong script. His approval method seems flawed, because the script for Supergirl is really quite bad, and oddly inert. Kara does not quite learn or change on this journey — beyond not being drunk, I guess — and after spending the whole trip pleading with Ruthye not to kill and declaring it will taint her soul, Kara ultimately kills Krem while announcing she is doing it for revenge. Flashbacks gesture toward a more interesting movie, with the destruction of Krypton beautifully rendered, if only because it recalls better films. They arrive with almost no warning and expand the DC Universe considerably; Kara, it turns out, was not born on Krypton itself but in Argo City, which survived the planet’s destruction only to slowly die anyway when its core was discovered to be made of Kryptonite. All of that lore exists so that we can understand that Kara’s depression stems from witnessing her mother’s death and never processing it. In a movie about Kryptonians, this drawn-out, non-linear origin story is more tedious than revelatory. Of course her mom is dead. They are all dead. That is somewhat the point.

So why is Kara less sad by the end? Beyond saving Krypto, she’s taken down Krem, who runs a galaxy-wide operation kidnapping women to forcibly repopulate an all-male race. If you expected that to be handled with tact, I’m sorry to report that the victims are seen sparsely, primarily in a very-2016 coded scene wherein they rise from the rubble like angels and proceed to operate a giant machine gun, mowing down dozens of aliens. Worth noting: every woman in this trafficking ring is a human-adjacent alien, implying some broader racial hierarchy in this universe that the film has absolutely no interest in exploring. Weird!

A sex trafficking ring taken down by a female superhero might naturally lend itself to something resembling a feminist film. Luckily, director Craig Gillespie — the man behind Dumb Money and Cruella — is committed to female empowerment. In one sequence, Kara flies in to save the day, “powerfully” calls herself a bitch, immediately gets poisoned with Kryptonite, and is rescued by womanizing alien Lobo (Jason Momoa??), who rides off on a flying motorcycle and, as his parting words, addresses her as “tits.” Some of the identity politics of the late 2010s may feel dated in 2026, but it’s possible that hiring a female director for this particular story might have been a good idea. Gillespie is also seemingly incapable of blocking an action sequence, though that likely has less to do with his gender and more to do with his general hackishness.

Ultimately, even if you find something to enjoy in DC’s latest outing, the whole exercise feels pointless. Around the same time Gunn announced his new universe, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, done with his cost-cutting and debt-erasing, was fattening up his most valuable properties, preparing for a sale. That sale, to Paramount, was announced in February of this year and is expected to close in a matter of months. With a shockingly muted marketing campaign and an overall amateurish feel, one is left to wonder whether Supergirl simply exists to keep the lights on long enough for the deal to close. But hey: at least we can all take comfort in the fact that James Gunn has read the comics.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Bought Woman of Tomorrow years ago, and never read it.

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

On June 12th, less than a month from today, a new, wholly original Steven Spielberg Sci-Fi film will be released in theaters. The last time this happened was over two decades ago, so suffice it to say the anticipation for the upcoming Disclosure Day is hitting a fever pitch—at least in my household. As a firm believer in the promise of American Populist Cinema, I have long held Spielberg’s films close to my heart, especially his genre-heavy, crowd-pleasing spectacles. While I adore his later career turn towards war films, period pieces, musicals, and other more adult-oriented fare, it’s hard not to see Spielberg as the ultimate populist filmmaker, for better or for worse.

But what about his unpopular work?

From an early stint directing TV movies to a short-lived NBC show, Spielberg has recklessly slapped his name on quite a few projects over the years. Today, in the time-honored tradition of Auteur Theory, I’ll be taking a look at some of these “Rare Spielbergs” to see if we can glean any additional insight into the mind of Cinema’s own Grim Reaper, who single-handedly murdered art by releasing Jaws in 1975. What does it take to be the multi-billionaire whom Jean-Luc Godard once called “not very intelligent”? I intend to find out. Once a week until June 12th, I will be releasing a deep dive into one “Rare Spielberg,” starting off today with my personal favorite, and the only non-film of the bunch.

Medal Of Honor

In the grand pantheon of dumb internet debates, whether or not video games are art surely ranks in the top percentile. Regardless of where you come down on that exhausting discourse, it certainly is interesting that Steven Spielberg created the deeply mediocre World War Two video game series Medal of Honor. Originally released in 1999 by DreamWorks Interactive and PlayStation, the first Medal of Honor is based on an idea Spielberg had while filming Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg thought of both the story and game concepts, was a primary creative force behind the original game, and was inspired to make in the first place after watching his son play Goldeneye007 on the Nintendo 64. Thus, it deserves a rigorous look through a strictly auteurist lens.

The first thing that any modern player will notice about Medal of Honor is that despite its low-quality graphics and occasional glitches, the game is far and away more fun than just about any corporate, mainstream war game of the current generation. There are no predatory loot boxes or $20 cosmetic skins; the whole game is focused on a narrative-based single-player campaign, and features full voice acting with a cinematic score written by future Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino. Playing Medal of Honor feels much more like a full experience than anything you will find in modern gaming, and the pure craft on display is immediately obvious.

The game has an overwhelming sense of personality: it isn’t too serious, and calls to mind Where Eagles Dare (1968) or The Great Escape (1963), two of Spielberg’s favorite films. This pulpy feel almost works to smooth over the unrealistic graphics, as Spielberg does what he does best, allowing technology and narrative to combine, bringing out the best in both. The game’s AI feels genuinely alive and reactive, and certain tasks, like showing Nazi agents fake papers, make the whole game much more immersive than video games had ever been up to that point.

There is also an appreciation for history which future war games would completely lose. With Saving Private Ryan much too mature for children (and possibly Spielberg himself), Medal of Honor was intended to educate the youth about American history. Devoid of blood or bodily gore, Medal of Honor, like Band of Brothers after it, goes out of its way to honor American veterans, not make light of their sacrifice. Whether that is necessary in a video game is certainly up to personal opinion, but it wouldn’t be a Spielberg product without some hokey patriotism.

While I wouldn’t call Medal of Honor an outright masterpiece, it is hard to not feel Spielberg’s touch. I’ve played a fair few war games in my day, and the modern ones reek of corporate artifice; they may look superbly realistic on 4K screens, but there is no humanity in them, just violence. Much of Medal of Honor is mission-based, and along with the classic infiltrating of enemy camps or blowing up of Nazi weaponry, there are quieter moments where you must save a comrade, free prisoners, or just rescue civilians. Spielberg, ever the humanist, does not allow his game to become simply a killing machine.

Of course, scholars of video game history will be quick to remind us that DreamWorks Interactive, which developed the first Medal of Honor, was bought by EA in 2000, after Spielberg lost interest in developing video games. In 2002, EA tapped a small development studio called 2015 Inc. to create Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, carrying on the vision of a WWII shooter Spielberg’s team had established. All the Medal of Honor games up to that point were huge leaps for the genre, but unhappy at EA, the core creative group at 2015 Inc. soon splintered off and formed Infinity Ward. Taking what they learned from the framework established under DreamWorks Interactive, this new development house would go on to create a small game called Call of Duty

Recently, Puck1 reported that Steven Spielberg pitched a vision for a Call of Duty film that he was, allegedly, quite excited about. Activision, spooked by Spielberg’s demands for full creative control over their precious billion-dollar military franchise, said no, selling the rights to David Ellison’s Paramount instead.

And so, the loop closes. After creating the modern framework of the historical shooter, Spielberg was slowly but surely pushed out of the very industry he birthed. Rather than thinking about whether he should make WWII video games, he only thought about if he could. This is a tragic, common story for our spry auteur, whose career is defined by great leaps in innovation quickly taken away from him, corrupted almost immediately by lesser minds. While he is not without agency — or resources — it seems that the pureness of his child-like soul often distorts the capitalist nature of his pursuits.

Critic Pauline Kael, in her review of Raiders of The Lost Ark, famously wrote that the film is akin to “being put through a Cuisinart — something has been done to [you], but not to [your] benefit.” Perhaps, as his dreams of making a COD movie were shattered, the never-stopping march of time ensuring he will never get a chance again, Spielberg finally understood what she meant all those years ago.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
The only person who has seen Amistad (1997) twice.

P.S.: Looking for more Max Bolen Official Content? Check out my new piece in wonderful all about Daredevil: Born Again and the limits of corporate radicalism.

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers!

One of life’s greatest pleasures is heading to the multiplex to take in a new Steven Soderbergh film. The 63-year-old director has released a film almost every year since 1989, save for a brief hiatus from 2013 to 2016 known in my circles as “The Dark Times.” In 2017, he returned to cinemas with Logan Lucky, a NASCAR heist film starring Daniel Craig that, scientifically speaking, is one of the coolest things ever made. If there is one constant across his eclectic and occasionally piss-poor filmography, it is his ability to subvert audience expectations.

Known for taking typical genre fare and infusing it with an arthouse, almost avant-garde flair, no two Soderbergh films are alike. My favorite, Ocean’s Twelve, plays out like an anti-film: no heist ever really happens, at least not on screen, as audiences are treated to what is essentially Soderbergh, Clooney, and the gang blowing the budget on a multi-week European vacation. We need more filmmakers who are not afraid of their audience, and Soderbergh has always fit the bill.

In The Christophers, releasing this Friday from NEON, the director is working in a more personal and emotional mode than we’ve seen from him in years. Starring Ian McKellen as Julian Sklar — an aging artist famous in the ‘60s and ‘70s, now old, jaded, and barely working — the film is a two-hander putting McKellen opposite Michaela Coel as Lori Butler. Butler is a serious artist moonlighting as Sklar’s assistant, but she has been hired in actuality by his estranged children to finish his famous but never-completed series of “Christophers” paintings. When Sklar dies — which the kids assume will be soon— they’ll sell the pieces as newly discovered work. Lori gets a third of the profits.

McKellen gives one of the best performances of his career as a physically frail but verbally domineering prick, talking at Coel much more than to her, offering unsolicited views on everything from her dating life to her own career, or lack thereof. Coel easily holds her own against him with a quiet, hungry confidence.

Soderbergh shoots almost the whole film handheld, snooping around Sklar’s five-story London townhouse like a predator on the hunt. Every corner is crammed with blank canvases, books, paint, and the accumulated debris of a lifetime of artistry. There is a curiosity to the camera — a desire to see what’s around the next corner, what secret is hiding behind the rarely opened doors or the sparsely visited basement. The whole film is quite intimate in this way, and really a delightful watch.

In an interview with critic Amy Taubin1, Soderbergh expands on his creative choices: the handheld style expresses the instability Lori feels in that space, he says, though he also cops to the fact that it was simply easier to move around a cluttered house without a dolly. His career has been defined by the tension between his restless inventiveness and his often-unexplainable need to move fast. This tension almost always creates something interesting, even if, in the case of Unsane (shot on an iPhone in a matter of weeks), the films aren’t always amazing. His later-career movies are often called lazy, but I disagree; they carry a clear sense of authorship and, although disparate in theme, style and quality, are obviously made by a man consistently thinking deeply about the images he presents.

But, in the same interview, Taubin asks him about AI. He reveals he is working on a John and Yoko documentary and is using AI to create what he calls “thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space,” adding that the technology “desperately requires very close human supervision.” This is clearly an off-the-cuff quote, and perhaps the AI usage will somehow be reasonable in the final product. But I have my doubts. Is this the endgame of Soderbergh’s long career? The ultimate hack to get a film done faster? And if so, why should I care enough to even watch it? Soderbergh has always subverted audience expectations, and now he seems to be taking the ultimate plunge: daring us to care about a film he couldn’t be bothered to fully make.

Beyond the fact that I think it should be illegal to make any more Beatles documentaries — we get it! — it feels particularly gross to reduce John and Yoko, two of the most philosophically rigorous artists of the 20th century, to AI-generated imagery. The careful, personal authorship behind every Lennon song is in almost hostile conflict with the very concept of AI. That doesn’t seem like something that needs explaining, least of all to another creative.

The Christophers asks us to consider whether art completed by someone other than its originator is real, a fraud, or something more complicated and human than either of those words allows. Lori isn’t just a forger; she is an artist in her own right, finishing canvases someone else abandoned, and the film asks us to sit with the discomfort of not being able to cleanly separate the two. But is Soderbergh actually interested in that question? Based on his comments, it’s hard to take him seriously.

I’ve always understood Soderbergh’s hunger for speed and efficiency as a form of discipline — a way of trusting instinct before overthinking can calcify it. It’s what allowed him to maintain a steady output during every Hollywood downturn since he burst onto the scene with Sex, Lies and Videotapes in ‘89. There is a DIY energy to his work, an indie spirit that hasn’t left him since his Sundance days. But there is a clear difference between shooting on an iPhone to keep costs down and generating images with a machine. One is a constraint that sharpens creativity — how do you get the most interesting frame through a subpar lens? — the other is just a shortcut.

The Christophers is quite good, and I’d recommend everyone go out to see it. But at a time when institutions are rapidly crumbling and the fate of film is in question, I hoped someone like Soderbergh would be able to cut through the crap. His adoption of AI isn’t surprising, but it certainly isn’t welcome either.

“It’s a weird time to be making movies.” Soderbergh tells Taubin at the end of their interview. That’s true, I suppose, but isn’t it his job to figure it out?

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Wishing I had just written an essay about The Limey instead.

The Christophers is out Friday in NYC and LA, and nationwide on April 17th. A NEON release.

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

In 1902, filmmaker, magician, and all-around legend Georges Méliès released A Trip to the Moon. A revolutionary work for a nascent medium, it remains one of the purest expressions of cinematic art to this day. Méliès’s impeccable craft challenged the very definition of art, forever imbuing film with a desire to grasp the unknown.

In 2026, toy-maker Nintendo released The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. A revolutionary work for the still-young medium of “technically a film,” this movie reaches heights in Intellectual Property management never before thought possible. For years, filmmakers and audiences alike assumed we simply lacked the power to cram a film this full of references to games released before 1998. But, like Méliès before them, directors Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath have truly changed the game for what can be achieved in the field of “cinematic arts” while still being legally considered a movie. The animation is competent, the voice work passable, and the story is discernable. While I have personal qualms calling this a “film” — it is much closer to a five-second clip of keys jingling on a 90-minute loop — it’s right there in the title, so who am I to argue? The images certainly move.

Following Mario Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi Mario (Charlie Day), or The Mario Brothers, for short, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie sees our mustachioed heroes venture into space to find Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and help her save her long-lost sister, Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson). Our motely crew must contend with Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie, Silver Lion for Best Director 2025), who has kidnapped Rosalina and is using her to win back the love of his father, Bowser (Jack Black). Yoshi is also in this film, played by Donald Glover, and he is a precious, completely innocent soul. There will be no Yoshi bad-talk in this review.

This oddly blunt story of parental abandonment is diluted through a series of hell-like detours to colorful planets filled with characters, signs, or even slight visual nods to video games that no one has heard of or played. The last time Fox McCloud, an anthropomorphic, spacefaring fox, had his own game was 2016, and it sold just under 500,000 copies. That game was essentially a remake of Star Fox 64 (1997), which in turn was a remake of the original Star Fox released in 1993. I have now gone through the sum total of all Star Fox games. Voiced by Glen Powell, Fox McCloud is a main character in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. You would, of course, be forgiven for having no idea who he was.

Nominally a comedy-adventure film for kids, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is actually directed toward men in their mid-30s. In order to understand every single reference in this film, you have to be at least 35, if only due to the passing nature of time. One of the movie’s longest (and according to the middle-aged men sitting next to me, funniest) jokes concerns the character R.O.B., based on a toy released by Nintendo in 1985. I feel I must now offer a correction to my previously stated age range of mid-30s; in order to actually have played with and remembered R.O.B., you have to be, generously, 45. I suppose R.O.B. was a very slow-moving toy, as the film makes us sit through an oddly long scene of him turning around. This joke is repeated twice.

Not to be outdone, immediately after the first R.O.B joke is a ten minute action scene that sees Princess Peach fight Wart, a green toad, Birdo, a pink Yoshi-like thing, and Mouser, an admittedly very cool mouse. These are all villains from the game Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA), which released in 1988. At some point, you may begin to wonder if there are any references to Super Mario Galaxy, the game which this movie is allegedly based on. Released in 2007, today’s kids are still much too young to have played it, but perhaps they bought one of the many re-releases Nintendo has offered. I know I have. Unfortunately, though, beyond a few “turn to camera moments” wherein the names of certain levels in Galaxy are simply said out loud, the game is all but absent from this film. Famous for its live-recorded orchestral soundtrack, the movie decides to only sample a few of those songs, and makes sure to not let any of them play all the way through, instead favoring strange remixes which sound much worse.

In recent years, film critics have been accused of going too harshly on children’s films. Supposedly, we should leave space for people to simply have fun. The kids who were in my screening of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie were not having fun. They did not understand 95% of what was going on, because it all relied on built-in knowledge of Nintendo lore, something a nine year old simply cannot be expected to contain. But no one making this film was thinking about them. A film that reduces children to confused bystanders in their own entertainment, so that grown men can feel seen, is not a children’s film. I’m not really sure what it is. Therapy with a marketing budget? Those adults who enjoyed this film have, in their incessant need to be catered to, helped bring about the slow death of an entire medium of art. Cinema has always had its parasites. Rarely have they been this well-fed.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is not the last film that will ever be made. But with its release, we have certainly inched closer to that horrible day.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Seriously I don’t want to see anything bad about Yoshi in the comments.

Theoretically, we are living through a golden age for the sleepless. We’ve finally traded the circadian tyranny of the 9-to-5 for a “flexible” digital landscape where being a night owl is no longer a curse, but a career path. Between the standardized sedation of the East Coast Liberal — where the nightly SSRI is as foundational as the morning matcha, as routine as brushing your teeth — and our 24/7 digital womb of high-definition distractions and algorithmic comfort, a world meticulously designed to ensure no waking second is ever spent in silence or boredom, the conditions for sleeplessness have never been more hospitable.

By every metric of modern progress, being a lifelong insomniac should be a bespoke luxury — a frictionless glide through a neon-lit utopia of our own making.

Yet, after spending the past ten days falling asleep by 5:00 AM at the earliest, I feel a genuine responsibility — nay, a duty — to report that, despite a powerful PR push, modern society is not all it’s cracked up to be. I couldn’t even find the hit 1976 sitcom Alice streaming anywhere.

The first thing you must learn is patience. We are used to a world of same-day shipping and instant gratification, but sleep is, unfortunately, not a task that can be rushed, optimized, hacked, or even automated. First-time insomniacs often make the mistake of panicking when a restful state hasn’t been reached after forty-five minutes — a canon event worsened, of course, by attention spans that have been whittled down to the eleven-second runtime of a TikTok. The correct response is to lie there. The body will eventually betray you into unconsciousness.

I panic anyway.

After an hour or so of aimless ceiling study, you might try to reset. Doctors — who sleep, we must assume, with the ease and totality of the smugly rested — recommend a walk around your domicile to break the cycle. If your home is an obnoxiously overpriced shoebox chosen voluntarily, despite ample warning, just to be near culture and employment you don’t actually participate in, this walk becomes a two-step shuffle: backward and forward, pacing the length of a rug while trying to imagine a beach. A caring roommate should assume you are in a unique state of mental breakdown that warrants extended study. If they do not, you are simply not pacing hard enough.

During this gait cycle, feel free to put on a podcast, but select carefully. Anything with stakes will destroy you. The recommended options are NPR’s This American Life or Wait, Wait... Don’t Tell Me! Let Peter Sagal’s voice wash over you. Do not actually listen.

By the second hour, the Dopamine Device becomes irresistible. All reason tells you this is paradoxical — like using a hammer to unscrew a nail. But after 2:00 AM, logic is a foreign concept reserved for hours when you are not so exhausted that your vibrational frequency awakens all dogs within a fifty-mile radius.

I have of course reached for the phone every night for the past ten days.

Common wisdom suggests Frasier as the ultimate sedative. Kelsey Grammer’s baritone voice — essentially what a mahogany bookshelf would sound like if it could describe itself — inspires calm, and his character’s stakes, ranging from dinner party seating charts to minor social faux pas, are blissfully low. But as a first-time watcher, I eventually found a doomsday-like feeling emanating from the show’s comfortable world of well-paid intellectuals. Is there even enough liquid capital in the modern world to support that many grand pianos, let alone on a radio host’s salary? Frasier’s apartment — with its fancy chairs and easily hired domestic staff — feels like a taunt. Was I born too late, destined for the permanent underclass, a victim of the coming bifurcation, stuck in the cobalt mines generating power for Mr. Beast’s next video?

An overly pretentious existential crisis regarding late-stage capitalism is not a desirable sleep aid. Let’s try something new.

Enter the FAST apps — Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television, with names like Tubi, FreeVee, or Pluto.

Here, the cable-less insomniac can live out a mid-2000s fever dream, flipping through poorly curated channels cycling through easily licensed political thrillers and network procedurals. Pakula’s All the President’s Men leads directly into some Mark Wahlberg film simply titled Shooter. Reruns of King of Queens give way to episodes of the CBS show Tracker — allegedly one of the most popular shows in America, though the jury is still out on whether the show and its 16 million viewers actually exist.

The FAST apps are a perfect companion for late-night misery: a crude and somehow slower recreation of cable, packaged as innovative technology for unsuspecting twenty-somethings. New movies and shows keep surfacing, all of them somehow five seasons or more, none of them something anyone has heard of. Somewhere in this country there is someone for whom Boston Blue is appointment viewing. They are certainly happier than me, and are probably the true heart of America.

There is no bottom on these apps. At the very least, I have not found it.

By 7:00 AM, you will have finished two three-hour historical epics or a full season of Taxi. The morning shows are beginning. It is time to give up entirely.

The Today Show is the correct choice here — my Good Morning America boycott will continue until George Stephanopoulos is allowed to call as many world leaders adjudicated rapists as he wants. Settle in. You may be reminded, somewhere between the third segment and a cooking demonstration for some soup, that an unpaid intern (working, somehow, on a freelance basis) has an important Zoom meeting today. That intern is you.

It seems that trying to get to sleep in today’s age is just not possible. Better go back to training an AI agent to knock me over the head with a frying pan.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Actually quite pleasant in real life.

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window subscribers,

After a nice eight-year break, the Clintons have once again been dominating the news cycle. The former President’s past associations with Jeffrey Epstein — and the quieter, but perhaps better documented, connection to Ghislaine Maxwell — have led many to demand answers from one of America’s most powerful couples. With the Clintons potentially preparing to testify before Congress, my mind has been aflutter with decades of Clinton Conspiracy Theories, taking up valuable brain space that I really should be using for basic life skills, like learning how to dress myself or filing taxes.

Naturally, this felt like the perfect excuse to revisit a longtime curiosity of mine: 1998’s Primary Colors.

Directed by New Hollywood legend Mike Nichols, with a script from the equally legendary Elaine May, Primary Colors closely tracks the Joe Klein book on which it is based. That is to say it is a thinly veiled retelling of the 1992 Democratic Primary and the numerous trials and tribulations that befell the eventually victorious Clinton Campaign. The book was originally published anonymously before Klein — ever desperate for attention and unburdened by pesky concepts such as journalistic integrity or shame — revealed himself as the author.1 A mix of fact and fiction, Primary Colors is, in its own perverted way, one of the most honest depictions of American politics ever put to screen. It essentially accuses the First Couple of murdering the soul of anyone they speak to, after all.

The film follows Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), the grandson of a Civil Rights icon, who abandons his comfortable Capitol Hill gig to work for Jack Stanton (John Travolta), a smooth-talking Southern governor with a wandering eye and presidential ambitions. Together with Susan Stanton (Emma Thompson) — Jack’s steely, calculating wife — legendary strategist Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton, really channeling his inner Carville), and Libby Holden (Kathy Bates), a fresh-from-the-psych-ward former chief of staff, this gang of dreamers and degenerates must claw their way to the White House through a minefield of sex scandals and backroom deals.

Released in March of 1998 at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the film suffered from a cosmically unfortunate coincidence of timing. Although well-received by critics, Primary Colors landed with a thud at the box office. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why Americans, already exhausted by the 24/7 news cycle, were disinterested in a fictional send-up of the very drama they were living through.

It is easy to see how some viewers might have been turned off by the very first scene. It depicts Stanton visiting an Adult Literacy Center in Harlem, regaling the predominantly Black attendees with a story about his Uncle Charlie, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient who was never brave enough to admit he couldn’t read. Nichols shoots the monologue with immense care; the camera circles the wide room, catching the admiring faces of the attendees before slowly moving in on Travolta, whose beaming smile invites everyone to believe — if only for a moment.

Of course, just two scenes later, we learn that “Uncle Charlie” is actually a random campaign assistant far too young to have fought in WWII, and we catch Stanton walking out of a hotel room, barely dressed, with the librarian from the previous scene following behind him, equally naked.

Here, the movie reveals its central tension. Stanton is a man of “harmless” lies or sleazy affairs who presents as authentic and down-to-earth. But as the campaign gains momentum, the compromises shift from personal to political.

This shift is best captured in a scene at a New Hampshire factory. The attendees begin the rally hostile, many of them suffering unemployment due to offshoring. Stanton, looking exhausted and dressed in a large, informal coat, starts off by bluntly telling these laid-off workers that they will not be getting their jobs back. In a friendly yet stern manner, he lectures them on their responsibility to educate themselves and “adapt.” On the sidelines, his aides worry he has lost them. But Stanton, ever the charmer, promises to help them every step of the way, suggesting that as President he would fully fund education for one’s “entire life.” The workers erupt in applause.

It is a masterclass in political theater: he sells them hard, paternal, and explicitly conservative ideas wrapped in a warm fantasy. Yet, the film refuses to acknowledge this ideological pivot. As scholar Myron A. Levine points out, the film glosses over Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” ideology — with support for the death penalty, or the dismantling of welfare “as we know it” dominating his campaign — instead crediting Stanton’s (and by extension Clinton’s) success to his magical empathy.2 While it is conceivable New Hampshire factory workers are just sincerely conservative, Mike Nichols and Elaine May fans certainly are not — and yet, the allure of Stanton is hard to deny.

This pivot to the “New Democrat” center sets the stage for the film’s true tragedy: the death of Libby Holden.

Libby isn’t just a fixer; she is a relic. A self-described “Dustbuster” who cut her teeth on the 1972 McGovern campaign, she represents the old guard of Johnsonian liberalism — messy, passionate, and fiercely principled. She believes in the cause. But it’s the 90s now, and the party has changed.

In the film’s second half, the Stantons face a threat they cannot charm away: Governor Freddy Picker, a reluctant, honest candidate. To win, the Stantons order Libby to dig up dirt on him. She succeeds, finding evidence of a past drug addiction, but she refuses to use it. She realizes that destroying a good man to elect a flawed one is a bridge too far. The Stantons, however, have no such qualms. They are willing to execute the “New Democrat” strategy: win at any cost.

This betrayal breaks Libby. Realizing she is fighting for a man who has replaced her idealism with ruthless calculation, she takes her own life. With Libby gone, there is no one left to say “no.” The old party is dead.

This brings us to the film’s haunting final shot at the Inaugural Ball. Henry Burton, who knows everything — the lies, the affairs, and the cost of Libby’s life —takes President Stanton’s hand. Is he still working for him, after vowing to quit? Nichols leaves that ambiguous.

At the time, that ending played like a question about political compromise. Was it worth ignoring Clinton’s flaws to get him The White House? A CNN poll released on the day of the film release (March 20th, 1998) seemed to suggest, for most of the country, it was: while 52% of Americans believed Clinton had participated in a pattern of sexual misconduct, only 32% of those polled thought he should be impeached. His worst crime? Lying under oath, with 74% of Americans thinking it was much worse than any potential harassment.3

But looking back now, with the Epstein files spilling open, the scene plays almost like an indictment. Primary Colors captures the exact moment the deal was struck. Clinton’s charm didn’t just cover up a few affairs, it opened up the door into total moral collapse, bringing the whole American political system down with it. The road that starts with “harmless” lies or alleged affairs and ends on a private plane with Jeffrey Epstein or Donald Trump as President is paved with handshakes just like Henry’s. He freezes his smile, pretending the hand he’s holding isn’t dirty. All the audience can do is pretend they aren’t either.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Wishing you and yours a very lovely President Day :).

Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,

In 1976, The Muppet Show first graced American airwaves and proved that the invention of television was not, in fact, a complete mistake. In contrast to the often dark and cynical ‘70s, the Muppets offered a vision of the world based on happiness, singing, and dancing. When the show ended in 1981, many Americans permanently turned off their televisions, for without the Muppets, what was the point? Now, 50 years later, The Muppet Show is back.

And it’s really damn good.

Executive produced by Seth Rogen and guest starring Sabrina Carpenter, this new (hopefully-not-one-time) Muppet Show special is a welcome return to form for a franchise that’s been adrift for two decades. While Disney’s ownership of the Muppets gave us the wonderful and instant classic that was Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller’s 2011 film The Muppets, fans have since endured a parade of disappointing and short-lived attempts to modernize Jim Henson’s creations. With this special, Disney has finally made the right call, proudly declaring that it isn’t the Muppets who need to adapt to our times — it’s modern audiences who need to adapt to the Muppets.

Hitting the ground running, the special wastes no time with setup or first-episode malaise. Instead, it barrels full steam ahead into patented Muppets antics and chaos, acting as if the 50 years separating this special from the original show are no time at all. Kermit is backstage, desperately trying to wrangle his performers. Gonzo spends the entire runtime stuck in a stunt-gone-wrong. Miss Piggy threatens to sue Sabrina Carpenter, claiming her style is too similar to the famous pig’s. This, my friends, is the Muppets at their finest.

The premise is simple: it’s been so long since the last episode that every performer wants back in, and Kermit is desperately trying to manage an overbooked lineup with too many acts and not enough time. Being reliably polite, he told all the auditioning Muppets their acts “seemed fun.” Kermit, the soft-spoken and anxious frog that he is, assumed that was an acceptable and nice way of saying no; Scooter, back as stage manager, worries that wasn’t very direct.

The overbooking comes to a head in the show’s most memorable number: a duet between Sabrina Carpenter and Kermit that quickly becomes a duet between Carpenter and Miss Piggy after she sneaks onstage and (somewhat violently) kicks Kermit off mid-song, claiming she didn’t have enough screen time. The song choice remains unspoiled here — it’s funnier going in blind — but this easily ranks among the top ten Muppet music videos of all time, a list that hasn’t budged in 50 years.1

Carpenter is an inspired choice for first guest star, slipping seamlessly into the Muppets’ chaotic, self-effacing humor. She delivers a bawdy joke with a straight face and perfectly adapts to whatever shenanigans Kermit and gang throw at her.

Rogen’s appearance is brief but funny, while Maya Rudolph steals her scene with a cameo in which she dies and then, seemingly, goes to hell. It’s oddly sweet and sincere, and a real highlight.

In a time when the world feels like a decidedly unfun place, the special doesn’t attempt to straddle the line between contemporary bleakness and hokey nostalgia. It is pure Muppets through and through. That isn’t to say it’s not current: the Dr. Honeydew and Beaker segment tackles the “Attention Span Crisis,” and a new bit, “Pigs with Wigs,” though not quite living up to “Pigs in Space,” is funny and seems to be inspired by Bridgerton.

While the special is currently a one-off, a full season seems likely if it succeeds. It’s not perfect — Matt Vogel’s Kermit voice still leaves much to be desired, and the half-hour runtime feels rushed — but this backdoor pilot proves the concept works.

Some will question whether the Muppets, in all their gloriously imperfect chaos, can connect with the TikTok generation, kids raised on carefully choreographed dances and ironic, detached humor. Can the frenetic, low-budget aesthetic find purchase in the airbrushed 4K world of streaming?

After much consideration, I think I have come to an answer: who gives a shit? The Muppets have never asked permission to exist. They’ve never apologized for showing their seams or coming apart at the stitches. For 50 years, nothing has come close to what Henson created. Maybe that’s because everyone else is too scared to be this earnest and messy and so defiantly themselves. In an increasingly artificial world, the Muppets remain stubbornly, wonderfully, impossibly real.

The Muppet Show is back, baby. For those who love them, it’s exactly what we wanted. And for those who don’t get it? Well, there’s always the latest Netflix original.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Has written no less than four academic essays about The Muppets

The Muppet Show Special airs February 4th at 9:00 PM on ABC and Disney+. Photos and early screening provided courtesy of Disney.

Hello to all my wonderful World Outside our Window subscribers,

It has long been said that when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the American flag and carrying a bible. In Melania, the latest from Rush Hour director and rabid sex pest Brett Ratner, one is forced to wonder if that quote gave us too much credit.

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the famous Nazi propaganda film, goes out of its way to humanize and valorize Hitler — showing him in front of huge, seemingly never-ending crowds, framing him as a savior. Melania doesn’t even bother. Its subject is so obviously insincere and disdainful of her “supporters” that even an earnest Trump voter would struggle to find something to cheer for. This is barely a propaganda film, its only ideology ego and money, with no attempt to persuade or convince.

Ostensibly an intimate look at the First Lady in the 20 days leading up to the second inauguration of Donald Trump, Melania is a movie about walking across long, empty hallways into large, opulent rooms, before leaving those rooms and walking across different, even longer hallways. Opening with Melania driving from Mar-a-Lago to a private airfield, flying to NYC, and arriving at Trump Tower (all scored to “Gimme Shelter1,” giving the Rolling Stones yet another chance to sue the Trumps), she takes off and puts back on her sunglasses four times. The most scripted documentary I’ve ever seen, Melania follows a subject so clearly directing her own performance that Ratner’s only job seems to be keeping the camera in focus.

Beyond the designers and army of assistants that accompany Melania 24/7, there are no real “people” in this film. The second biggest character is the President himself, whose presence is predictably boisterous and overbearing. At one point, Melania’s interior designer gives an impassioned speech to the camera about her early life — an immigrant from Laos, she now works for the First Lady, true proof of the American Dream, at least in her eyes. Almost as if to ensure the audience notices Melania’s complete lack of inner thoughts, the camera stays on Mrs. Trump after this speech for almost a full minute, and she stands there, staring blankly with nothing to say.

Ratner’s attempts to insert personality into a woman famous for her lack of introspection fall flat at every turn. The one exception: a car scene where he and Melania sing along to “Billie Jean,” likely because Ratner’s contract stipulated he cram as many sex pests into the runtime as possible. Beyond learning her favorite song, the only other thing we discover about the famously quiet First Lady is that she used to be a model — which makes it easy for her posse of French designers to pick out an outfit. And though Ratner claims the film was Melania’s idea, the choice of director tells you everything: another sex-pest-solidarity pick from our Commander-in-Chief.

With a $75 million budget (most of which AmazonMGM paid directly to Melania Trump herself), Melania is, oddly, one of the most widely released and marketed theatrical documentary of the past 25 years. Unfortunately, it’s an insult not just to its audience but to filmmaking itself. At one point, the movie turns meta, showing Melania’s press assistants fielding calls about the documentary’s announcement, turning to the camera and promising they will never talk to a single journalist about how it came to be. There is no attempt to pretend this is anything other than a bribe, because no one involved cares what you think.

Amazon is fine if you know they greenlit a bribe — are you really going to cancel Prime? Melania doesn’t care how she comes across to the average American —has she ever spoken to one? Ratner knows anyone who Googles his name will find a disgraced hack — when being a cancelled sex pest gets you in the good graces of the President, why be anything else?

The movie will likely bomb. That might hurt the Trumps’ famously brittle feelings. But Melania already cashed her check. Bezos already got his White House access. Ratner, whose career was dead and should likely be in jail, got to premiere a new movie with the President of the United States.

Fascism, it turns out, didn’t need to hide behind the American flag. It just needed the largest checkbook.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
On my way to see the latest Sam Raimi, a much needed palate cleanser.

Hello to all my wonderful World Outside our Window Subscribers!

Lost in the humdrum of an already chaotic year is the need for more children’s entertainment. As media companies continue to consolidate — and AI algorithms push unvarnished slop at the youngest of internet users — the quality and quantity of children’s programming has gone downhill. That’s why I was happy to see that Bari Weiss, in her new position as Editor-in-Chief of Vichy CBS News, made the difficult but necessary decision to retool the primetime Evening Newscast, once anchored by such greats as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, into something more suitable for the pre-K crowd.

With the pick of host Tony Dokoupil, Weiss signaled her belief that anyone, no matter how dim or unqualified they may be, has the chance for promotion in corporate America. As the job market continues to worsen and technological advancements erase entire industries, children can look to Dokoupil as an inspiring figure, safe in the knowledge that no matter what the future holds, there will always be an economic benefit to cravenly selling out. Dokoupil, who previously made a name for himself by accusing Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, of being a terrorist live on air, started his tenure out strong: responding to a random Instagram comment with a “promise [that] we’ll be more accountable and more transparent than Cronkite or anyone else of his era.” Not to be outdone, he also released a pre-broadcast video stating his desire to no longer rely on the analysis of experts in any given field, but rather the opinions of “the Average American.” For the three-year-old audience — just beginning to talk and form sentences — never before has a figure of such authority promised their viewpoint would hold so much weight.

In a courageous display of flexibility, Dokoupil was able to start his hosting duties two days early, after the United States illegally invaded a sovereign nation and kidnapped its President. In an almost 45-minute interview with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last Saturday, Dokoupil educated his pre-pubescent audience on the importance of listening to — and never questioning — people of authority. With the credulity of a newly born infant, or perhaps a small, overly obedient dog, Dokoupil respectfully took in the Secretary’s talking points, taking great care not to interrupt, interrogate, or intimidate Hegseth in the slightest. Parents across the nation can rest easy knowing their children will no longer feel the desire to ask questions, or really emote at all, as Dokoupil’s shining example shapes a generation of toddlers.

Moving along to the “official” start of his tenure, Dokoupil showed great humility on last Monday’s broadcast after he struggled to read the teleprompter. Not faltering in what one must assume was an embarrassing moment, Dokoupil struggled through his transitions — one time introducing four stories at once, somehow — but apologized and chalked it up to “first day” troubles. While Dokoupil had of course hosted a news show before, and presumably can read a teleprompter (the only required skill for his chosen profession), the children of America will learn a priceless lesson about determination and grit.

In an attempt to get in touch with “true Americans,” last week’s show saw Dokoupil traveling the country, visiting a new city each night to meet the people where they are. In Florida, he received a three-minute tribute to his roots as a South Florida native — a gesture which made him cry live on air, teaching young viewers that when it comes to the news, it’s about personality, not reporting.

The Florida dispatch wasn’t complete without a “salute” to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself a Miami native, who received two minutes of coverage describing the many roles Rubio has taken on in the administration: Secretary of State, Acting Archivist of the United States, Administrator of USAID. Dokoupil told viewers that whatever their politics, they just had to salute the man. Additionally, a clip reel of AI-generated Marco Rubio memes was shown. While some children may question why Rubio holds so many positions simultaneously (could it be because his predecessors were illegally removed?), Weiss knows that what kids really want is to be entertained, not informed. When the Children’s Television Workshop first aired Sesame Street, many questioned if this radical new show would be entertaining enough for America’s youth. Weiss, some 50-odd years later, has her answer.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Maybe another George Clooney op-ed will help?

P.S.: I wrote about CBS (and the decline of news) back in October as well. Check it out:

Last week, I published my personal picks for the best movies of 2025. I had a lot of fun with that piece, and thought my list reflected not just my personal taste, but a diverse selection of films from across the globe. Hopefully, I was able to convince just one person to take a shot on a movie they would not normally watch.

Upon posting my list, however, I received feedback from my vast and varied readership (Fortune 500 CEOs, three of the Sharks on Shark Tank — not the ones you'd think, by the way — my mom's college friends (who are admittedly very nice and supportive), etc.) telling me that I had erred in only choosing movies “no one has heard of.” While I am somewhat puzzled by this idea — the theater was packed for all but two of the screenings — in my haste to get the list out before the year’s end, I suppose it is possible that I forgot the cardinal rule of film criticism: movies should be judged by their popularity, not any qualitative concerns like form or aesthetics. Perhaps, as is so often the case, I got wrapped up in my own taste for film and forgot to factor in the general population’s needs and desires, not to mention deeply important quantitative metrics, such as box-office success, or streams. So now, without any further ado, I‘d like to present a revised roundup of 2025’s best film. Once again, this list will be unranked and unordered.

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A Minecraft Movie (Jared Hess)

Rejoice! The game that launched thousands of soon-to-be-failed careers in architecture finally has a film of its own. In development since the early 2010s, Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie took the world by storm last April, grossing just under a billion dollars at the global box office. The film looks so bad that one assumes nine-year-old Minecraft players could have animated better creatures, and the jokes are so mind-bogglingly crude and humorless that they aged like milk in just six months. However, think of all the money that was made! Everyone knows about Minecraft, so the box office isn’t surprising, but no one is talking about all the toys sold, the number of plushies or posters, and of course the Minecraft Movie McDonald’s Meal. As Martin Scorsese is so fond of saying, A Minecraft Movie is simply “absolute cinema.”

Wicked: For Good (Jon M. Chu)

A good best-of list wouldn’t be complete without Wicked: For Good. Although just about everyone hated it, and fans of the play likely walked out shocked that they chose to make Act Two even…longer…think of all the money that was made! Everyone knows Wicked — after all, it’s a golden IP. Who hasn’t seen The Wizard of Oz? Plus, unlike A Minecraft Movie, the story for Wicked was already done; all the filmmakers had to do was film it, really increasing efficiency. Still, they went above and beyond, garbling not only the themes but presenting a movie that looks so bad one can at least be comforted knowing that no AI was used — it is simply inconceivable that a machine would invent such a nothing aesthetic. And don’t worry, Wicked won’t stop generating revenue anytime soon, with Universal executives already on the record that they have — and this is a quote — ”a responsibility to figure out how we can continue in this universe.” Once again, a certified populist flick.

A Minecraft Movie (Jared Hess)

That’s right folks! When it comes to films that people have heard of, there is really nothing better than A Minecraft Movie. Its massive portfolio of plushies, McDonald’s meals, and Jack Black Pez dispensers make it a must-have on any Best Films list, so much so that I put it on twice. It may seem like I’m cheating, skimping out on a critic’s responsibility to be decisive and so forth, but I beg to differ: a critic writes about what’s popular, and boy am I doing that!

Welp, that’s about all I have for you today. If the films on this list don’t tickle your fancy, you could consider just go to the trending tab on YouTube instead.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Always focused on The Grind

Well, like clockwork, the year is coming to an end. After catching up on some heavy-hitters over the holiday break, I’m ready to offer guidance on what was good this year. My list includes a few picks not showing up anywhere else. I think this is, frankly speaking, the only guide you’ll need. Here are the best films of 2025, unranked and unordered.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie)

Starting off with a bit of wild card: the last entry in the Mission: Impossible series was met with critical trepidation, and not unfairly. Technically the second part to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Christopher McQuarrie’s latest is probably his worst, stumbling under the weight of its massive obligations and clearly altered heavily once it was decided this wouldn’t explicitly be part two. But to be completely honest…I loved it despite all that, and saw it three times to boot.

Tom Cruise pushes himself to the absolute limit once again, with two breathtaking action set pieces—especially the long underwater sequence, which feels like a test for the fully underwater film Cruise and McQuarrie have been teasing for years. There’s a huge sequence that can only be described as “The Gay Submarine Where Everyone Loves Tom Cruise” which is worth the price of admission alone. Add in Tom Cruise dangling off a real plane, fascinating politics concerning America’s first Black Female President1, and an interesting meditation on what a movie star like Cruise means in the age of AI, and I’m all in.

Dracula (Radu Jude)

The latest from Romanian director Radu Jude, Dracula was not exactly a pleasant experience—I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bored for long stretches, occasionally checking my phone or rolling my eyes at my friend—but I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Set in modern-day Transylvania, Jude reimagines the tale of Dracula through a distinctly modern, satirical lens that often feels like a punishment for showing up. With horrifically ugly AI-generated sequences, vulgar and confusing sex scenes, and long stretches that are basically just a very old man running around Romania shot on an iPhone, Dracula is not “good” in the traditional sense but instead an experiment: a look at the past and future of cinema crashing into itself as a garbled post-liberal exercise in vulgarity and flat-out trolling. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but not a day has gone by when I didn’t think about this movie, and in a year where people began discussing the concept of “post-cinema” (which I’m not totally sold on), Dracula certainly makes an interesting case for what that looks like.

Also: there is a slow-mo scene that may be the funniest thing I have ever seen.

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi)

When Jafar Panahi walked on stage to present It Was Just An Accident at this year’s New York Film Festival, he told us he was worried about our country—not interested in discussing his own troubles (the Iranian director only got to the very screening I attended with a stroke of luck), Panahi instead made a film that works as both personal memoir and dark, twisted warning of things to come everywhere.

Following auto mechanic Vahid who finds and kidnaps Eghbal (defined by the distinct noise his “peg-leg” makes as he walks), the man he suspects is his former torturer, It Was Just An Accident asks us to see the humanity in everyone and question the value of revenge: should we rage against the machine or its individual operators, and does it matter either way?

Often funny—one scene where our motley protagonists must bribe a security guard who immiedtly pulls out a credit card machine is particularly memorable—Panahi depicts life under authoritarianism as oddly banal, with his characters’ quest to kill their former torturer playing out as a strange Weekend at Bernie’s redux. The empathy Panahi brings is startling, as he forces the audience to continually evaluate the worth of Peg-Leg’s life and operate in the same moral grey zone as the characters. The first movie Panahi has made as a free man in more than 15 years, It Was Just An Accident blew me away with its tightly woven plot, slowly revealing itself as the film descends further into dread and pure anger—essentially a morality play that stands out in its small moments of humanity and quiet reflection. What would you do in the face of such suffering? Who would you want to be?

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

I have simply never seen a movie that looks like this before and while this is not surprising for a Park Chan-wook joint (2022’s Decision to Leave being the first movie to figure out “cellphones”), not a minute went by where I wasn’t audibly cheering under my breath because of a slight move of the camera. There is a conversation in this film shot through the reflection of an iPad!

Following newly fired paper mill worker Man-su, No Other Choice is a biting satire on late-stage capitalism that feels like one of the only truly modern films of the year. Director Park uses FaceTime as an almost cosmic curse, with our main character’s wife always calling him at the worst possible moments—mostly seconds pre-murder—but Man-su always answers, and the camera always finds a way to show us a video call in a new and exciting way. It is almost inconceivable that other people are directing films at the same time as Park Chan-wook and not even trying to match his style, his flow, his effortlessly slick transitions.

The class politics are admittedly a bit light, but Director Park understands something a lot of filmmakers are ignoring: the economic suffering of 2025 is inextricably linked to the technology that defines our day-to-day life. You cannot tell a story about an unemployed man in 2025 without showing how he hides his crimes from a wife who can FaceTime him at any moment, how he navigates a world where he’s always connected but completely alone. Most directors treat phones as an annoyance to be ignored or a lazy plot device; Park treats them as not only inescapable architecture of modern existence, but a fun excuse to try a million new visual tricks. More films would do well to move with even half of the energy in No Other Choice.

End of History (Jacob Gregor)

I watched End of History in a Greenpoint microcinema called Film Noir Cinema—me, my friend, and six others who I can only assume are the coolest people in New York packed the room to watch the latest from Jacob Gregor, whose last film Endless Content Forever remains one of the best films about “our present time.”

Playing like a road trip movie—albeit one with a single, silent character—End of History follows an isolated incel who goes on a journey of self-discovery to Canada. As we watch this nameless man make the drive up North, stopping only to sleep or work out (he keeps putting a “Travel Pull Up Bar” in the most bizarre places, say a very creepy tunnel, but that is of course what one does on The Grindset), Gregor plays endless podcasts, or just narrated comments on online videos, all of which are real but re-dubbed by Gregor and star Matt Calhoun—things like the internet being aflame with Property Brothers memes, comments about female videogame streamers, or manosphere podcasts about picking up girls are just a paltry sum of what is played throughout this film. Often hilarious and boring at the same time, End of History suggests that the world, in essence, has ended, and we are stuck in a purgatory of sorts—an endless suburbia that all looks the same and never changes, different states and even countries blending into a greyish blob of nothingness.

But as I sat there in that small theater (whose website has had a GoFundMe campaign to “keep them alive” for almost five years), it seemed obvious that if this is the end of history, we can escape our self-made doom if we try. End of History is not the type of movie that is getting a wide release—although I contend its humor and sensibilities are really not too inaccessible—but the director has been traveling the country all year, literally touring his film to countless small theaters, and if Dracula suggests cinema as we know it is over, then maybe End of History tells us what may be coming next. The Q&A that followed the screening was lit by one strange lamp in the middle of the room, and was an entirely awkward experience, but not in a bad way of course. The world is changing, maybe even ending, but that doesn’t mean we should just wallow in our despair. End of History is not a very hopeful film at all, but the community-oriented method of its distribution genuinely warmed my heart. I even talk to the director on Twitter now!

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

I’m embarrassed to admit that this was not only my first Lav Diaz (I have started and not finished Evolution of a Filipino Family like four times, for whatever that’s worth) but also my first proper slow-cinema experience and boy what an experience it was. I loved Magellan, and spent weeks talking to everyone in my life about it; the few people I know who have seen it (Janus is not exactly moving fast with the release) all similarly adored it, so reading all these year-end lists that didn’t include it made me feel a bit insane, but to be fair, they literally are just not playing this movie…anywhere!

As the title suggests, Diaz tells the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s (Gael García Bernal) long journey to the Philippines, and somehow, literally every shot in this movie feels ripped from a 16th-century tapestry. I have no idea how he captured nature in this way: beautiful, but also bloody and evil. This is not Hollywood’s Magellan, and Bernal’s performance is a breathtaking depiction of casual cruelty as Magellan carelessly punishes his crew and brutally murders the indigenous people, only expressing anguish or exhaustion with the long journey and his wife’s absence. Time falls away as we watch these majestic wide shots of the ocean, the sound an unbelievable mix of wind, crashing waves, and haunting silence, and while only a timid 2 hours and 40 minutes, Magellan flies by, subtly sneaking a fairly compelling and conventional narrative into the broader vibe of slow cinema.

I need to see this film again, as soon as possible, and I really think everyone should—it is a monumental achievement, and feels accessible to even the most impatient of moviegoers. The full nine-hour cut cannot come soon enough, assuming it ever comes.

Cover-Up (Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus)

I know I said this list was unranked, but Cover-Up was the best film I saw this year. I am a longtime fan of Laura Poitras—Citizenfour was almost annoyingly influential on me—and Cover-Up is far and away her best work yet. Obviously a documentary about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Poitras’ film is far from a simple biographical account of his life but instead functions as a critical lookback on the past 50-odd years of American history, drawing a line between the My Lai Massacre, the war in Iraq, and the genocide in Gaza to link the historic and present cruelty of the American Empire with the decline of our media institutions, painting a picture of a government and media class working in tandem to uphold our status quo.

As we watch Hersh tell the story of his life—in an office that feels like it had to be set dressing, covered with old papers and notebooks, bursting to the brim with a lifetime of work (how is this a real man and not a movie character?)—he shows us just how close all of his revelations came to never getting out. Hersh’s tell-it-like-it-is attitude gives the film some funny moments, but also helps to make it clear how he does what he does: at multiple points he suggests he will quit making the film, constantly expressing both anger and shock at how much the filmmakers seem to know, and fiercely protective of his sources, Hersh resents the attempt to psychoanalyze him or them—he wants the truth, and will talk to anyone willing to give it to him. Take his recent scoop in 2022 that the United States had blown up the Nordstream Pipeline: ridiculed by the Biden Administration and doubted by the larger media class, Hersh says he stuck to his story for a simple reason—the source had not been wrong yet. The film prods him a bit: what would it mean if he was wrong? Not possible, he says, how could it be? Of course, since being elected, Trump has all but confirmed the US did it.

What really struck me about this doc was its refusal to ever commit the sins it exposes—not once is Hersh allowed to make a claim without prodding, with one standout moment where he cops to wrongly saying Bashar al-Assad was innocent of war crimes, namely using sarin gas. Did he get too close to power in that instance, Poitras asks; of course, he says, anyone can. It’s this push-pull between truth and power that seems to have defined Hersh’s, and by extension all Americans’, life, and while he mainly focused on our foreign atrocities, one need not work hard to connect that tension to our present domestic issues.

While the film may often play out as a conventional documentary, I think that its ability to deftly weave all these somewhat disparate strands into a powerful indictment of not just American foreign policy, but the American press, and in many cases the American people, shows the work of a brave and unrelenting documentarian committed, like Hersh, to getting to the meat of the story, no matter who she pisses off.

Cover-Up just recently released on Netflix, and of all the films on the list, this is the one I think everyone should watch immediately. Plus, as a final aside, this is probably a better portrait of the mid-century American Jew than Marty Supreme (which is conspicuously absent from this list…).

Signing off,
Max Bolen
The last movie I watched this year was Norbit (Brian Robbins, 2007)

P.S.: For more end-of-year favorites, look at my entry in The Ministry of Pop Culture’s list of the 25 best Pop Culture moments this year. I wrote about Donkey Kong, but you should read the whole list, it has some of the best writers on this platform.

Ministry of Pop Culture

25 Favorite Pop Culture Moments of 2025

Last night, just before this piece went to press, we learned of the tragic deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner. Rob Reiner was a titan of film and television, and while we will have more to say about his legacy soon, we wanted to share some brief reflections on favorite moments from his career…

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8 months ago · 31 likes · 16 comments · Ministry of Pop Culture

Hello to all my wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers!

It can be depressing sometimes to read modern entertainment criticism. Not because the writing is bad per se – in some ways it has never been better, just look at this blog – nor because there aren’t still great shows and films being made (buried though they often are beneath the content deluge). But rather because even when covering the rare works that demand our full attention, modern criticism seems more interested in explaining them rather than understanding them.

This has been made abundantly clear with the coverage of Pluribus, Apple TV’s new prestige sci-fi drama from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Following Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a miserable and cynical author, Pluribus is one of TV’s freshest shows in years. After an alien hive mind takes over the world – and Carol’s wife doesn’t survive the transformation – Seehorn finds herself one of a few humans not part of the horde. Forced to contend with being the only unhappy being on a world full of content, robotic-like aliens, Pluribus smartly mixes Gilligan’s X-Files past with the character study focus of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. While we are only about half way through the season, it feels safe to say that this is one of the first sci-fi shows of the streaming era to truly make use of the freedom afforded to writers finally free of the constraints of traditional TV production. Rather than using Apple’s blank check to just go big on lore and fancy sets, Gilligan returns to the roots of science fiction and tells a deeply human story, taking advantage of Apple’s trust in him by telling a surprisingly slow and subtle story, devoid of the flashy made-for-TikTok moments so common in today’s TV.

It’s strange to say, but Gilligan’s approach to TV is almost old-fashioned now. The past few years of prestige television have prioritized spectacle over substance in increasingly absurd ways. Stranger Things, once a show that proved the power unlocked by streaming budgets, now represents the worst of the “post-peak-TV” era. With its bloated episodes, absurd character count, and frankly disturbing turnaround time between seasons, Stranger Things has become almost unwatchable. The focused and often smart 80s/Stephen King pastiche of season one has been replaced by the heavy burden of lore-brained TV, as the story continues to expand and spiral out of control, losing the refined and careful character work which originally attached us to these five kids. Now, the most memorable character development of the last season was the weird attempt at making Will Beyers gay, but not gay enough to turn off a Fox News watching grandma (who is certainly not watching anyways).

Volume One of the final season just released – Volume Two comes out in a month, split for reasons no one can quite articulate – and four years after the last season, finding the motivation to watch seems all but impossible. The season finale will be almost two hours long and released in theaters, with all the preceding episodes still long enough to qualify as feature films on their own. There’s no creative reason for any of this. You could simply cut the episodes to normal lengths, make it two seasons, or write tighter scripts. But the strangeness of the release schedule is basically the point. Episode titles were “dropped” as if it was a huge moment. Runtimes for each episode were announced as practically a feature of the experience itself. Call it form over function, quantity over quality, or just plain cynical marketing crap, this is simply not a sane way to release a television show. And Netflix is not alone here, although they certainly are at the top of gimmick-show game.

This context makes Pluribus feel almost radical. Like Breaking Bad, and especially Better Call Saul, Pluribus works because of its commitment to exploring one character and understanding them in totality. Seriously, Carol is basically the only other person we see – save for a few other humans who “escaped” the transformation and are hilariously unreceptive to Carol’s outreach. The rest of the cast plays a hive mind, devoid of any interiority or motivation. As someone who watched with bated breath as Seehorn lost Emmy after Emmy for her stellar work on Better Call Saul, it is deeply satisfying to see her get a show which hinges entirely on her performance. Every casual glance or slight eyebrow raise conveys a universe of feeling, and Carol’s clear unhappiness before the alien invasion is made more darkly comedic after everyone around her becomes incredibly joyful. There’s something perversely funny about watching a woman who was already alienated from the world suddenly become literally the last woman on Earth who still feels anything at all.

But rather than writing about Seehorn’s wonderful performance, or Gilligan’s striking direction (a split diopter shot already – he is going sicko mode), most of the so-called reviews and especially the general discourse around the show seem to focus on the most uninteresting of questions: what is the show really about. As in, below the plot, what is Gilligan trying to say with his Invasion of the Body Snatchers redux? In what is becoming all too common, media outlets seem to think the only thing they can write are “explainers,” designed to help an increasingly unengaged audience, trained by Netflix and the binging model to veg out rather then truly take in an episode. For a show that has barely begun to scratch the surface of its planned three-season run, the prospect of explaining the allegorical core – of which I’m unsure one answer even exists, for what it’s worth – is depressing. Shouldn’t we at least watch the full first season?

I love this Roger Ebert quote, and go back to it quite often: “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” The rush to decode Pluribus – to determine whether it’s “about” conformity, depression, AI, or for some reviewers “the woke mind virus” – misses what makes the show compelling in the first place. It’s the style of Gilligan’s direction, the way he frames Carol against vast empty spaces that somehow feel claustrophobic. It’s Seehorn’s ability to make cynicism feel like a survival mechanism rather than a character flaw. It’s the show’s willingness to sit in uncomfortable silence, to let scenes breathe in a way that feels satisfying and increasingly rare.

Gilligan, for his part, has played coy about the show’s “meaning,” not wanting a repeat of Breaking Bad‘s exhausting press cycle, which devolved into constant questions about the exact “moment” Walter turned evil and other tedious process stories. It seems he understands what the best science fiction has always known: that the genre works when it poses questions rather than answering them, when it creates spaces for thought rather than delivering neat theses. And, of course, when it simply entertains us with its mysteries and intrigue.

The irony with all of this is hard to miss. A show about a hive mind, one that strips people of their individuality and critical thought, covered by a media landscape that increasingly functions in similar ways – churning out explainers, recaps, and my personal favorite, “listicles,” before the credits have rolled on the pilot. In the first episode, there’s a telling moment where Carol drolly signs books as her adoring fans eat up work she herself admits is quite bland. Maybe the hive mind came long ago after all. Perhaps Carol is just the only one paying any attention.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Certainly not welcome in any future Hive Mind situation

Hello to all my wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers!

I know, I know, I was supposed to be covering DOC NYC, America’s biggest regional documentary film festival.1 It turns out however, that covering an entire film festival alone, while still being a full time student and working part time was harder then I expected. Not to worry — I am on track to have my DOC NYC piece up by mid-December. This is of course after the festival ends, but as my girlfriend always says: Alright Max, whatever, I guess it’s the thought that counts.

That being said, I set a goal for myself to write on this blog consistently. Goals are important, and I like to keep them, because without a routine I am liable to become a full-time Trickster, living a life of tomfoolery and lollygagging. This would not be good, as certain important players in politics, entertainment, and business rely on this blog. With that in mind, I am happy to announce the start of a new series — News On The March. This will be an irregular series where I write about various topics in the world and also my life, from a pointedly subjective view point, of course. Inevitably, this may be seen as what I write when I don’t have time to write anything deeper, but I’d argue if I get far enough that people are analyzing when and why I drop certain posts, I’m doing something right!

Let’s start things off with some local news. A few days ago, Gothamist reported that many of the MTA’s October delays can be traced back to one man’s serial copper stealing habits. Transit officials said a vandal disrupted service on three separate days by tampering with signal wires, delaying 755 trains across six major lines. Apparently, copper theft has long vexed MTA officials, with one particular offender, Prince Hayes, avoiding capture for over a decade. I was struck by this story, and found myself considering what a society should do about crimes such as this. While this may be me being “annoyingly woke,” I simply do not believe prison is a fair punishment for copper theft, a crime that is certainly not victimless but surely not serious enough to warrant the inhumane conditions seen in all American jails. Plus: wouldn’t copper thieves simply take the metal out of the jail wall and make a key, securing their escape? Or perhaps, god-forbid, as they are stripping the prison compound of all its precious metals, get struck by some sort of radioactive lightning, and become a metal thief supervillain? These are the questions we must wrestle with.

In other NYC news, our very own Mayor-Elect had quite a big week. At Wednesday’s DSA Endorsement forum (which was so crowded I couldn’t get in!) Zohran Mamdani made his case for why the organization should not endorse City Councilman Chi Ossé in his primary challenge against House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies. The specifics of the debate aside — the vote ended, and DSA will not be endorsing — it was incredibly cool to see the next Mayor of NYC show up to our org’s meeting, and participate as just another member. This is mass, democratic politics in action, and the future looks bright. Mamdani also went to The White House, conceded no ground at all, and called Trump a fascist who is enabling the genocide of the Palestinian people, all while our 47th President sat there smiling, heaping praise on Zohran, and generally acting strange. Beyond the distinct possibility that we all woke up in a bizzarro world a few weeks ago, I feel like there isn’t much to say about that one which hasn’t already been said, but man is it cool to be living in Zohran’s NYC. Also, here is a suggestion for a future NY Post headline:

MamDonny? Trump cozies up to Commie Mayor: “a rational person.”

Moving on to some national stories, a Texas politician’s bizarre announcement caught my eye. Bo French, who up until very recently was Chair of the Tarrant County GOP (one assumes this is a county in Texas, one will not be looking into it further) declared his intention to run for Texas Railroad Commissioner. Why is he running? Well, in order to “stop the Islamic invasion” of course. His statement reads in part, “With Iran and radical Islamists attacking our allies in the Middle East, the Chinese Communist Party pushing its agenda worldwide, and the radical Green New Scam artists waging war on domestic energy production, our state needs a strong leader who will fight back.“ Beyond the obvious humor innate in running to be Texas Railroad Commissioner for these particular reasons, I do think the deeply bigoted justification for this run is something to consider. I am not the first to say this, but in many ways it feels we are living in repeat of the Dubya Years. Random GOP politicians are coming out of the wood work to run on Islamophobia and fear, unwilling to acknowledge the intense failures of their party’s leader. When they have no solutions for the vast economic despair plaguing our nation, all they can do is blame minorities. It is not a new trend, but one that is coming back in full force.

In more important news, there was a new Now You See Me film released last week. A lot of people don’t know this, but I love the Now You See Me franchise. And to be clear, in no way do I love the NYSM films as a bit — I think they comfortably fit in the heights of modern American filmmaking. The newest one, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (Ruben Fleischer, 2025) is inarguably one of the most important films to come out this year. Almost revolutionarily in its aversion to the so-called “vibe shift” Now You Don’t seems like a movie ripped from a not so distant past. The script, which surely was written a decade ago, reaches level of woke and libbed out that I simply did not think were possible anymore. There are multiple conversations about the lack of female representation in the magic world, and one of the characters claims that due to “wars, pandemics, climate change [and] AI,” we need magic more then ever. That is a sentiment I can get behind. The villain is a South African Diamond Miner whose father was a Nazi War Criminal, and in case you thought it couldn’t get better, she is played by Rosamund Pike, doing one of the worst accents I have ever heard (complimentary). Reports of Gen-Z’s shift to the right have been greatly exaggerated, as NYSM topped the box office last weekend, led by an army of dedicated 20-somethings. I know it may seem like I am being facetious, but I truly believe the implications of a film as 2018-libcoded as this one beating out something like The Running Man is notable, and I hope to see more mainstream films buck the conventional wisdom and go all in on unapologetic wokeness.

In direct contrast to the joy of NYSM, however, I also saw Wicked: For Good (John M. Chu, 2025), which reminded me that in order to appreciate the height of American filmmaking, one must also experience the low. As anyone who has seen the stage show knows, act two of Wicked is really quite weak, and unfortunately for us, For Good is somehow an extended version of it. The songs are not as good, the story is overstuffed, and Chu’s poor direction makes it all the more miserable. Seriously, it is unbelievable how bad he is at blocking, seemingly going out of his way to make almost every musical number a bland and forgettable mess. Dorothy is in this film, but they make a pointed choice to shoot around her, never showing her face or even full body. This seems fine on the surface — her most iconic attribute is her shoes after all — but as many may already know, the Wicked films did not get the rights to Dorothy’s Ruby Red Slippers, so they are instead silver. This is undeniably funny, and I honestly respect their commitment to just pretending it doesn’t matter. Also, a man who looks so uncannily like SpongeBob that he was literally cast as him on Broadway plays a character named Boq. I forgot about Boq from the first one, and could not stop laughing whenever Boq was on screen. Eventually, Boq becomes the target of dictatorial rule and turns into a tin-man. Weird stuff.

Well, that’s all from me on today’s edition of News On The March. I hope you all enjoyed this casual post, and will be patient with me as I work on more involved ones. A great mind like mine never rests, but sometimes, it does need a break.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Contains Multitudes

Hello to all my wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers!

During the long hours I spend each week reading books, analyzing important works of art, and generally doing the work of a Great Thinker, I’ve developed an obsession with mid-to-late 19th Century American politics. The fight over slavery, Reconstruction, and the formation of a new, more mature country fascinates me, occupying what I’m told is a strange amount of space in my mind. Much to my surprise, though, the 100+ year old political battles I am so desperate to discuss do not seem to interest the Substack algorithm.

While I would be remiss to only cover attention grabbing topics, I am only One Max, so I must dedicate my limited time to pieces which may appeal to more than five people. A crazed late-night phone call with my girlfriend—me talking at her for 45 minutes about Garrisonian Thought, her begging to hang up—seemed to suggest that even the people I know in real life were uninterested. As I spent weeks searching for an excuse to write about Republican Party Factionalism in the 1870s, I began to simply accept that there was no good angle.

But then, in words which have never before been uttered: I was saved by Netflix. On Thursday, the streamer released Death By Lightning, a four-part miniseries set in 1880, starring Michael Shannon as President James Garfield and Matthew MacFadyen as Charles J. Guiteau.

The series traces Garfield’s unlikely rise to power and Guiteau’s parallel descent into madness. As all AP US History students surely remember, Guiteau’s decline eventually leads to him killing Garfield just a few short months after the 20th President’s inauguration. Finally, it seems mainstream culture has come around to what I have long known: the people crave prestige dramas about niche periods of American History.

Much to my delight, the series goes fairly deep into the politics of the era. The first episode focuses almost entirely on the 1880 Republican National Convention. As someone who once spent a weekend watching the 1988 DNC, I was excited to see a full hour devoted to the subject. But I’m also aware that most people don’t care about this strange American tradition, so it was a shock to see Netflix cover it so extensively.. It seems that in their drive to produce “content” for every niche, Netflix occasionally delivers something made for, generously, 50 people. Rarely do one of these niche shows feel genuinely good, but Death By Lightning stands out as truly well-made prestige television, rising well above a simple period piece, becoming a fascinating, and hilarious, satire.

Death By Lightning works so well because the show is deliberately anachronistic in its dialogue and sensibility, making 1880s politics feel immediate, relatable, and funny. The 1880 RNC fight that takes up much of the first episode is, in essence, a battle over public corruption, or what was then known as The Spoils System. For most of the 1800s the President would appoint only top donors and party loyalists to federal positions. These weren’t ceremonial gigs—a local Postmaster wielded real power, and controlling appointments meant controlling politics. One of course can’t help but think of the modern-day Republican Party’s fondness for corruption, with Trump pardoning anyone who has shaken his hand. This comparison is made easier with the modern dialogue, as the 1880 fight looks and sounds almost identical to those of today. Trump’s public desire to return to Gilded Age politics also makes similarities abundantly clear.

But, unlike our present moment, Death By Lightning starts at a time when certain parts of the GOP were getting sick of the corruption and favoritism and were actually planning a party coup. The Half-Breeds, as they were called, sought to reform the Civil Service into a merit-based system. Led by Maine Senator James Blaine (Bradley Whitford, doing the exact same performance he’s been doing for decades), they show up to the 1880 Convention determined to block former President Grant from getting the Presidential nomination once more. I am a huge defender of Grant, putting my body on the line for him in many online wars, but it can’t be denied that his penchant for corruption tore his Presidency apart.

Despite hailing from Maine—a place so irrelevant it only became a state as part of a doomed compromise over slavery—Blaine manages to take on The Stalwarts and their leader from New York (the only Real State), Senator Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham). Best known for his wanton corruption and fantastic name, Conkling is shown as supporting the spoils system for one reason: he wants control over the Port of New York and who would be appointed the next Collector. Before the advent of income tax, tariffs and fees levied on shipped goods accounted for most of the Government’s balance sheet. Once again, similarities to our present moment abound, as a crook from New York desperately screams about tariff revenue and the need to control it.

After 35 deadlocked ballots, the 1880 Convention finally picks a compromise candidate: James Garfield, who’s not a Stalwart nor a Half-Breed, and doesn’t really want to be there in the first place. Outside the Convention Hall stands Charles Guiteau, who up till this point has been shown as a well-meaning buffoon trying his best in a tough world. Ostensibly there to launch his new paper, The Daily Theocrat, Guiteau spots Garfield departing and excitedly runs up to shake his hand. Guiteau, hilariously, pretends to greatly love this random congressman from Ohio. Who among us hasn’t had to pretend to like someone from Ohio?

Inspired by this handshake, Guiteau decides to help the campaign by writing a speech in support of Garfield. The show does leave out my favorite detail: Guiteau literally just took a speech he’d already written for Grant, crossed out “Grant,” scribbled in “Garfield,” and called it done. Historians contend the speech was delivered at most twice, and the show doesn’t depict either time, but it’s enough to convince Guiteau that he personally won Garfield the presidency.

At this point, Death By Lightning turns away from the political gamesmanship of the Convention and Campaign, and begins to focus squarely on Guiteau. Something I love about grand period pieces is our weirdest, most committed actors getting the chance to portray real freaks. Guiteau is one of history’s greatest freaks, and MacFadyen makes a meal out of every word spoken, with every small tick of his face or glance taking on a life of their own. There’s a particularly memorable moment wherein Guiteau is trying to sneak into the Oval Office and is stopped by a very old White House Butler. He picks up a stack of papers and throws them at the Butler, before screaming “Eat Shit!” and running away.

Guiteau comfortably fits into an archetype which is becoming unfortunately familiar: the sad, isolated, and disillusioned man left behind by the political process. Death By Lightning satirizes these men with MacFadyen’s increasingly deranged performance, and manages to humanize the person below while never excusing his twisted ideology. Not having the modern option of posting racist memes online and making AI Troll Videos, Charles sets out to kill the President after it is made clear he has no job waiting at The White House. At first simply revenge, Guiteau soon convinces himself of a deluded quest given to him by God to restore the soul of the GOP and put Stalwart Vice President Chester Arthur in charge. It is impossible not to think of the modern-day political violence plaguing our nation, carried out by deluded incels or ugly Groypers, who assume that their act of killing will lead to political change. This never works out, though, and it doesn’t for Guiteau either. Once President, Chester Arthur mostly honors Garfield’s wishes, keeping the reformist cabinet and passing vast Civil Service reform.

The show is fantastic, especially the two leads. MacFadyen, who has gotten quite good at playing slightly sympathetic losers, perfectly captures Guiteau’s delusions of grandeur, as he morphs from a quiet and struggling man on the fringes into a violent and sadistic psychopath. By contrast, Shannon delivers a reserved performance, portraying the short-lived President with honor and principle. Whereas MacFadyen’s performance is almost Joker-like in its subtle yet intimidating menace, Shannon’s portrayal is akin to that of Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet, with his grandiose speeches and moralistic views on the Presidency. Considering the Venn Diagram of West Wing fans and Death By Lightning viewers is a circle, this comparison is likely intentional.

Watch Death By Lightning. Then email me, because I have so much more to say and if I have to keep these thoughts about 1880s patronage politics to myself any longer, I will simply perish. And then who will send you a weekly email about topics you never dreamed of caring about?

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Putting the history minor to work.

Hello to all my wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers.

A lot of people don’t know this, but despite my wily charm and cool demeanor, I am actually quite insecure about my writing. As you surely noticed, I took a week off from posting, feeling lost and uninspired by the state of the world. I know that as a Thought Leader I have a certain responsibility to the public, and I do hope that everyone was able to survive okay without any musing or guidance from yours truly.

While on my much-needed sabbatical, I came to the unfortunate realization that my commitment to the written word may be my downfall. Fielding advice from my council of trusted advisors on how to grow my blog, I was told that I just have to be on TikTok, I need an Instagram presence, and I should probably start a podcast or two. But, despite my past as a Minecraft Youtuber, and a brief stint hosting a podcast about pickles, I really have no desire to enter the “content creation factory.” For one thing, I think there is value in quiet boredom. The constant stream of mindless entertainment we all subject ourselves to is somewhat silly, and I’d hate to add to it. Why would I devote time and energy towards something that will almost certainly be half-watched in the bathroom. After all, that is what newspapers are for!

Some may argue that as a keen observer of the human condition, it behooves me to be on the platforms where the masses gather, spreading my gospel. To that I say: look at TikTok, which until recently was going to be banned in America. The rise of Short Form Video is not because anyone thinks that 10-20 second long clips are the best way to deliver information, but because they are simply the easiest way to get ads in front of eyeballs. There is no guarantee that anything will have staying power right now, and chasing trends is a surefire way to burn yourself out, so why should I bother?

With that in mind, I do wonder: why are companies like The New York Times so eager to establish a presence in the “Short Form Video Space”? This week, users of the NYT app (boomers, resist libs, and me) found themselves greeted by a new video tab when they opened up its digital platform. My experience with it was quite unpleasant, demonstrating a complete lack of curation: I was first shown a harrowing video of mass deaths in Gaza1, which immediately cut to predictions for a catastrophic hurricane, followed by a video of Trump, and finally, an interview with Anthony Hopkins. I like Hopkins just as much as the next guy, but isn’t it odd to present a light-hearted talk with him in this way? Does the NYT report news or do they make content? Right now, it seems like they are more focused on content, and the line between news and entertainment is blurring.

Recently, Zohran Mamdani, the favorite in NYC’s mayoral race, hosted a press conference exclusively for digital content creators. I was shocked to not be included on the invite list, considering I’m being called a “tastemaker” by many insiders. Invite notwithstanding, I was still impressed by his campaign’s effort to include those not normally in the political process. However, I am deeply concerned about New Media being a replacement - rather than an addition - to traditional, fact-based journalism. It is good that there are cooking TikTokers who now get five minutes with the future mayor and can encourage their followers to vote. It would be bad if cooking TikTokers suddenly became responsible for informing their followers about the New York State budget. An optimist would say the NYT pivoting to video, and Mamdani elevating creators, may stem the tide of slop-content as the industry adapts to the new normal. Shockingly, I am not an optimist.

What about my own work? I think that the credibility of this blog is fairly obvious to readers; I write in a sarcastic tone about my personal opinion on current events, film, and my own life, desperate to make sense out of a confusing world. But I am not a reporter by any stretch of the word. I am a new, ineffable figment of the internet, who is somehow tricking people into thinking my opinions have value. As I continue to rise on the Substack leaderboard, it is very possible that I will soon be trusted to deliver news.

As an example, fellow blogger Bari Weiss was recently hired to be editor-in-chief of CBS News, after Paramount bought her Substack for 150 million dollars. Her blog, The Free Press, managed to carve out a modest following of heterodox moderates who badly want to just be Trump supporters, but don’t want the social consequences that come with that. They think the Democrats are worse than Trump, and the average liberal in America is a Hamas-loving Commie. While I find many of their pieces insulting to the idea of the Fourth Estate and writing in general, for the longest time one could simply ignore it. Now, however, as someone who is friendly to the Trump administration, Weiss and her ilk will run CBS, one of the nation’s three main sources for broadcast news. Not good.

What makes her unqualified, you may ask? For one thing, she is not an actual reporter. She is a commentator, who cut her teeth writing purposely divisive op-eds for the NYT, before resigning and founding The Free Press, a publication that prioritizes commentary over traditional reporting. Despite this, people have begun to hold it up as an unbiased source of news. The Free Press frequently publishes pieces that don’t satisfy basic journalistic standards. Look no further than a recent piece with the headline “NYPD Cops: ‘I Will Quit If Zohran Is Elected.’” The article, written by Olivia Reingold—who has complained on social media that her supposedly brave reporting has cost her friendships—relies on four unnamed NYPD officers, none of whom definitively say they’re quitting. One explicitly says he’s staying.

Now, as Editor-In-Chief of CBS, Weiss is trying to bring in Fox’s Bret Baier to host the main primetime newscast, booked her sister as one of the first guests in her tenure, and claimed to be focused on “winning,” something which is contrary to doing the news well.2 Despite her lack of experience in TV, and clear ideological commitments, Weiss is considered a good pick because her blog got big. It also pays to be a friend of Trump, of course.

This is a terrible standard to set. If, in the next four years, this blog somehow earns as many followers as The Free Press, will I be qualified to run a news agency? Maybe, in a few years, Disney will feel the need to pay me 200 million dollars for my blog in order to appear politically neutral. Perhaps, if all goes well, under a future AOC Presidential Regime, she would force Bob Iger to hire me as Editor in Chief of ABC News, a position I would of course gladly accept. I’d be a good Editor in Chief. My only change: no more reporting the news on Sundays. It’s the lord’s day, after all.

This, I think, is sure to bring more viewers than anything Weiss can cook up.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
Totally relevant.

Hello all my wonderful World Outside Our Window subscribers! In the past week we have reached 20 total readers, which is a huge accomplishment. I couldn’t have done it without all my adoring fans, nor my Dad’s 5+ email addresses, which are really helping to pad the numbers. Please, consider sharing this blog with friends, family, and foes, because once I hit a solid amount of readers, those who know me personally can be freed from their debt and allowed to unsubscribe from this blog so they can go back to just hoping I don’t call.

Now, as a writer whom a lot of people are calling a “Thought Leader,” I thought it would behoove someone in my position to share some thoughts on Artificial Intelligence, which is quickly becoming the “topic du jour.” These are not all my thoughts, nor are they the most refined, and rigorous of ideas. Rather these are my Stray Thoughts, and I think with an issue so new and fast changing like AI, it is honestly more useful to casually consider where we are right now, and hopefully start a conversation in the comments.

To begin, as someone who is pursuing writing professionally and has no other discernible skills, the rise of AI obviously scares me on a very immediate and emotional level. It is unlikely that these machines will be able to replace the average human worker anytime soon, but the writer, already in a precarious situation with the decline of literacy and general intellect facing our society, may be the first on the chopping block. This isn’t to say that I foresee books or news reports written solely with AI in the near future, but the smaller, entry level positions that someone such as myself would use to sustain themselves while waiting for their Upstart Media Blog to blow up are disappearing. Copy writers, for example, already a dying breed, may be soon fully replaced by an algorithm. While I question the quality of work done by a machine who has never felt the abject despair and self-loathing which is paramount to the human experience, especially that of a writer, quality is generally less of a concern these days.

What’s more, sites that, at best can be described as “content farms,” who used to churn out 100 stories everyday about a Marvel movie based on one rumor they made up have started to transition to using AI. While those jobs were never the most desirable, and generally criminally underpaid,1 they did at least provide some work and the ability to get noticed by more professional outlets.

What I’ve discovered, however, in conversations with people about this topic is that, shockingly, no one seems to care that much about the plight of the writer. In fact, I’ve been credibly informed that many people consider writers “annoying,” and are glad to see them go. Whether that is universal or just the way people in my life feel is of course up in the air. But, beyond ones personal feelings on those in their life committed to the pursuit of written word, I think everyone should fear the disappearance of writers.

After all, for centuries, the average person was desperate to read and write. Literacy was a sign of intellect, of importance, of status. When education began to become a more universal thing, and literacy rates rose, it was a fantastic human achievement. Why would we give that up so our kids can grow up reading AI-generated slop that is often wrong and never very entertaining? It would be a shame.

Moving beyond the world of writing, I find myself struggling to understand just what need AI is fulfilling. I think when judging whether new innovations are, to be quite binary, “good” or “bad”, we should look at the problem being solved, and judge to what extent it makes life better, easier, and more prosperous. The tractor, for example, made farming faster and easier. While this may have been a negative for the farmer whose employer replaced him with a machine, it made food itself cheaper for the whole world, since if it is easier and faster to grow, it can be sold for less. This, to me, feels like a fair trade off, and I think everyone would agree that tractors are a good tool.

With AI, the use-case seems less clear. Yes, it can certainly speed-up office work, but a recent study concluded that while the initial task is completed faster, the following period of having to clean up the “workslop” outputted by the AI actually ends up decreasing productivity. The study, which was done by an AI company called BetterUp suggests training employees to learn more effective ways to use AI.2 If we need to invest in years worth of training for this cost-cutting tool, perhaps simply not using it is best. Another recent study claimed that 95% of organizations polled are not seeing any “measurable return on their investment [in AI].”3 While exact numbers are unclear, everyone can see just how many trillions of dollars have been poured into this technology over a very short period of time, 2-4 years. It seems hard to picture how that investment can ever break even, let alone turn a profit. And with a large portion of our economy relying on these tech companies doing well, there is reason to believe that this industry may in fact be a “bubble,” which ends in economic ruin.

There is also the other factor here, which is that I don’t think I entirely understand how it benefits anyone to eliminate various office positions in order to get work done slightly faster by just using AI. While there is obviously a boost to the Corporations profits if they are spending less on payroll, is that something we can consider a universal benefit? One worth the negatives? I’m not so sure.

An optimist would say that with people freed up from the tedious day-to-day of corporate work, we will have more time to do the things AI can’t: live, laugh, drink, make art, raise kids, sit on the couch for 14 hours trying to pick a movie but then fall asleep, and of course, eat, pray, love. But, I am not an optimist, and to be honest, I think looking at the people behind most AI companies should probably make any optimists reading question their hope. By and large, these are not very good people, who want to control every single aspects of our lives, and make us dependent on the machine, not independent of it.

Think about Mark Zuckerberg, whose company website claims they have “moved beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences in mixed reality and innovation with AI to help build the next evolution in social technology.“ Beyond the fact that this mission statement does not really mean anything, it is clear that Zuckerberg does not want to enhance the life we have now, but rather radically change it, and tether all social connection to his products. While that is bad in its own right, we also know from years of experience, that when Zuckerberg says he wants to help humans connect, he really means he want to sell our data, and reduce our entire lives to profit margins. Time, and time, and time again, Zuckerberg has been caught using his immense power for intense evil, and while he is just one example, there is basically no one in Silicon Valley who is any better.

Elon Musk, whose company xAI has a valuation of over 200 Billion Dollars, has called empathy the greatest human flaw and frequently goes on ketamine binges where he makes a decision that either wipes out entire global markets or kills a thousand children. Forgive me if I sincerely doubt he wants to help humanity with his AI bot, that at one point began to call itself MechaHitler and find Twitter users with “Jewish Sounding” last names and call them slurs.4

Going back to the tractor example, if John Froelich, the inventor of the modern tractor, had said out loud many times that he thinks his invention may lead to the end of humanity, like Sam Altman of OpenAI has said, maybe people would have been less willing to adopt it.5 If one of the major funders of the tractor had said his work would hopefully lead to an elite-based authoritarian government run by tech CEOs, perhaps we would exert some caution in buying his product. Peter Theil, a major backer of AI projects, has said this many times, and also keeps ranting to anyone who will listen about the Antichrist coming to life in the form of anyone who tries to regulate AI.6

What’s more, the actual products being put out by AI companies are simply not accomplishing the things they are supposed to. Altman consistently talks about using AI to better scientific research and cure diseases, yet his company seems to mostly be focused on creating an app full of AI-generated TikTok videos; why anyone would need, let alone want this, is unclear, but you can download it today!

I also want to be clear that before I decided to go into Blogging fulltime, I was very interested in technology and coding. I went to a “tech camp” until Senior Year of High School, and I remained fascinated by the world of 0s and 1s. I am not someone who is reflexively against new technology — I thought Apple’s weird VR headset was incredibly cool and wanted one very badly.7 There are many people who are “AI haters” just for the sake of it, and while I respect their hustle, that is not me. I am genuinely concerned about the adverse effects this technology will have on society, and am earnestly curious about it and constantly trying to learn more. The problem is that everything I learn just makes it seem worse.

To close off this polemic, I thought it would be a fun idea to run all my previous posts through an LLM and see if it could generate a new, original “Max Bolen Special.” Unfortunately, after trying three different models (ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude), I could not get the output to be anything except a remixed version of things I have already written — that is, it was literally just cutting and pasting random sentences from my pieces and calling it a day. The best I could get was a look at a film called Gideon staring Harrison Ford as a Supreme Court Justice. This movie does not actually exist however, and when I told the AI it had made up a movie, it responded that actually I had made up the film, and should do more research before posting the piece. I was taken aback at this aggressive tone and immediately closed the tab for fear of being harassed further. If I needed someone to gaslight me this way, I would just go to my girlfriend who insists I love the film Sing 2 and won’t stop putting it on.

Signing off,
Max Bolen
98% Human.