Is This Thing On?
★★★★★ 2025
Will Arnett didn’t have to be good to succeed at stand up comedy here, and a movie doesn’t need to be good to succeed at entertaining me! Pretty messy overall but it had a couple of moments
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Journal
Everything I've watched and read, with reviews. Updated as I go.
Sourced from my Letterboxd and my Goodreads.
Point Break
★★★★★ 1991
The correct time to watch this cult classic for the first time was at 8 in the morning hungover at my brother-in-law’s bachelor party
I was ready to jump out of a plane after
Zootopia 2
★★★½★ 2025
Weaker premise, looser pacing, but the same charm and humor as the first one. I hope to see another in the next decade.
The Drama
★★★½★ 2026
Me watching a mom decapitate herself with a piano wire in a fucked up horror movie: “hell yeah”
Me watching a publicly humiliating incident at a wedding: “it’s just a movie it’s just a movie it’s just a movie”
Also… "shout out to Sally you're gonna fuckin die first"
The Prince of Egypt
★★★★½ 1998
I can't believe it wasn't until my 31st passover on this earth that I watched this movie
Hoppers
★★★★★ 2026
Psychotic (complementary)
If I had seen this at an impressionable young age (like the poor kid three seats to my left) it would have traumatized me just like that one scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (you know the one).
Honored to have watched this with Hoppers superfan Camyll.
KPop Demon Hunters
★★★★★ 2025
Watched this two days after Project Hail Mary and the rest of the week was the Battle of the Earworms: Golden vs Sign of the Times
Project Hail Mary
★★★½★ 2026
When I read the book a few years back the first thing I said was "this would work better as a movie" and you know what that was a great call.
Almost certainly would have been 4+ stars if I had seen this without knowing the plot ahead of time. Someone tell Andy to skip the prose and go right to a screenplay for the next one.
Wild Dark Shore
★★★★★ Charlotte McConaghy
I'm done reading climate fiction unless it's written by Richard Powers.
Alt
Vigil
★★★★★ George Saunders
With recent Saunders (this and Liberation Day) I found myself craving more of the intense novelty that permeates his earlier collections. This book shares the same conceit as Lincoln in the Bardo, which is a great conceit for exploring themes on morality and humanity, but loses some of the freshness of reading about a limbo-world for the first time.
That being said, this book still delivers all the good Saunders-stuff that has him as my favorite contemporary author. He portrays his characters with a blunt sincerity that truly understands them without judgement.
Recency bias, but I found myself thinking about Joachim Trier and how his movies are filled with real, three-dimensional people instead of archetypes of good and bad. Same with Saunders (except sometimes the real people are ghosts
The Correspondent
★★★★★ Virginia Evans
Easy reading, creative structure, well-wrought main character, funny at points, sad at points, what is not to like here??
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
★★★★★ Joan Didion
Candidly, I struggle with collections of essays (which is surprising because I love collections of short stories). Not doing myself any favors by reading this late at night, I would sometimes catch my eyes just scanning the words. However, for the essays that caught me, and there were quite a few, I was loving the prose and structure. In particular, "On Keeping a Notebook" and "Goodbye to All That" resonated deeply and personally (having kept a journal for years, and having had a dreamlike 6 months of living in nyc in my early twenties).
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1)
★★★★★ J.K. Rowling
Full-cast Dolby audiobook for commuting / solo workouts.
This was a really fun new addition to the many many many ways to consume the Harry Potter world. Shall I list them all? The original books, the Jim Dale audiobooks, the Stephen Fry audiobooks, the movies,
And now this, a full-cast audiobook with mind-boggling 3D sound effects and great voice acting (some of whom you will recognize, Matthew Macfadyen so good!)
Pale Fire
★★★★★ Vladimir Nabokov
Wow this was l i t e r a r y, and it was just at the outer limit of my attention span outside of an academic setting (don't get many of those these days do I). I was only able to get through thanks to the long break from work and work related stress. I'm glad I had the chance because in the end this was a very rewarding puzzle to unpack and enjoy.
At some points I wished to have this in print format for easier flipping back and forth, but I appreciated Kindle's X-Ray feature for the first time ever, and I very much relied on its dictionary (was looking up about one word per page).
With all the cross-references and intertextual links, by the time I finished I felt like I'd read the entire book three times.
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
★★★★★ Bryan Burrough
Just like Succession except it’s a 600 page book and it all actually happened