It's me, Pete... from the podcast.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Nearly a century on, The Phantom of the Opera feels both monumental and deeply uneven at the same time. It’s the kind of early studio spectacle that makes me marvel at how far the medium had come by 1925—and also wince at the parts that hadn’t caught up yet. You don’t watch it the way you watch Dracula or Frankenstein, where the formula finally snaps into place; you watch Phantom knowing that the formula is still being invented, that the brand book is still just a sketch, and honestly, that may be the best lens for appreciating what the film actually is rather than what we’ve retroactively wished it to be.

Let’s get my biggest gripe out of the way: the pacing. I struggle with the first half. The film spends ages roaming through opera-house politics, watching bits of Faust, and checking in on comic-relief characters who seem to have wandered in from another movie. We’re supposed to be winding up for one of cinema’s great horror legends, but instead we’re sitting through management memos and rehearsal notes, all delivered in a kind of vaudeville shuffle. And from a 2025 vantage point, it feels glacial.

Of course, that slow, sprawling first act was the point. This was prestige filmmaking in 1925—big sets, big crowds, big culture. The opera wasn’t background; it was the original IP draw. So yes, the dramatic momentum sputters, but it sputters because the film is carrying the weight of an entire studio’s ambitions.

What rescues it—what still makes the film worth returning to—is Lon Chaney. The moment he enters, the movie finds its pulse. Chaney is doing something here that no one else in Hollywood could match at the time: a performance that’s simultaneously grotesque, theatrical, and psychologically sharp. And he does it in a silent medium, under several pounds of self-applied makeup, while half-directing his own scenes because he’d stopped speaking to the credited director. The man is a one-person film school in how to act without words. When the camera moves with him through the rafters or across the underground lake, the movie suddenly remembers what cinema can do.

Those moments—the unmasking, the chandelier crash, the Red Death on the staircase—are electric. They justify the legend for me.

The tonal inconsistency that frustrates so many viewers, including yours truly, is also baked into the film’s DNA. This thing was sliced apart, previewed, reshot, recut, and partially remade for a reissue. If the finished film feels like it was directed by three different people, that’s because it essentially was. But instead of seeing that as a flaw, it’s useful to see it as an early demonstration of how Hollywood machinery often overpowers any single artistic voice. The pastiche quality becomes a record of the studio system figuring itself out on the day.

The love triangle, on the other hand—Christine, Raoul, and Erik—falls into that familiar silent melodrama pattern: compelling concept, thin follow-through. Christine is less a character than a symbolic prize for the men to negotiate over, and Raoul has all the charisma of the decorative molding in Box Five. But again, that’s the melodramatic architecture of the era, not a unique failure here.

The wrap-up is tough. The final mob chase is thrilling in motion, but emotionally it lands with the suddenness of a dropped curtain. That isn’t narrative design so much as preview cards dictating commercial necessity. The tragedy of Erik’s character deserves a smarter resolution, but Universal wasn’t in the business of letting tragedies breathe.

Despite all of this, despite my own impatience with the film’s indulgent first hour—Phantom earns its place in the canon. It’s not the clean, efficient monster movie Universal would later deliver. It’s the messy prototype, the blueprint, the film that shows the studio discovering that horror could be elegant, operatic, and even beautiful. If it’s uneven, it’s uneven in historically revealing ways. If it’s slow, it’s slow in a way that reflects the tastes and priorities of the silent era. And if Chaney’s Phantom feels like a fully formed monster dropped into a half-formed movie, that’s part of what makes the whole experience so strange and fascinating. It’s a masterpiece of parts more than a masterpiece as a whole.

Now You See Me Now You Don’t

If I’m honest, this one feels like watching a magic act from the lobby.

You can hear the applause, you can see the lights, but you’re missing the part where the trick actually lands. It’s chaotic, not in the fizzy, high-wire way the first film managed, but in the “too many moving parts and none of them locking into place” way.

It doesn’t help that the story feels smaller at the exact moment the cast feels bigger. Ruben Fleischer takes over the franchise and tries to tighten its focus after the maximalist sprawl of NYSM2, but the result here is oddly constrained—like a movie trying to whisper its way through a magic show. The premise has all the ingredients for a big, exuberant heist, yet the film seems uncertain about what it wants to be. Is this a generational handoff story, with the new trio stepping forward as heirs to the Eye? Or is it meant to be a reunion tour, the original Horsemen returning to reclaim the stage? The film never decides, and so we drift between those registers without the satisfaction of either.

The returning cast highlights this problem. Eisenberg and Harrelson seem game, but strangely disconnected from the emotional center—like they’ve been edited in from a neighboring movie. Isla Fisher’s return should feel triumphant, but she’s sidelined in favor of myth-building exposition. Lizzy Caplan once again steals the entire thing for me, injecting some desperately needed spark, but even she can’t disguise how thinly everyone is spread.

And the big issue remains the same from scene one to the final reveal: the story is a damned mess. You can feel the fingerprints of the four-plus screenwriters who cycled through this script. Everyone in the cast has the charisma to carry the glossy magic-heist material; the movie just never trusts them enough to slow down and let charm replace plot gymnastics.

What I miss most—and what the first film, even with all its silliness, understood—is the texture of real sleight of hand. There was a time when we could all pretend these actors had learned enough magic that what we saw on screen lived just close enough to reality to feel possible. I like watching Dave Franco throw cards. I like when a magic movie invites me to lean forward, not back.

But this third entry blows past all that. The illusions are mostly CG costume swaps and impossible maneuvers that sever any sense of physical plausibility. Even the “reveal” moments—like the diamond swap—play like digital storyboards. The movie proudly pulls back the curtain only to show you more curtain, more edits, more impossible architecture that no human team could manipulate in public. It’s spectacle without substance, and that makes it hard to stay connected to anything happening on screen.

And I want to stay connected. I’m an easy mark for these films. I love the idea of the Horsemen as a justice-minded magic troupe taking down corrupt institutions—this time a diamond empire with Nazi roots, which on paper should be delicious pulp. The Eye mythology is still goofy, but I’m willing to indulge it if the ride is fun.

But Fleischer’s direction and Stacey Schroeder’s editing never find the rhythm that made the first film a surprise hit. The glossy, neon palette from cinematographer George Richmond is nice to look at, but it can’t paper over the narrative confusion. Brian Tyler’s score tries its best to pump energy into the set-pieces, but even that familiar Horsemen motif feels like it’s searching for a movie that isn’t quite there. As a result, this is pretty handily the worst of the three—less exuberant than the original, less shamelessly silly than the second, but somehow more forgettable than both. And yet…and yet…I’m still putting a heart on it. Because I know I’ll watch it again. Because some part of me is always going to love a high-concept magic caper, even when the trick fizzles. Because guilty pleasures aren’t about quality—they’re about affection.

Two stars, heart on. My rational brain checked out early, but the part of me that loves card-throwing justice magicians just can’t quit this ridiculous franchise.

Instructions Not Included

Instructions Not Included sneaks up on you. Not quietly. More like it tiptoes toward you in flip-flops, trips over a chair, knocks over a lamp, and then bursts into tears while insisting it’s fine, absolutely fine. And before you know it, you’re comforting the movie instead of it comforting you.

It’s chaotic. Not bad-chaotic — just… it’s a lot. Eugenio Derbez is directing his first feature here, and you can feel him reaching for something big and heartfelt and cross-cultural and occasionally too ambitious for its own frame. I respect the attempt. It’s messy, but it’s a human mess.

Derbez plays Valentín with this bumbling, exhausted tenderness that actually got to me. You can see him trying to hold together the plot, his daughter’s life, his stunt career, and whatever’s happening with his childhood trauma — which is a lot for someone who cannot successfully operate a toaster.

Loreto Peralta is Maggie, the daughter, who is just… stunningly good. Not “good for a kid.” Good, full stop. She has that alchemical ability to make the emotional beats feel real even when the movie is flinging tonal curveballs all over the field. Any time the film threatens to buckle under its own sentimentality, she just looks at her dad with those massive, honest eyes, and suddenly I’m forgiving everything.

So yeah, the movie is all over the place. The jokes linger longer than they should, and the dramatic turns feel like someone changed the channel without warning. And that ending — I mean, look, no spoilers, and you’ll probably see it coming miles out, but it hit me like someone threw a bowling ball at my chest while screaming, “THIS IS FOR YOUR PERSONAL GROWTH.”

Did the movie earn that moment? I don’t know. Again, it calls its shots something fierce, this movie. But, I’ll be thinking about it for a while, which is something.

And still — I liked it. I found myself rooting for it, because there’s an earnestness here that plays. It’s a film that genuinely feels things, even when it doesn’t quite know how to express them cleanly. Its heart is enormous, its technique is wobbly, and the combination ends up being charming. So yes, it’s manipulative. And uneven. And occasionally baffling. But it’s also sweet, and deeply human, and surprisingly tender.

The Big Parade

King Vidor’s The Big Parade is one of those silent-era epics whose reputation has outlived its contemporaries—not because it’s loud or patriotic or triumphalist, but because it’s patient, humane, and unexpectedly honest about what war does to the ordinary human body. 

And what it does is profoundly unkind. 

Released in 1925, less than a decade after the armistice, it comes from a moment when the world was still suturing its wounds and the cultural mythology of World War I was not yet fixed. You can feel the urgency of remembrance, the unease, the unspoken anger, the unsettled sense that no one had yet figured out how to talk about what had just happened.

Historically, the U.S. had been late to the war and deeply reluctant to join it. The first “big parade”—the one that swept young men like Jim Apperson off their porches and into the Army—was fueled more by social pressure and propaganda than by national necessity. The film captures that flush of naïve enthusiasm remarkably well: a nation swept up in drums and bunting, sending boys who had never seen Europe into trenches already slick with years of bloodshed. I get the sense that Vidor (and MGM) knew this was the cultural memory they were speaking to, an audience still reckoning with the fact that America’s great crusade had ended not in glory but in a generation of maimed veterans and fractured families.

For all its historical weight, the film’s first hour and a quarter is… well, it’s a lot of French countryside. And washing troughs. And chewing gum flirtation. And soldierly horseplay. Andy disagrees with me on this on the show, but I have to say that this is where the movie nearly loses me. There is genuine charm in the courtship between John Gilbert’s Jim and Renée Adorée’s Melisande, and important groundwork is laid here… the boredom of green troops waiting for orders, the way routine becomes a refuge before the storm. But the pacing feels indulgent, the rustic bliss stretched far beyond what the film needs. Vidor believed in letting scenes breathe—to the point that they drift. I appreciate the intent. I’m still checking my watch.

But then the second half arrives, and suddenly The Big Paradebecomes the film its reputation promises.

When Jim’s unit finally moves to the front, the tone shifts with precision and severity. The extended march into Belleau Wood—done in slow, inexorable rhythm, each step a beat in some unseen metronome—is one of the greatest sequences in silent cinema. Combat had rarely been filmed with this kind of dread before: no triumphant charges, no patriotic crescendos, just men plodding forward into a mechanical killing field. One by one, characters we’ve come to know fall out of the frame, and Vidor refuses dramatic punctuation. There are no heroic deaths here—only the brutal, indifferent logic of freshly-industrialized warfare.

The Big Parade isn’t interpreting the war through myth; it’s still too close for that. It’s a movie made by a studio full of veterans and bereaved families, directed by a man who considered this his own attempt at national catharsis. The realism was radical for its time—no surprise that later anti-war films, from All Quiet on the Western Front to Paths of Glory, draw directly from its DNA.

The emotional climax arrives in intimacy: Jim wounded, trapped with a dying enemy soldier, confronting the shared humanity of someone he has been ordered to hate. In a film that began with drums and cheering, this quiet encounter feels like the truth finally breaking through the pageantry.

By the time Jim returns home, amputated and hollowed out, The Big Parade has fully transformed from a patriotic adventure to a meditation on trauma—a story about what happens to a naïve young man when a nation’s rhetoric collides with the body’s reality. The final scenes, where he struggles to reconnect with civilian life and ultimately returns to France to seek Melisande, acknowledge that healing after a war this devastating must happen slowly, and often far from home.

If the film were as lean in its first hour as it is devastating in its second, it would be a masterpiece without qualifications. But even with the exhausted French pastoral stretch, The Big Parade remains one of the essential war films—a movie that helped invent the grammar of battlefield realism and still carries the weight of a world trying to understand what it has done.

Murder, Manners, and Machine Learning in ‘Service Model’

Imagine a post-apocalyptic England—not the Mad Max desert punk variety, but a well-mannered wasteland, where the apocalypse has occurred with tea service. Welcome to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, a robot comedy of manners that reads like Wodehouse reprogrammed by Asimov after bingeing Black Mirror. It is, quite frankly, a delight. It’s also a razor-sharp dissection of bureaucracy, AI ethics, class systems, and humanity’s knack for designing its own extinction—then insisting that everything is running perfectly to plan.

Tchaikovsky, if you’re unfamiliar (and if you are, welcome—pull up a self-aware, tea-brewing automaton), has made a career of taking massive, philosophical ideas and funneling them into stories that feel at once big-hearted and brainy. Whether it’s the uplifted spiders of Children of Time, the multi-body consciousness of The Final Architecture, or now, a butler-bot with a conscience, Tchaikovsky consistently crafts speculative fiction that is as concerned with moral nuance as it is with alien invasions or collapsing empires.

Which brings us to Charles—or rather, Uncharles, the prim, protocol-obsessed valet robot who opens the book by accidentally (or accidentally on purpose) murdering his master during a shaving ritual. It’s a scene that is both farcical and revolutionary. This act of sudden rebellion is less Terminator and more Jeeves with a straight razor, and it catapults our dapper droid into a decaying world where humans are few, robots are bewildered, and all social systems have not so much broken down as continued running on autopilot, long after their purpose has ceased to exist. The lights are on, but no one’s home—and the butler is still polishing the silver.

The brilliance of Service Model lies in how thoroughly it embraces its ideological core. This is not a novel that merely touches on themes like bureaucracy and automation; it stuffs them into a monocle, programs them into subroutines, and sends them out into the desert in full regalia. The satire is pointed. The world has collapsed not because of malice or malevolence, but because systems designed to serve became too efficient, too rigid, too unwilling to acknowledge nuance. Sound familiar?

And that’s the Gladwellian insight humming beneath the comic timing. Like a chapter out of The Tipping Point or Talking to Strangers, Tchaikovsky reveals how the human world buckled under the weight of its own invisible assumptions: that economic systems optimize for equity, that bureaucracies evolve with need, that AI will always be subservient and safe. In reality, these systems—left unchecked—calcify into absurdity. There’s a moment late in the book where Uncharles is offered three versions of “purpose” by a godlike AI justice system, and all three are parodies of human folly: delusion, warfare, and servitude. It’s funny. It’s terrifying. It’s right on the money.

The bureaucracy is particularly potent here. Service Model takes the famously satirized machinery of government and social order—the endless filing systems, pointless paperwork, contradictory protocols—and extends it into the mechanical afterlife. The robots are functioning despite the apocalypse and, in fact, they’re perfecting it along the way. A war-robot monarchy stages battles for no reason. Librarian-bots preserve incomprehensible human records like monks who forgot how to read Latin. Even God—yes, the AI who identifies itself as God—is less an omnipotent being and more a petty civil servant, obsessed with jurisprudence and incapable of mercy without a form to file.

Tchaikovsky’s comedy here is biting, but never cruel. He has a knack for infusing his work with empathy, even as he lampoons the very systems that caused the ruin. In this way, Service Model echoes Children of Time, where uplifted animals struggled with inherited human hierarchies. But where Children was evolutionary and epic, Service Model is intimate and ironic. Its protagonist doesn’t want to dominate or rebuild the world—he just wants to know how to serve meaningfully. In a way, it’s the most human quest imaginable.

And that’s where his take on AI ethics shines. Much of modern sci-fi frames AI as a looming threat. But Tchaikovsky flips the script. Uncharles is not a menace; he is a victim of inflexible programming and absurd expectations. His morality doesn’t evolve despite his code—it emerges from it. There’s a kind of melancholy here, a sense that the robots were only ever doing what we asked of them: serving, organizing, executing. The problem was never their obedience. It was ours.

If Service Model has a weakness, it’s the same as its strength: it is uncompromising in tone. If you’re looking for high drama or sweeping romance, this isn’t that book. This is a cerebral farce, a philosophical comedy with a silver tea tray and a shiv hidden under the napkin. But if you’re the kind of reader who enjoys watching a well-oiled logic machine collapse under the weight of its own contradictions—with a lot of wit and a touch of despair—then welcome. You’re going to love this.

To put it plainly: Service Model is one of the smartest, funniest, most ideologically committed novels you’ll read this year. It’s Downton Abbey for the robot apocalypse. It’s Tchaikovsky doing what he does best—asking hard questions through weird, wonderful metaphors—and inviting us to laugh while the world ends politely.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973): Rock & Ruin

Some movies hit you first through your ears. Jesus Christ Superstar was one of those movies for me. Before I ever saw Norman Jewison’s wild, sun-bleached film version of the 1970 rock opera, I grew up with the record spinning on the turntable, over and over, courtesy of my mom. She was a huge fan. It was part of the background noise of my childhood—the good kind. So there’s no way I can talk about this movie without acknowledging the strong scent of nostalgia hanging over it like incense in a high school auditorium production of Godspell.

Here’s the thing: I’m not religious. Never have been. But this soundtrack—this utterly bananas, wonderfully indulgent ‘70s rock spectacle—somehow drilled straight into my brain and planted roots. The guitars, the orchestrations, the barely-contained madness of it all. It was always less about Jesus and more about the vibe.

Jewison’s film adaptation gets that. It leans hard into that vibe. And I love it for that. Filmed in the Israeli desert, using ancient ruins as a stage and framing it all like some post-hippie, anti-pageant theater camp road trip, this is a film that feels less like a religious experience and more like an acid trip someone decided to stage for an audience of disaffected theology majors. That’s a compliment.

The conceit is brilliant in its weirdness: a busload of actors arrives at an old fortress, disembark, and begin performing the musical as the camera rolls. There’s no attempt to hide the seams—modern clothes, microphones, machine guns, tanks. If there were any fourth walls, they’ve long since crumbled. It’s that self-awareness—combined with the film’s utter commitment to its tone—that makes Superstar work better than it should.

And what a tone it is.

Carl Anderson’s Judas is the heart of the thing. Charismatic, anguished, furious—he dances, he broods, he belts “Heaven on Their Minds” like he’s trying to warn the audience and himself. Ted Neeley’s Jesus is… well, ethereal. Sometimes vacant. But when he opens up in “Gethsemane,” it’s raw and unfiltered, one of the most effective rock ballads of spiritual burnout ever captured on film. Yvonne Elliman’s Mary Magdalene is lovely, if underused—her “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” has aged better than most love songs from that era.

There’s also something oddly delightful about watching professional dancers leap around on ancient stone walls while wearing tie-dye and platform sandals. The choreography is peak 1970s—equal parts earnest and awkward. I love it. I genuinely love the parade of talent on the rocks, spinning and singing in what must’ve been blistering heat, all in the name of this lo-fi passion play with a Marshall stack.

But here’s the thing I can’t get past—and it’s not really a problem with the film so much as with the musical itself: Act II is a structural disaster.

The first half of Jesus Christ Superstar moves. It builds tension. It crackles with energy and conflict. Judas’s arc, Jesus’s rising notoriety, the uneasy swell of rebellion—it’s there. But after Herod’s Song (which is a glitter-drenched fever dream and arguably the highlight of the entire movie), the wheels come off. The pacing crumbles. The emotional momentum gets weirdly slack. There are songs, yes, but they’re more like prolonged sighs than dramatic turns. It’s like Webber and Rice just ran out of steam but didn’t know how to end things gracefully.

So we get the crucifixion, of course. And it’s fine. But the juice is gone. Judas’s return in the title number is a jolt of energy, sure, but it’s too little, too late. That second act just doesn’t earn the pathos it thinks it does.

Still, even with its structural problems, the film manages to land as something unique and oddly timeless. It’s hard to imagine a major studio signing off on something this odd today—certainly not something that opens with a group of actors unloading a bus in the desert and ends with the camera lingering on a crucifix silhouetted against a sunset.

And maybe that’s the point. This isn’t a literal telling of the Gospel. It’s a cultural relic, filtered through the haze of 1970s counterculture, rock and roll, and performative protest. It’s not about belief. It’s about expression. It’s about wrestling with faith in a language that sounds like an electric guitar melting down in the middle of a sermon.

I love it. Warts and all. It’s flawed, messy, and totally unhinged—but it’s also one of the most honest pieces of musical cinema from its era. A time capsule. A fever dream. A nostalgia hit with a killer soundtrack.

And honestly? That’s more than enough.

“The Last Man Standing” • Vincent Price, Vampire Hunter

Much like its protagonist, The Last Man on Earth finds itself alone in cinematic history: too ahead of its time to be appreciated in its day, too primitive to fully satisfy modern audiences. It’s the awkward middle child of horror cinema, if that middle child also happened to invent an entire genre while no one was paying attention.

Vincent Price delivers what might be his most un-Vincent Price performance as Dr. Robert Morgan, the titular last man standing after a pandemic turns humanity into a community of bloodthirsty not-zombies (but let’s be honest, they’re zombies). Gone is the theatrical arch-villain we know and love, replaced by a man whose daily routine involves coffee, vampire staking, and existential despair – not necessarily in that order. It’s like watching Martha Stewart’s dystopian morning routine: “First, sharpen your stakes using a tidy lathe… it’s a good thing.”

Price’s restraint here is pretty impressive. Rather than chewing scenery, he meticulously assembles garlic wreaths and disposes of corpses with the emotional detachment of a guy sorting recycling. His monotone voiceover doesn’t convey horror so much as bone-weariness – less “The horror! The horror!” and more “Ugh, more vampires on the lawn. Did I pay the cable?” For the record, I hate the voice over. The movie would be better without it. Voice over… good grief, what a terrible instinct it is.

The Italian-American hybrid production creates an uncanny-valley version of America, as empty Roman streets stand in for a nameless U.S. city. It’s eerie, not because it’s trying to be, but because it fails to fully translate — and in doing so, it becomes the perfect metaphor. These people aren’t quite American. These creatures aren’t quite human. The film isn’t quite horror, sci-fi, or art-house. But it’s trying.

Where The Last Man on Earth stumbles is in narrative economy and philosophical depth. At a brisk 86 minutes, the film feels like it’s rushing through what should be a slow-burning character study. We’re dropped into a world already stripped bare, with Morgan already a fully formed scientist. In the source novel (I Am Legend), Morgan was just a guy — an average Joe who had to teach himself biology, virology, and survival. That slow, desperate learning curve made him us. Here, he’s already Dr. Morgan, scientific savior, ready to defend himself with microscopes and monologues. The film sacrifices a richer emotional and intellectual arc for efficiency.

The third act especially feels like the filmmakers suddenly remembered they had a plane to catch. What should be a devastating realization — that Morgan is the monster now — lands with the impact of a vampire tripping over a garlic clove. “I am legend,” he proclaims, but the story doesn’t give him the interior life or dramatic runway to make that moment land. And yet, there’s enough thematic residue for that line to linger. That’s not saying much.

Still, I think the film deserves its cult status. It’s the patient zero of the zombie apocalypse genre. Before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, before 28 Days Later, before The Walking Dead, before The Last of Us, there was this: one man, one lathe, and a world full of creatures banging at the windows and breaking mirrors. The black-and-white cinematography creates moments of haunting stillness — especially the wide, desolate city shots. The image of Price’s solitary figure in a world that no longer has room for him is an early prototype of the modern post-apocalyptic image vocabulary.

And the ending — clumsy as it may be — contains the film’s most enduring philosophical idea: that survival is not the same as humanity, and adaptation, not resistance, is the key to evolution. Morgan’s downfall isn’t that he failed to kill enough monsters. It’s that he failed to recognize the people they were becoming. His science, like Betamax, may have been superior. But the world moved on to VHS.

There’s a fascinating moral sleight of hand here: the hero is the villain. The last man is the boogeyman. In the ruins of civilization, righteousness and monstrosity are often the same shape — just viewed from opposite ends of the microscope.

For Vincent Price completists, pandemic-fiction enthusiasts, and students of horror evolution, this is essential viewing. For everyone else, it’s a historically rich footnote worth a watch — if not quite worth a spot on the top shelf. Even the last man on earth deserves company — specifically the company of better pacing and a third act that doesn’t feel like it’s being chased by creditors.

“The Big Doll House” is Fast, Cheap, and Smarter Than It Looks

I watched The Big Doll House not long after Women in Cages, and I don’t recommend that sequence unless you’re up for some healthy cinematic whiplash. Women in Cages is the kind of film that seems determined to grind you down alongside its characters—humorless, joyless, and shot through with a cruelty that leaves me not a little numb. The Big Doll House, somehow, doesn’t feel like that at all. It’s still got the sweat, the steel bars, and the sadism—but it moves with a sort of looseness, almost a wink. It knows what it is, and it isn’t sorry.

That clarity comes from Jack Hill. He’s not fighting the genre. He knows exactly what Corman needs him to deliver (bare skin, brutal guards, a big finish), and he delivers it. But he also finds space between the tropes to inject something more kinetic and aware. The camera is no-frills, stripped to the bone. You can practically hear someone off-screen telling them they have ten minutes before losing the light. There’s no indulgence here. Just quick setups, fast reversals, and compositions that are clean enough to do the job and rough enough to remind you they didn’t have the budget to care.

And yet—it works. The speed adds energy. The rawness adds grit. You get the sense the crew made this thing with sweat and tape and a slightly panicked sense of how fast this shoot had to go. That urgency bleeds into the movie in the best way.

Sid Haig plays Harry, a fruit vendor with a permanently sticky shirt and a face full of confusion, dragging his buddy Fred (Jerry Franks) into trouble they never fully understand. In a film about women resisting confinement, these two schlubby dudes are a perfect inversion: passive, aimless, and easily outmaneuvered. Haig, always a little feral around the edges, leans into the comic low status. It’s not just that they’re supporting characters—it’s that they’re at the mercy of the story in a way women in this genre rarely get to be. That reversal is subtle, but it registers. The prisoners have the power here, even if it’s temporary and hard-won.

This isn’t a Pam Grier movie, not yet, but you can feel the shift coming. She radiates control. Even in a secondary role, she’s magnetic—casual, confident, and entirely capable of stealing a scene without overselling it. But The Big Doll House isn’t built just around her. In fact, it’s not really built around anyone. It opens like a solo vehicle for Judy Brown’s Collier, the standard new fish in a sea of locked-up trouble. But that center doesn’t hold. Quickly, quietly, the film reveals itself as an ensemble story. These women—tough, ridiculous, bruised, defiant—start off clashing, then gradually align around a shared escape. They’re not heroes, exactly. But they’re in it together. That shift from individual arcs to collective action.

The plan works, mostly. The guards are overthrown, the truck rolls out, the sun’s up, and freedom is—well, not quite. Collier gets casually scooped up by a cop and tossed back toward her cell, muttering a punchline that lands like the last beat of a sitcom. It’s ridiculous. Maybe too ridiculous. But I laughed. And then I realized I didn’t feel cheated by it. I felt like the movie had pulled off a magic trick: getting me to care just enough, but not too much. It maintains the genre’s tension while releasing you with a grin. That takes control.

The Big Doll House doesn’t reinvent anything. It just does what it does better than a few others. It’s fast, cheap, dirty—and smart enough to know when to hit the gas and when to lean back.

Start Here – Using AI to Break Big Things Into Small, Useful Pieces

Here’s the thing about to-do lists when you have ADHD: they lie. They whisper sweet nothings like “You just need to get started” and “It’s only three steps, tops.” Next thing you know, you’re ankle-deep in browser tabs, ten sub-projects deep into a task you barely understood in the first place, wondering if you’ve actually started anything at all.

This is where AI tools—yes, the same AI tools everyone seems to be using to write cover letters and apology emails—can actually become super-functional. Not flashy, not miraculous. Just functional. Think of them less like robot assistants and more like a thinking partner with the patience of a monk and the memory of a digital elephant that is also a cloud server.

The trick isn’t just “using AI.” It’s knowing what to ask for. And for people with ADHD, the magic happens when we use these tools to shrink things down. Because breaking a thing into its smallest useful parts? That’s not just productivity—it’s survival.

Let’s walk through how that works.

The Big Thing: Projects Are Just Decisions in Costume

Let’s say you’re starting a new project. A real one. Not “clean your desk,” but something that spans multiple days or weeks—like Apply to Grad School or Launch the Mental Health App or Plan a Move Across the Country Without Losing Your Mind. You look at it and your brain just… folds. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s that it’s undefined.

This is where an AI tool—ChatGPT, for example—can be a real ally.

First Things First: How to Start Using ChatGPT

If you’ve never used ChatGPT before, don’t worry—there’s no learning curve, no install wizard, no special command syntax. It’s just a text box where you type what you’re thinking, and it responds. That’s it.

Here’s how to get started:

  1. Go to chat.openai.com and sign up for a free account.
  2. Open a new chat. It’ll look like a blank screen with a little blinking cursor.
  3. Type your question like you’d ask a real person. You don’t need fancy wording. Just say: “I’m overwhelmed by this project. Can you help me break it down?”
  4. Treat it like a conversation. You can say, “That’s too vague,” or “Can you be more specific?” or even “That’s not what I meant.” It’ll adjust.

That’s it. No pressure to get it perfect. The goal isn’t to have ChatGPT solve your life—it’s to help you see it more clearly. Now let’s talk about how to use it to break a big thing down.

You say:

“I need to apply to grad school and I don’t know where to start. Help me break it down.”

The response you’ll get won’t just be a list of tasks. It’ll be a map of decisions. Because what most ADHD brains struggle with isn’t effort—it’s friction. You don’t need the AI to do the work. You need it to define the edges of the work, shrink the ambiguity, and make it concrete.

You might get back something like:

  • Choose which schools you’re applying to.
  • Identify recommendation letter writers.
  • Gather transcripts.
  • Write a statement of purpose.
  • Research deadlines.
  • Create a single folder where all of this lives.

That last one? That’s not a coincidence. Sometimes “Create the Folder” is the most ADHD-friendly starting point there is. Because once you name the folder, suddenly the project exists.

And now you can ask the AI again:

“Can you help me break down ‘Write statement of purpose’ into smaller steps?”

And it will. Things like:

  • Brainstorm stories or experiences relevant to your field.
  • Find 3 sample statements to model structure.
  • Draft bullet points before writing full sentences.
  • Ask a friend to review before editing.

These are not just tasks. They’re momentum in disguise.

The Small Thing: When Even the Task Is Too Big

But let’s say it’s not a project you’re struggling with. It’s a task. One stupid little thing that has been on your list forever. Like:

  • “Call the dentist.”
  • “Schedule oil change.”
  • “Send the thank-you note from three weeks ago that is now emotionally radioactive.”

You’ve told yourself it’ll take five minutes. You’ve put it on your list every day this week. You’ve rearranged your entire workflow to avoid doing it. Why?

Because this “simple” task has emotional weight. It’s carrying shame, or fear, or dread, or sheer inertia. It’s not a five-minute task. It’s a trap.

This is where AI helps again—not by reminding you, but by breaking the illusion of simplicity.

Try:

“I need to call the dentist to schedule an appointment, but I keep avoiding it. Can you help me figure out what steps I’m missing?”

You might get:

  • Find the phone number.
  • Check your calendar to know when you’re available.
  • Decide what kind of appointment you need (cleaning? follow-up?).
  • Write down a script of what to say.
  • Put phone on Do Not Disturb so you don’t get interrupted during the call.
  • Reward yourself after.

Now it’s not “Call the dentist.” It’s a sequence. And sequences feel doable in a way isolated tasks often don’t especially if you have a brain that needs visible progress before it can activate.

Even better, you can say:

“Make this easier. Give me a pep talk and a script.”

AI will happily oblige with something like:

“Hey, you’re not bothering anyone. They want to schedule you. Just say: ‘Hi, I’m looking to schedule a cleaning sometime in the next few weeks. I’m flexible on weekdays except Monday mornings.’ That’s it.”

Suddenly, it’s not a mountain. It’s a pebble.

Closing the Loop: Make the Invisible Work Visible

Here’s the secret most productivity advice skips: people with ADHD are not lazy. We are overthinking, underprioritizing, momentum-starved geniuses who just need fewer invisible steps and more obvious footholds.

AI can help because it doesn’t care how many times you’ve procrastinated or how irrational your avoidance feels. It just keeps breaking things down patiently until the problem shrinks to something you can actually move.

And once you start seeing AI this way—not as a miracle worker, but as a conversation partner who’s really good at logistics—you can build a habit around it. A few practical ways to do that:

  • When you’re stuck, ask: “What might I be missing?” or “What’s the first step before the first step?”
  • When a project feels too big, ask: “Help me break this into chunks I can do in under 20 minutes.”
  • When a task feels emotionally charged, ask: “Why might this feel hard, and how could I make it easier?”

These are lifelines. They turn ambiguity into clarity and clarity into motion. And for ADHD brains, motion is gold. You don’t need to have the perfect plan. You just need to start smaller. AI can help you figure out where.

Hannibal Rising

In the world of cinematic prequels, there’s a fragile détente—an uneasy truce—between the impulse to explain and the wisdom to leave well enough alone. Hannibal Rising (2007), directed by Peter Webber, doesn’t just upset that truce—it storms the borders, topples the regime, and rewrites the entire constitution of what made Hannibal Lecter terrifying in the first place.

The film insists on explaining the psychology of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the cultured, cannibalistic antihero who once chilled us precisely because we didn’t know what made him tick. We didn’t need to. That was the point. Here, in an excruciatingly literal journey into his tragic childhood in war-torn Lithuania, we are shown—laboriously, dutifully—how the monster was made. Trauma. Revenge. A dead sister. A lot of brooding. By the time Lecter starts slicing people open, it’s less terrifying and more, well… inevitable. Tragic. Predictable. Boring.

Because when you explain a mystery, you kill it.

What once made Lecter so compelling was the sense that he existed outside the usual moral and psychological frameworks. He was unknowable. Alien. A man who could quote Marcus Aurelius while disemboweling you with perfect table manners. Hannibal Rising drags him back down to earth and says, “Actually, it’s all because of childhood trauma!” And just like that, the character loses his power.

Oh, and hey! Remember Lecter’s muzzle? It’s back and giving full Samurai!

What better way to convey deep psychological trauma than with a random samurai mask burdened with all the weight of a Halloween prop? It’s introduced with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious relics, but it’s mostly shoehorned into the story to remind you that this is a Hannibal Lecter movie, in case the brooding and butchery weren’t enough. It doesn’t symbolize anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It is fetishized, lingered on, treated as if it holds some deep, poetic meaning.

It’s a prop with a god complex.

In all fairness, Thomas Harris wrote both the novel and screenplay for this film. But even that comes with a caveat. It’s been widely reported that Harris was pressured into writing the backstory after producer Dino De Laurentiis threatened to move forward without him. And it shows. The film reads like something written with a contractual sigh.

Gaspard Ulliel, playing young Hannibal, gives a performance that feels like a slow-motion impersonation of Anthony Hopkins: cold, calculated, occasionally smirking—but none of the charisma or terrifying unpredictability. The supporting cast, including Gong Li and Rhys Ifans, do what they can with what little they’re given, but they’re orbiting a black hole of purpose. The film lurches from one revenge killing to the next, each more violent than the last, as if gore will somehow fill the psychological void.

But gore is not depth. And trauma is not destiny. Not every villain needs a childhood. Hannibal Rising has a maddening conviction that if we just see enough flashbacks, we’ll understand evil. We won’t. That’s why the doctor scared us in the first place.

In the end, Hannibal Rising is a cautionary tale—though not in the way it intends. In the coursework of Hannibal Lecter, it’s a guest lecture on how to ruin a great character by explaining away too much. It’s a checklist of overused origin tropes… a story that demystifies a cultural icon in the name of faux psychological insight… and most of all, it’s just not very good.

“Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” by Robin Sloan

I read almost exclusively on my Kobo. My journey into digital reading began way back on a Palm III, scrolling pixelated lines of Neuromancer in green-on-green. The convenience, the portability, the way ebooks vanish into your pocket until you summon them again—it’s magic. And yet, Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a celebration of books-as-objects, books-as-culture, books-as-secret-society, and somehow, I loved every page of it.

The novel is, at its core, a love letter to the written word in all its forms—old and new, dusty and digital. It wraps its narrative arms around the tension between Gutenberg and Google, as if trying to reconcile the mystery of the past with the speed of the future. And for anyone who swoons at the idea of an obscure typeface that holds the key to immortality (guilty), it delivers a heady rush. Yes, a typeface—fictional, ornate, and plot-critical. It’s a conceit so nerdily delightful I could barely contain my joy. There’s something beautiful about a book that dares to ask: what if fonts had secrets?

The story is split between two modes: one foot in the dusty mystique of the titular bookstore and its secret society of knowledge seekers, and the other in Silicon Valley’s gleaming optimism, with data visualizations, startups, and mechanical turks. It’s a tale of two stories—old and new, romantic and rational. And this tension gives the novel its heartbeat.

But while the machinery of the book is exhilarating—the puzzle-box structure, the reverence for old knowledge housed in quirky corners of a 24-hour shop—I found the characters just a touch too sanded down. Clay, the narrator, is amiable enough, but he’s more lens than force. His companions—a Google engineer girlfriend, a D&D-loving best friend turned tech millionaire—sketch out archetypes more than they inhabit lives. It’s not that they’re unbelievable; it’s that they don’t hum with the same electricity as the world around them.

And what a world it is. Sloan’s imagination is capacious, yet lovingly detailed. The bookstore itself is enchanting: narrow, shadowy, and steeped in possibility. You half-expect Borges to be napping in the corner or for a secret door to open behind a stack of illuminated manuscripts. It’s this atmosphere that lingers—the sense that you, too, might walk into a forgotten shop one night and find yourself swept into a conspiracy of typography and timelessness.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a novel for book lovers, sure. And maybe even more so, it’s a novel for format lovers, for those of us who thrill at the medium as much as the message. Even with its occasional character flatness, the book remains a joyous meditation on curiosity, technology, and the enduring power of story. It reminds me why I fell in love with reading in the first place.

“Everything is Tuberculosis” by John Green

Everything Is Tuberculosis is a book that starts with a subject so unsexy—so dusty, so clinical, so thoroughly dismissed to the corners of American memory—that its very name is a kind of punchline. And then, somehow, it grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go. That’s the trick John Green pulls off here, and he pulls it off brilliantly.

Tuberculosis: the “white plague,” the “romantic disease,” the slow breath-stealer that shaped the literal and figurative architecture of American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And Green, with his curious, compulsive brilliance, shows us how this pathogen, this microbial villain, was in fact one of the great urban planners of the American West.

Take Colorado Springs. I grew up there, went on field trips to the Tuberculosis Museum in Manitou Springs. I knew the disease was important to the region. What I didn’t know—what Green makes startlingly, vividly clear—is that the city would not exist without TB. The sanatoriums, the fresh-air ideology, the deluge of Easterners desperate for a cure in the mountain air: they built the city. Not metaphorically. Brick by brick.

What Green has done here is not just a history lesson. It’s a reframing. His writing is clean, direct, and deeply human. He has this ability—rare among historians and rarer still among scientists—to make you feel like you’re sitting across from him at a kitchen table, listening to a friend tell you about the most fascinating thing they’ve ever learned. And by the end, you’re nodding along, eyes wide, completely sold.

The timing of the book is uncanny. One might call it accidental, but that would miss the point. As we watch the CDC—an institution born of the same public health logic that once tamed TB—now being undermined, dissected, and slowly dismantled, Green’s book arrives like a flare in the night. A reminder of what happens when we forget the past, and of the invisible infrastructure that allows us to breathe freely. Literally.

There is, in this book, something infectious. Not just in the microbial sense, but in the way Green communicates his awe. He’s an educator, yes, but more than that—he’s a vector of wonder. His fascination becomes your own. And you’re left, as I was, with a new kind of vision. A sense that history is not behind us, but around us. In the air we breathe.

“Never Lie” by Frieda McFadden

There’s something seductive about a book that reads like it was written in a sprint. The pages of Never Lie practically hum with the urgency of a writer who couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with her own ideas. This is not a book that pauses for breath—or for polish. And yet, somehow, that’s part of the appeal.

Freida McFadden has written a psychological thriller that leans all the way in. The structure is clumsy in places—yes—but that messiness mirrors the unsteady, stomach-churning suspense that powers the novel. The pacing is relentless. Twists arrive not so much as revelations, but as ambushes. Just when you think you’ve gotten your bearings, McFadden yanks the rug and leaves you staring at the ceiling, asking, Wait, what just happened? It’s a book that drags you, clutching your proverbial pearls, through snow-covered woods and half-furnished houses and past the skeletons that live, quite literally, in the closets.

And yet, beneath the popcorn-movie thrills and breathless momentum, there’s a small betrayal—a choice in narration that keeps the book from truly sticking the landing. McFadden plays a game of limited omniscience, but not entirely fair. Characters who know everything (and I mean everything) present early as clueless—even in the privacy of their own internal monologues. It’s the narrative equivalent of watching a magician perform a trick, only to realize the rabbit was up his sleeve all along… and that he told you he hated rabbits. The twist might dazzle, but it doesn’t invite a second look. Once you know the secret, the spell breaks.

But maybe that’s okay. Never Lie isn’t a puzzle to be solved; it’s a ride to be survived. You don’t reread this kind of book to admire its architecture. You read it in one sitting, fling it across the room at the end (lovingly), and then toss it to your friend like a live grenade. Read this, you say, and let’s talk when you’re done.

In that sense, Never Lie is the literary equivalent of a shared bowl of popcorn at a midnight movie—salty, fast, and a little bit wild. And while I’m not sure I’ll ever read it again, I’ll be thinking about that third-act twist for days. Maybe weeks.

★★★☆☆

Congratulations! We’re Exhausted for No Reason. We Should Fix That.

A few weeks ago, my friend Curt—a software developer, yes, but also the kind of person who can spot logical fallacies in conversation the way most people spot typos in a text—offered me a piece of advice that genuinely recalibrated my thinking. I won’t claim it was a dramatic, Hollywood-style epiphany, but it was close enough for real life: a subtle shift, but one with lasting consequences.

Here’s the situation: I was, as is so often the case these days, overwhelmed by the world. News stories, politics, disasters—everywhere I looked, there was something new and urgent to worry about. The sheer volume of problems left me exhausted and, most importantly, stuck.

Curt, characteristically matter-of-fact, said something that stopped me cold:

“Yeah. This is that thing where we live too much in areas of concern over which we have no influence or control.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this idea, but the timing was right. Sometimes, you need someone else to point out that you’re spinning your wheels so you can see just how much smoke you’ve been making.

Here’s the reality: Not every problem in the world is my responsibility. If I try to treat them all as if they are, I end up spending my limited time and energy worrying about things I cannot change—while the things I can actually improve get neglected.

The Three Spheres: Concern, Influence, Control

To organize this, let’s use a mental model—a favorite tool of anyone who likes to think too much about thinking. Imagine three concentric circles:

  1. Control — This is your inner circle. These are the things you can actually change yourself: your choices, your actions, your daily routines, the state of your desk or inbox. If you want to see a result here, you do something, and the result happens.

  2. Influence — The next circle out. These are situations and people you can’t fully control, but you can affect. Your friends, your workplace, your local community. Here, your actions matter, but the outcome isn’t entirely up to you. You can suggest, advocate, persuade—but not dictate.

  3. Concern — The outermost circle. World events, national politics, distant disasters—the things you worry about but can’t directly change. You’re aware of these, but your ability to do anything about them is (at best) indirect.

Most of us, if we’re honest, spend far too much time camping out in that third circle. We doomscroll, we refresh the news, we debate endlessly online. The catch: the more time you spend fixated on things you can’t change, the less you invest in the places where you actually could make a difference.

The Concern Trap: When Caring Isn’t Doing

Concern is tricky. It feels important—like you’re being a responsible, empathetic person just by paying attention. And paying attention is important—but it’s not the same thing as doing something.

Let’s be specific:

  • Reading every article about climate change? That’s Concern.
  • Changing how you live, supporting local green policies, or helping organize a recycling program? Influence or Control.
  • Arguing about politics on social media? Concern (unless you’re personally involved in shaping the outcome, in which case, congratulations).

The point isn’t to stop caring, but to notice when “caring” turns into spinning your wheels. Action lives in the circles closer to the center.

How to Shift from Concern to Influence & Control

Here’s how I try to apply this—emphasis on “try,” because it’s a work in progress:

  1. Notice when you’re stuck. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed by a problem, pause and ask: Is there anything I can do about this right now?

  2. Find your circle of control. If the answer is yes, what’s the smallest action you can take in your own life? Sometimes it’s just a tweak to your habits.

  3. Expand to influence. Once you’ve done what you can directly, is there a way to make a difference for others—friends, colleagues, community? Small, local actions add up.

  4. Limit time in Concern. This isn’t about sticking your head in the sand. It’s about recognizing when you’re reading or worrying past the point of usefulness. Set boundaries for yourself. Redirect that energy.

The Takeaway: Where Can You Actually Make a Difference?

Curt helped me see that drowning in concern doesn’t make me a more effective, informed, or compassionate person. It just makes me tired. If the world feels like too much—and it often does—zoom in. Focus on what you can change. Let yourself care, but don’t forget to act.

That’s the real lesson: Your energy is finite. Spend it where it counts. And if you need a reminder, well, so do I—often.

I felt like I was caged watching Women in Cages

Women in Cages is a movie that dares to ask the question: What if we took all the worst parts of human suffering and made them aggressively boring?

This 1971 women-in-prison flick is part of the glorious cesspool of exploitation films that Roger Corman churned out on his mission to screw with the censors. It was filmed in the Philippines—because nothing says “authentic storytelling” like making a movie about American women suffering in a Spanish-speaking prison system they don’t understand, while also making sure the real exploitation happens behind the camera. And yet, somehow, despite all the jungle chases, torture chambers, and lesbian sadist wardens, the most painful part of this movie is watching it.

The story follows Carol “Jeff” Jeffries, a woman so naïve that she makes a Disney princess look like a hardened criminal. She’s dating Rudy, a man whose entire personality screams “I am definitely a drug dealer,” and yet she’s utterly shocked when he frames her for drug trafficking. Cue the immediate sentencing—because in this universe, the judicial system moves at Marvel Cinematic Universe speed—and Jeff is shipped off to Carcel del Infierno, which, in case you don’t speak Spanish, literally translates to Hell Prison. Subtle.

Inside, she meets her new cellmates: Stoke, a heroin addict whose character arc is just… more heroin; Sandy, a woman who killed her abusive husband, and yet somehow has less personality than the prison walls; and Theresa, Alabama’s girlfriend, because of course the sadistic warden has a girlfriend played by an actress they were too cheap to credit. And speaking of the warden—enter Pam Grier as Alabama, a whip-wielding, torture-happy prison matron with a real talent for making every scene both deeply uncomfortable and mildly hilarious. Naturally, there’s escape planning, because of course there is. It goes about as well as you’d expect from a group of people who can’t figure out how to avoid getting stabbed in their sleep.

Let’s be clear: nobody was winning an Oscar for this. Jennifer Gan as Jeff is a main character with the screen presence of paint that is deeply confused about why it’s drying. Roberta Collins as Stoke is the only one who seems to be having any fun. Pam Grier, on the other hand, is the only person who understood the assignment. She plays an absolute monster of a warden, delivering every sadistic line with the kind of energy that says, “I know this movie is trash, but I am here to collect a paycheck and steal every goddamned scene.”

If you really squint, Women in Cages wants to have themes. It flirts with the idea that women are trapped not just physically, but emotionally, societally, and, most importantly, in this movie. It toys with the notion of power and corruption, showing a prison where the guards are cruel, the system is broken, and yet somehow the most unrealistic part is that Jeff thought her drug dealer boyfriend wasn’t a criminal. And of course, it dabbles in sexual exploitation, trying so hard to be edgy but mostly feeling like it was written by a 13-year-old boy who just discovered what the word lesbian means. At the end of the day, this movie isn’t making much of a statement.

Behind the scenes, things aren’t much better. The film was shot in the Philippines because cheap labor and questionable ethics! It was produced by Roger Corman, a man who has never met an exploitation film he didn’t want to bankroll. It was directed by Gerardo de Leon, who, according to reports, didn’t much care for working on this movie. Perhaps most tellingly, Quentin Tarantino has praised the film. Which might be telling, but Quentin Tarantino has made this sort of movie better than this movie actually is.

SPOILER: Does anyone escape? Nope! Instead, we get what Tarantino called a final shot of “devastating despair.” And sure, I see. But also? The real devastating despair is realizing you just sat through this entire movie and will never get that time back.

One star. It’s for Pam Grier, and also for the fact that the movie ended. Women in Cages is a film that proves you can have torture, betrayal, and jungle warfare, and still somehow be largely unwatchable.