Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning.

– Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

And then one day, one magic day, he passed my way.

Moulin Rouge, the Broadway musical — 3.5/5

What spectacle! Stage design and art direction that I've personally never seen before on Broadway. It succeeds in taking what Baz Luhrmann does on camera – everything is ever-shifting, plot moving forward at lightning speed with sound as its jet engine propulsion – and applies it to the stage. It's here, it's there, it's everywhere. Where it succeeds is its bigness. Larger than life, Barnum & Bailey's three ring circus. The songs are too often distractions, relying on familiarity and an easy cleverness, but when the music hits, its because it rises to that bigness, taking these modern day love songs and letting them loose to be these elaborate operatic constructions, free from the reins of radio, allowed to be as big as they are. It's fun. It's exhausting. I only wish the show had the courage to slow down and let us catch our breath. The plot, as thin as it is, could have used a moment to center itself before rushing us on to the next spectacle.

Also, I saw Jojo live, wheeee, you couldn't have fucking snuck a little "Too Little Too Late" in here?? I don't think you even tried.

How often the pillars of our wisdom have crumbled into dust!

Chariot of the Gods? (book) – 3.5/5

You realize how people fall into its ancient aliens rabbit hole. It's fun to fall in, there's a rush, air pulsing past you as you freefall, gravity and speed pulling your skin upwards and away from your body. How else could this be possible but this? How do we not know why it exists? Doesn't this look like that? It's not fun to just have had someone in history make something; people being people, artists being artists. It had to be made for a reason beyond us, a message from the past to the future to the past. Imagination, on its own, isn't enough, it has to be an offering to something greater than us. If not God, then some other unknowable thing. And the fun is in that never-knowing; it'll never be proven concretely yes or no. The past is lost to us, and the fun is puzzle-piecing our way through it, forming a foggy outline that, when you squint, seems to make a shape. It's an oasis in the desert. And only we are smart enough, brave enough, fortunate enough to see it. And what gives them faith is that everything that's been built thus far, the sum collective knowledge, all that has been seen before has changed, been modified, has crumbled to dust. So why not build something more interesting? 

Do you want to come to my birthday party?

Peanut Butter Falcon – 3/5

There should be a name for these kinds of movies. These sweet little nothings. 

For evil lies not in God’s picture

but in crooked eyes.

— JRR Tolkien, Mythopoeia

We make still

by the law in which we’re made.

– JRR Tolkein, Mythopoeia

I want a smaller thing in mind

Like a good dinner

I'm tired of these big things happening

They happen to me all the time

– Joanne Kyger

If you'll follow me

I'll show you why

Even I fear the monstrosity

Which I've created

– Carl Burgos, writing Phineas Horton on creating the original Human Torch, Marvel Comics #1

We can make a good thing bad.

Daisy Jones and the Six – 4/5

My friends, I was compelled to keep watching. The chemistry, the magnetism, the flame... the burning. Sam Claflin and Riley Keough are simply great to watch together. There is hate and love in equal measure, attraction and repulsion. Maybe it's just where I'm at in my life, seeing things through new lens, or perhaps I've simply not seen enough, but it seems like there's been a spat of entertainment in the past couple of years that upend old ideas. In this one, the notion of loving someone not because they have that Phoenix Flame that can destroy an entire planet, its civilization, its history, but because that love is quieter, smaller, not always perceptible. It's a love that doesn't give you anxiety, that doesn't make you question your choices, or hate yourself. It's a light on the darkness, not a sinking into the depths. The show does a great shift in personality right there at the end which doesn't contradict what came before. Daisy is mean, selfish, narcisstic, and so is Billy, but at least he wants to be better. But then when Billy wants to give into the darkness, to give into his worst excesses, to stop hating himself for wanting something other, Daisy reveals that love, for her, for him, is because it's a way towards wholeness. He wants to be broken, but she wants to be better. The show surrounds itself with side characters who are charming but don't always amount to integral, and the framing device more often than not surrounds everything that works with this patina of amateur. But the show smartly realizes that Billy and Daisy are where the heat is, and all is tangential to them. There is love there, it's hard to deny that Billy is denying something true and spiritual and eternal; but love can't work if it breaks everything around you. 

That's why I'm leaving the room.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves – 3/5

It's fine. It's charming, it's light, it's inconsequential. It's an episode of Xena Warrior Princess with a bigger budget and bigger names. I ain't mad at that. But what gets my gizzard is that it feels like it's trying to be exactly what Guardians of the Galaxy was. I think we've moved from Whedon-esque being the descriptor for this sort of stuff and shifted to Gunn-esque. Whedon focused on decent people with a sarcastic streak,  losers playing at being jocks. Gunn focuses on scumbag losers who hide their tortured past with a charming eccentricity. Whedon wanted to show everyone how clever he was. Gunn would rather make a joke. I think I prefer it? Especially because he underlines his jokes with a touch of sadness. And so, here, you've got what makes his movies work, blatantly stepping in his footprints, but you don't have the other part of Gunn which is, you know, some artistry to connect everything together. Everyone states their motives clearly. There's no surprise to it. It's saving grace is that it doesn't try to trick you into thinking it's more than it is. There's a laziness to it, which makes it the ideal Saturday afternoon special. Does TBS still play the same movies over and over on the weekends? In 15 years, this could grow into a classic because of the repetition. It's better than whatever else is on. You can play on your phone and look up at the good parts. It's a sunny day and you'd rather stay inside dissolving into nothingness. 

You just walk in like you belong.

Andor, S1 – 4/5

Who knew the most interesting part of a galactic rebellion would be the seeds planted at the start of it? All the hope sprinkled around, different weights placed on different people; all important, all disposable. Andor's the name of the main character but it more feels like the name of a world, a promised land that all of these people are working towards that they may not end up seeing, and not all of them necessarily believing it will come to pass. Like 'Last of Us' which teaches us that love and hate are two sides, yes, but of the same coin, so too does this one teach us that serving good has the power to make you a bad person. Can you save the world and retain your core? How many sacrifices can you rationalize? What's the higher moral value? There's a reason the Hebrew people wandered for 40 years and not even Moses himself got to arrive in the promised land. A whole generation of hate and resentment and hard choices had to die out so that a new land could start out clean. 'Star Wars' makes rebellion look easy. 'Andor' makes it look hard.

You haven't seen the world.

The Last Of Us, S1 – 3.5/5

I think the show is largely okay. Serious People in Serious Times. But the last episode makes it worthwhile, and makes it worth revisiting each of the other episodes through a new lens – what love does to each of us, end-times or no. This is the show that makes me realize that the world's worst isn't just ruled by fear or greed or prejudice, but just as equally love. Love makes us do strange fucking shit. It does all of those good things, it creates life, it creates community, it pulls you out of yourself, but it also makes us vengeful, it makes us traitors, it isolates us, it makes us value one life over the whole. Love is just as dangerous a word as hate. It's a nuclear bomb, and in the wrong hands... 

The trouble with transcendence,

is that you're still stuck here, on earth.

Terrible, terrible joy.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio — 2.5/5

I watched this a week ago and I can already barely recall it. I've got to finally just pull the plug on Guillermo del Toro. He is full of imagination, and putting it on paper only flattens the joy out of it. It is, at least, an interesting take on Pinocchio (though I ultimately didn't particularly enjoy the watching) — the difficulty of children, the difficulty of being a parent, the difficulty of losing a child and placing expectations on another. All the difficulty, all the anxiety, all the vexation of a young boy; all the things that you went through so many years ago only to have to go through it yet again, this time with them, beneath a new lens of "parent." I don't know what the movie had planned for me, but it only reinforces my decision to not have children. 

The world is always ending

for someone. 

- Mark Russell, Superman: Space Age #3

I love you, and you don't pay me.

My Own Private Idaho – 3/5

The Shakespeare riff is weird and unnecessary, and only works when it feels like it's being made a joke of – riff-raffs wanting to sound high-falutin' because they wish to seem above their means, but also above being above their means. (Which means Keanu might be the best part of that part? I've never attached this specific word to him, but he's surreal, and his best movies position him in a place where the world warps around him.) The rest is on River Phoenix's shoulders and man, what an actor, what a loss. He's one of those beautiful ones who weren't afraid to be ugly. One comes around every 15 years or so, and each one helps to serve as a pin in particular moment in time. They are epoch, come to life. The movie is fine. But River Phoenix is monument to time and place.

Every day the same,

with infinite variation.

Like you're sinking.

Aftersun – 4/5

What a beautiful, subtle, powerful thing. There are people that love can't save. They live outside of the taped evidence. The videos only capture a few frames, easy ways to portion off memory and compartment someone as a certain thing at a certain time. It's a gift, to have them remembered this way, only living inside that frame, smiling at the camera, for eternity. It's also a loss of everything astride. "They fuck you up, your mum and dad [...] But they were fucked up in their turn." You will never know your parents, and they will never know their children. Not truly.