Hello all my wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers. My goal for this summer was to try and publish at least 8 pieces on this blog. I only published five, which is a bit less than I intended, but I am still happy with the work I did. I hope you all enjoyed it, and stick around, as I intend to start posting more regularly in the fall!
Yesterday on Instagram1 , former President Obama posted his Summer Reading List, which inspired me to make my own list. Obama never pursued higher education in Cinema Studies and media critique, while I currently am, so I do think it's anyone’s guess who is smarter about this stuff. In terms of accomplishments, he only won the Presidency twice while I have been retweeted by Bill DeBlasio’s girlfriend 5+ times, so again, we are basically the same and our opinions hold equal weight. Also, as long as I watched/read/played/did it this summer, it is fair game…limiting myself to just Summer 2025 releases of one medium is boring! This is mostly a casual reflection on the past few months, it won’t have the “academic rigor” of my normal pieces.
Number 10: The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci)
What can be said about The Last Emperor that hasn’t already been spoken about at length. I love historical epics, and this is easily one of my favorites. I think what works so well is, although it spans almost 60 years, multiple countries, revolutions, and wars, Bertolucci stays so focused on Pu Yi and his internal conflicts that it felt akin to an intimate character study, on a much grander scale. The visuals within the Forbidden City are obviously breathtaking, but even the drab and gray Communist Reeducation Camp is shot with such care and style, it's truly a visual wonder to behold. This film has a reputation as a typical Oscar-bait epic, a long and boring movie that is a technical achievement with not much under the surface, but that’s a read I really disagree with. As the film moves through its admittedly long runtime, it somehow got smaller and smaller to me, as the story got more and more focused on this one man and his grand internal dilemmas. I think it attempts to do something really unique within the classic Historical Epic form, and I wish to see it in a theater one day. Also worth noting it is one of the few Epics about an Eastern country that is not about a white man.2
Number 9: Zohran’s Scavenger Hunt
This was only last weekend, but it was easily a highlight of my summer. After spending a lot of time campaigning for him in April/May/June, it was really nice to get back into the groove of things with a fun community event. There have probably been more Opinion Pieces about Zohran/his supporters/etc. than anyone knows what to do with, but I do think it can’t be said enough that the energy and excitement Mamdani is capturing is not only impressive, it is contagious and inspiring. I’ve been told that I can be a bit of a “crank,” but the relentless positivity that Zohran carries himself with is really hard to avoid, and it's been a real bright spot in a sea of political misery, cruelty, and hopelessness. On the Scavenger Hunt, I met older New Yorkers who live in stabilized housing and need the #RentFreeze, people my age who are interested in a new way of governing, someone who drove from Virginia just to participate in this game, a middle-aged man who was so amped up to win that he had spent the day before theorizing what locations Zohran might pick and kept telling me that if Trump tried to occupy NYC then the participants of this event would be front line defense3, and even a Zohran supporter who seemingly had no idea who Eric Adams was, thought Cuomo was the current mayor, and was excited for a change. Close enough! Seeing all the buses, streets, and subways full of New Yorkers exploring our city and working towards a common goal was a once-in-a-lifetime feeling, and November can’t come soon enough.
Number 8: Marvel Rivals
I have never been able to seriously get into an online game because the second I need to start playing daily in order to maintain my rank I get bored. With Marvel Rivals, you can just join a casual match full of 12-year-olds who are screaming “Iron Man Go High” and then instead you go low and still kick all their asses. Rivals is in many ways a terrible game, because the large roster of characters means that when you really start to get into it, around ~25% of the heroes are basically unplayable for any real competitive strategy. My roommate, who is very good at shooters, was basically playing a different game than me I watched their competitive matches, but that did not decrease the enjoyment I got from queuing casual with them doing nothing but screaming in the voice chat. For a while, the game would just crash on both my roommate's very good gaming PCs, meaning I would be the only one left in the match, which was not ideal. I personally never had any problems on my kind-of slow laptop because I was streaming the game from a server farm somewhere in middle America. This is the greatest invention since, maybe, the stone age, and I am glad to say that I can now run basically any game on my 6-year-old iPad through the power of Spectrum Wi-Fi. I haven’t played much in the month of August, but supposedly they are adding the X-Men Rogue soon, which as many of you probably can surmise is incredibly funny because her power is just, like, lightly touching someone’s shoulder. I will probably play at least one match once she is added, and possibly get addicted once again.
Number 7: Pinball
According to the data that Substack gives me, readers of this publication range from 19-65, so for some of you, me talking about the novelty of Pinball and the joy I feel playing a tactile game in a physical space is probably nauseating/makes you feel old, but what can I say, I have really fallen in love with Pinball this summer. My good friend showed me a great pinball bar only two blocks away from the AMC Lincoln Center, where I spend a significant amount of time anyway, and I’ve probably spent a solid 50 dollars4 just playing Pinball this summer. Now, I am not very good at Pinball, and after looking into joining a league I discovered that the average pinball-league player has special gloves, knows which machines are better than others, doesn’t get drunk in between games, and generally takes it quite seriously. This was a bit disappointing, but, as an amateur player I have still managed to find some community with the other random 20-something FilmBros who came in the bar with me one time after a screening of F1.5 In a broader sense, I think there is value to leaving your house and going somewhere, even if it is just for a few minutes, and having fun without the involvement of screens or the internet. The tactile nature of the game, the bumpers, and the balls combined with the specificity that comes with each machine being slightly different leads to an immersive experience where when you find a machine that works for you, and you are having a good round, everything else falls away, and it is just you, the machine, the sound of metal clanking, electronic buzzing, and button tapping. It's good to be a human sometimes, and just exist in a space that is not virtual. We are becoming an increasingly disconnected and anti-social society, and I made an effort this summer to go to bars and just talk to people and form human connections. I know all of this sounds like an alien describing their first days on earth, but I think the point still stands. Go play Pinball, you may meet your new best friend.
Number 6: Fountains of Wayne
I accidentally called my boss old because she asked what music I was listening to and I said “oh, Fountains of Wayne” and she said “oh awesome” but then my co-worker said “I’ve never heard of them” so I said, “oh it's a band from the 2000s, [insert boss’s name here] they were super popular when you were our age, right?” It turns out somehow my boss is only 5 years older than me and is in fact still basically my age. This was an embarrassing situation for me on multiple levels, as well as a confusing one, because it was my understanding my boss was about to get her second graduate degree, has lived in four different cities during her adult life, was the head of HR at a company during COVID, and a bunch of other details that seemed to imply she was at least in her 30s, but I digress. I love Fountains of Wayne, and find their songs to be so resonant with the experience growing up in the suburbs of New York, moving to the city, and watching people you used to see every day leave, or change. There is something about the way they describe the highways and trees, the meet-ups in Union Square and the commutes to Jersey for something random that just really gets me. I basically exclusively listened to like 30 of their songs this summer, and I regret nothing. Stacy’s Mom is their most well-known song, for good reason, but I highly recommend going through all their albums. Great stuff!6
Number 5: An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola
When I arrived at The Capitol Theater in Portchester, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from The Megalopolis Francis Ford Coppola Live Experience. After my tickets were scanned, the usher informed me that due to a lack of tickets sold and the “director's desire to control the line of sight” I was being moved to a seat directly in the middle of the theater — fine with me! It was awesome to get to see Megalopolis again, a film I do truly love despite its many imperfections and rough edges. There is something so earnest and optimistic about Coppola’s latest, a film that begs us, all of us, to just consider the possibility of a better world. Megalopolis’ strength is in Coppola’s willingness to experiment and put his entire soul out on the film. You can feel his yearning for a more connected, intelligent, and loving society laid bare, while also seeing his vision of an America based around art, and laughing, and talking, and building, and just trying something new. I hadn’t seen it since it released last October, and it was certainly a different experience watching it in a post-November 2024 world. The American Empire does in fact seem to be crumbling around us because of the greed and abject laziness of those in power…maybe we do need a super special artist (who happens to have a son named Francis) to fix it for us. After the screening, Coppola came out and rambled at us for around two hours. He gave a feminist anthropology lecture, spoke about the housing crisis in San Francisco7, professed his love for Waymo cars, suggested we all play an improv game, and fielded questions that he both refused to answer and clearly could barely hear. Truly the best way I could describe it would be if Joe Rogan was 80-years-old, incredibly Italian, oddly woke, and both functionally blind and deaf. Coppola has been funding his own movies for his entire career, and I got almost teary-eyed at the end of the night when he said the dream he had with American Zoetrope had finally come true in that theater. I hope we get a million more Coppola films, and I hope we get to see every artist make their own Megalopolis. Really stellar time.
Number 4: Eddington (2025, Ari Aster)
There’s tracking shot in this movie where you see members of ANTIFA doing push-ups and training for their subsequent violent invasion of town. A tech company wants to build a giant data farm in the desert called SolidGoldMagikarp. After I saw this film I met my mom for lunch near Times Square where I was greeted by a giant billboard calling for the release of the Epstein Files. A few weeks later I got in a small spat with someone on twitter over the film but it turned out we basically just agreed with each other, were interpreting everything with intense bad faith, and just assumed the people on the other side of our phones were crazy and wrong. Feels like a very good distillation of the Eddington Experience. Not much more to say!
Number 3: The Naked Gun (2025, Akiva Schaffer)
There is a moment very early on in the latest Naked Gun film where Liam Neeson’s Frank Drebin, Jr. is narrating his internal thoughts about Pamela Anderson’s character. Suddenly, his yearning thoughts about her are echoed by 15 other voices, as the camera pans to reveal all the other cops in the station thinking the exact same thing, word for word. It was at this moment that I knew Akiva was not coming to play. The prospect of a Naked Gun reboot was a pretty terrible idea until I was in the actual theater experiencing it. This movie might be the most successful modern legacy sequel ever made, mostly because there is an extended scene where Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson have a threesome with a snowman they built and brought to life with magic. That snowman then proceeds to try and kill them, and shortly after that we learn that Anderson’s character plugged in Drebin’s TiVo to the internet, causing all his Buffy episodes to be erased. Basically every cultural reference in this film is from the year 2004, and I would not have it any other way. There is an earnest and passionate goofiness which explodes across every single scene and infuses the film with a contagious sense of joy and laughter. Every single beat has a laugh, every single performance is hall-of-fame comedy worthy, and there is not even a whiff of the irony/cynicism that has plagued our comedy films for years. This is not trying to do some “elevated comedy” bullshit8…it is just 80 minutes of pure laughs, and I hope we get a million more.
Number 2: Taking a Deep Breath
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but the world is ending. Democratic institutions are crumbling before our eyes, teenagers are committing suicide because an AI chatbot told them to, and SNL just fired Michael Longfellow9. With all that going on, it can be hard to live life, experience each day as it comes, and stay happy. This was a big problem for me last spring/winter, as I found myself unable to stop reading the news every five minutes following Trump’s swearing in. I was still going through life, attending class, going to work, doing everything I was supposed to be doing, but in many ways I was not living in reality but instead in the constant stream of vitriol and hate that is spewing from the White House. This summer, I made it a mission of mine to just…step back, and take a deep breath. This doesn’t mean staying uninformed or checking it out, but it does mean realizing that the way Trump wins is by us allowing ourselves to let him dictate our lives. I do not need to have an intense emotional reaction to a 3:00 AM bathroom tweet from a geriatric reality TV star who seems to be constantly living in one conversation he had with Lee Iacocca in the year 1989. This doesn’t make his evilness any less real, or the need to stop him any less urgent. There is a tension in me even writing this paragraph, because I do believe Trump represents an existential danger to all humans on this earth. I do believe he is a fascist who wants to take away freedoms and return us to a worse, less welcoming country. But I also believe that we have no power to stop him if all we can do is react. Stepping back, taking a deep breath, finding community in your life and experiencing the things that give you joy is just as important, if not more, as staying informed/vigilant. I think I said it a lot in this article, but the things that stuck with me this summer were people/films/books/whatever that were just relentlessly positive and refused to give in to the dark world that some want us to live in. We do need to acknowledge the difficulties that lay ahead, but if there is one thing I learned this summer, it's sometimes we all need to just take a deep breath, drink some water, and go for a walk. The world seems clearer when you are living in it, not just reacting to it.
Number 1: DONKEY KONG BANANZA
According to my Nintendo Switch 2 Mobile App, I spent around 80 hours playing Donkey Kong since it released just over a month ago. I wish I could play it all over again for the first time and experience its joys once more, but instead all I can do is write a top ten list so I have an excuse to talk about Donkey Kong. Nintendo has been at the top of gaming since the industry started, and with this new entry in the Donkey Kong series, they are proving once again that no one else making games really has any idea what to do. In Sony’s Spider-Man games, you swing around a perfect recreation of New York City, rendered so nicely in 4K it does truly seem like real life. Supposedly they spent like 200 million dollars making the second one, and a lot of that cost came from ensuring every single strand of hair on Peter’s head was high quality. Now, to each their own of course, but I vastly prefer Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, where you sing really loud to become a Zebra Donkey Kong with superspeed and run across an ice bridge in order to enter an Ice Cream town that has molten chocolate lava beneath it and collect 1000 bananas. The plot of this game is that someone has stolen Donkey Kong’s bananas and he would like them back. Every single time you collect one, the game stops, shows you the banana, does a little Donkey Kong Dance Victory, before the monkey himself says “Oh…banana!” This is un-skippable and happens every few minutes. It is perfect. Video games in recent years have been a race to the bottom, every company is trying to have the best graphics, the most “movie-like” cutscenes, and true to life physics. In Donkey Kong, you visit a fast food amusement park world where there is a giant hamburger that is hiding a big banana, and the goal of that world is to get to the top of the hamburger and eat the banana. To each their own, of course, but I’ll take a slight dip in frame rate for the unabashed creatvity, joy, and fun, which Nintendo infuses into each pixel of their games.
Also, in the new Mario Kart you can play as a cow. This by itself is worth the 500 dollars a switch 2 will run you.
Thank you so much for reading this, it is a bit more casual and personal then the average thing I write. I hope you enjoyed it, I know there is a lack of polish in my film critique, but I really wanted to get something out before the end of the summer, because I really had a great few months and had a lot of random thoughts to express. Please do consider subscribing for more stuff like this, as well as more serious film, politics, history, and culture writing. Who knows what I will post next, but I think if you liked at least one of the things on this list then this blog will work for you :).
Not on Twitter, strangely, where the only people who actually care about this tradition are active. His “Foundation” account posted it later on Twitter, but still not his personal one. This is unimportant, I just found it interesting.
Seriously, even Gandhi bizarrely focuses on a white photographer for a solid amount of the runtime…I like that movie fine enough but it should probably just be about Gandhi.
I agree with this, of course. The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated (whether in a history based Scavenger Hunt or a street-brawl with masked ICE Agents).
Subscribe to my Substack to support independent Pinballers:
Could not remember their names or any other personal details for the life of me but I do know how much I beat them by (562,000).
Their front man, Adam Schlesinger, also wrote the songs for the Tom Hanks classic That Thing You Do, as well as most of the music for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. He tragically died of COVID a few years back, which is how I was introduced to them, after Conan O’Brien did a segment on his death.
For the readers of this blog that know what Abundance is, it seems fairly obvious to me he has read it and is firmly in the YIMBY camp if that is something that matters.
I liked Friendship fine enough because every word that Tim Robinson says is funny no matter what, but it really suffered from an identity crisis where it clearly wanted to be some sort of elevated/deeper comedy. This is a problem almost every comedic TV Show has nowadays too (The Bear, for one), and it is a real shame.
Seriously what is going on with that? Is Lorne washed? Does he not like the fanbase of 20-something stan accounts that the recent hires have cultivated? Is it not deep at all and just routine Network TV casting decisions? More on that never.