Five bags of popcorn

So glad you asked. I’ve written about half of six different life-update posts since summer. Some had photos I was proud of, like a snapshot of parade mascots holding uzis from some town in north Jersey. I wrote down all the good jokes I could remember from Conner O’Malley’s stand-up tour, a nearly-perfect night that ended with the comedian opening a laptop and clicking through his “browser,” loaded with joke websites that became increasingly militaristic and erotic as he closed tabs. There’s most of a “Waiting for Godot” review; my wife took me to New York for one of the first nights of the Alex Winter/Keanu Reeves revival of the play, mostly faithful, with one in-joke about Wyld Stallions.

(Publicity photo for “Waiting for Godot,” Andy Henderson, 2025)

But I didn’t finish them. The noble reason: Work. The ignoble reason: It was more fun to read books than to write about my life. The more interesting reason: Writing about my life online is a less attractive idea than it’s been at any point since I learned HTML and published my first website, “DW-i,” in 2001. (Thats a good joke name, and half the reason I started the blog, which you should by no means look for now.)

I’m not becoming a hermit. I’m just wary of sharing too much detail about my life on social media. Like Michelle Goldberg wrote four years ago, when the dinosaur social networks were less exploitative than they are now, I think we should know less about each other. To un-bury the lede: My wife and I brought our daughter home last month. She’s now eating, sleeping, spitting up, and filling diapers in a world where many people post pictures of their babies for strangers to hit LIKE on, competing with weirder strangers who generate AI cartoons of babies riding cute dogs or falling through glass bridges, where they are rescued by even cuter dogs.

So: The idea of a weekly journal of What I Did, which would have been very interesting when I traveled two or three times a week, is much less attractive now. Inhaling books and movies and spitting out some takes: That’s fun, but I’m going to do less of that now that we’re taking care of (no offense) the most important person on Earth.

But! I do want to get back to posting something every week next year. The old format of naming the best things I read, saw, heard, etc: That was pretty good, and I have a couple months of paternity leave to do it, followed by a return to my campaign reporter schedule. I’ve thought a lot about entertainment, because of the compressed time I have to enjoy it; I’ve gotten even snootier about the time-wasting games and bullshit that I see other travelers or commuters or guys in the coffee line poking with their free thumbs.

My goal, even before fatherhood, was becoming very intentional about my free time. One concept I’ve kicked around all year is that I should be able to defend what I’m doing/reading/watching to anyone who walks by and asks about it. Would I sputter and close my screen and not want to admit I am, for the thousandth time, playing Civilization V and seeing if I can turn the Celts into the first space-faring society? Then I should be doing something else instead.

I’m going to close 2025 with two posts about what I saw (today) and read (tomorrow). Next month, I’m finishing up a short writing project that I can finish by writing 1000 words a day, so the entries might be skimpy. But not this one!

Part I: Pure Cinema

I saw 43 new-release films this year, fewer than I’d watched since I got to college. Back then I could walk, on Fridays, to a cinema where nobody checked if you used one ticket for for double features. Even easier: Walking to the library, checking out something no video store would shelve (like a copy of “Threads,” the scared-straight 1980s U.K. nuclear war movie), take it to a cubicle, and watch it with headphones.

This super-charged the interest in movies that I picked up as a teenager, when I’d buy mainstream movie-fan magazines and make sure I saw the good stuff. Did I think I’d be in The Industry? No, not really. I felt a little exposed by Matt Johnson’s Umbrella interview this year, when he talked about his juvenile thought that, the more numbered Criterion discs he owned, the more ready he was to become a director. I enjoyed movie culture, enjoyed building dates around something we could talk about at dinner after, enjoyed going over to a friend’s dorm room to crack open the Herzog/Kinski set and watch the films in order.

By the 2010s, I’d pick up useless knowledge, every year, about everything “Hollywood” put out. When I lived in east L.A., I got pickier, and made use of the theaters that got indie movies first; much more fun was a night at the New Beverly Cinema, where I could watch two or three old movies rescued from obscurity because Quentin Tarantino or some other curator liked them. Streaming/online renting gave me access to hundreds of “great movies” that I couldn’t find physically, and obviated my desire to own them and organize them on a dusty shelf. And, repeating myself from earlier, I read more.

So I’d watch some blockbuster slop, but mostly spent movie time on stuff that I might enjoy. I’ve seen most of what’s now in the Oscars conversation, minus four movies: “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” “Hamnet,” “The Secret Agent,” and “The Testament of Ann Lee.” It’s not a priority for me, right now, to watch a mother grieve her dead kid as Max Richter’s strings swell behind her. The other three movies crawled into theaters just when I wanted to spend more time with my kid. James Cameron, I support you, but not so much that I can ignore my family for four hours. Don’t worry, I have a big TV, and I wasn’t going to find an IMAX near me anyway. I’ll see it later.

First, the top 10 of what I did see, with links to anything I’ve written about them and blurbs for the ones that don’t have reviews yet.

I adored both movies because they built beautiful worlds, filled them with interesting characters, and made their heroes take risks that don’t pay off the way they wanted. All of this to beautiful, unnerving soundtracks and sincere needle-drops; it takes guts to play famous pop songs with lyrics that speak literally about the plot and know that it won’t be distracting. They’re also funny, sparing us the Big Speech Sincerity that gets associated with good movies. Hardest I laughed in a theater last year was during “Anora,” when the family fixer learns that Vanya eloped while cradling a baby at a christening; hardest this year was during the Christmas Adventurer meetings of OBBA and the bathtub collapse in “Marty Supreme.”

Honorable mentions: “Sentimental Value,” which I judged too harshly in comparison to other Trier movies and am probably wrong about. “Nouvelle Vague,” which is probably better than “Blue Moon,” but told a story I was less interested in. “Train Dreams,” because I liked the novella better and am becoming one of those people who thinks the interiority of a great story is more powerful than an adaption. (Definitely true for “Die, My Love,” which like “Nightbitch” worked as a novel and bored me stupid once you involved movie stars.)

Now, I’m going to recommend some double features, pairs of movies that worked very well together. I saw them separately — learn from my mistakes!

The Worst Years of Our Lives: “Prime Minister” and “Eddington”

(Publicity photo for “Prime Minister,” Magnolia Pictures)

Lindsay Utz’s adoring portrait of Jacinda Ardern, like Ardern’s memoir, asks us why the good-intentions liberalism of the Trump era was cast aside for Trump 2: Trump Harder. You spend the movie right next to Ardern, who led New Zealand’s left through COVID and a brief policy renaissance. She mulls her mistakes in real time (oral history interviews that she later re-listens to) and retrospect (as a global star living on campuses): All she wanted to do was “save everybody,” and yet some people didn’t appreciate it! In “Eddington,” the well-meaning and good-looking liberal politician is undone in more dramatic ways. No spoilers, but he doesn’t get to pick out his outfit for a final press conference.

Big Pain on Campus: “After the Hunt” and “Sorry, Baby”

(Publicity photo for “Sorry, Baby,” A24)

Two films about academics whose ambitions get rattled by sexual misconduct. One takes a first-timer’s script (inspired more by her Hollywood experience than by college) and populates it with stars across dark, opulent rooms; one’s a write-what-you-know hit by a rising ironic-comedy star. I preferred what Eva Victor (“Sorry, Baby”) did with her premise: Awkward talking around the subject, not big speeches that tell us everything.

Loving the Alien: “Bugonia” and “Superman”

(Publicity photo for “Superman,” Warner Bros.)

Two stories of misunderstood men, trying to save the world from alien conquest. Semi-spoiler: Love is stronger than bomb vests.

The Big Picture: “Jay Kelly,” “Sentimental Value,” and “Where to Land”

(Publicity photo for “Where to Land,” Hal Hartley)

A triple-feature this time, all of them rotating around the same topic, dear to the Gen X filmmakers’ hearts: Creating art at the expense of your family. “Where to Land,” Hal Hartley’s first film in a decade (delayed by COVID), tells much the same story as big-budget “Jay Kelly”: Handsome guy makes it big in the movies and wonders what he missed. But Hartley doesn’t have a Netflix budget, or (in “Sentimental Value”) a subplot about getting acquired by Netflix. He has a Kickstarter budget (disclosure: I gave to it), a small piece of Manhattan to shoot in, and an apartment that’s either his or designed to look like it.

Part II: Other voices, other screens

(Publicity photo for “Smiling Friends,” Adult Swim)

I barely watched TV this year, but everything I did see, I can recommend. “Smiling Friends,” the beautiful mess from YouTube animators Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel, had a strong third season, and stretched its ambition with a Halloween episode that seemed to answer a dare: How much disturbing imagery can you put in this before you reach a joke? “Haha, You Clowns,” Joe Cappa’s ultra-mundane sitcom about three good boys trying to do right by their widower dad.

On YouTube, I discovered two accounts that got me hooked, watching everything they had when I was mentally shot and couldn’t read text. One was Strange Brain Parts, the only channel I’ve ever seen that methodically reviews forgotten indie comics. The other: Redeemed Zoomer, a Presbyterian seminarian who talks about religion in the listicle format that took over YouTube. It’s shocking how well that works when it’s applied to, say, the history of Calvinism, instead of which X-Men can punch the hardest.

More tomorrow. Not about movies and videos, though, we’re done.