A guy who opens his sports betting app every day, even multiple times a day, sounds like a guy with a real problem. But what if that guy rarely ever places a bet? What if the guy I’m talking about is me?
I treat my FanDuel account not like a digital casino in my pocket, I treat it like I would my stocks app. It turns sports into an easily readable market index.
My favorite things to check in on are Futures markets. Primarily they tell you what a team’s current odds are to win the championship, make the championship game, win their division, etc. They don’t focus on the pointspread of the next game, they assess the odds of a future event, hence the name.
One myth I see stated often in sports media is that “Vegas thinks they’re the favorite”, or that “Vegas is giving them 7 points.” While the sportsbooks themselves set the initial line based on their own in-house oddsmaker’s analysis, that line is fluid, it moves as money is placed, shifting the odds towards the money. The sportsbooks ideally want to be in the middle, where the “vig”, the cost of the action that lies in the disparity of the odds, is where they make their money. Sportsbooks can get into danger when enormous amounts of public money are on someone who is, for example, a heavy underdog, and there is no money on the other side of the bet to offset the losses if the heavily bet side wins. This causes conspiracy theories (and I’m always willing to listen to those with an open mind) to circulate when the house ends up winning anyways, but it also shows what the goal of the bet taker is, to come out ahead no matter who wins or loses, and that means moving the line to whatever is most likely going to do that.
While you might think it’s just Johnny Casual placing all these bets and they don’t reflect data driven analysis of what is most probable to occur, the homer or the casual fan bets are called “public money”, there are sports betting syndicates and professional sports bettors who bring in significant capital and move lines when they see a disconnect between their view of what the line should be and what the odds currently listed are, they’re known as the “sharps”, and they bring in the “smart money.”
Betting syndicates employ data analysts with weaponized autism that make Rain Man look like Forrest Gump. And now when you add AI models to assist these savants you get some high level hedging happening across the sports markets.
So when I pop open my sports betting app and check out the futures, I’m looking at ticker prices like investments, mathematically deduced probabilities that bring public and smart money together to give you a sense of the likelihood of a given scenario happening, like the Dodgers winning their third consecutive World Series. This allows me to treat Futures as a more scientific version of Power Rankings.
Right now the Dodgers sit at +190, the plus minus odds look funny at first glance, but here’s what they mean in plain English. If it’s a +, it means if you bet $100 you win back your stake as well as the amount after the +. Right now, bet $100 on the Dodgers, and if they win it all, you win $190, and your $100 stake, for a payout when you cash your ticket in of $290.
If it’s minus, it’s just turned around, if a favorite is -200, a $200 bet wins you $100, for a $300 total payout. The payouts are adjust for each wager amount to the correlating ratio.
In the markets you have to be aware of and account for certain levels of bias. If you’re in Las Vegas and you’re betting on the Dodgers, be aware that due to the proximity of the massive LA metro area to Vegas, that the Dodgers are often overbet by Dodgers fans who come to Vegas and take the boys in blue no matter what the line is. The sportsbooks don’t always change the lines fast enough to correct these numbers entirely (but with automated market makers this has changed significantly) and this is where the sharps like to pounce, it’s a reason they often wait until just before a game starts, until all the public money has come in, to lay massive wagers on an inflated line to get an edge. This is why you often see significant line movement before kickoff, right before a fight begins, and so on.
In my article last week, Dead Sox Come to Life, I discussed how the Boston Red Sox odds were at 35/1, or written in +/- style, +3500. As we see today in the above image, those odds have shifted to +2500, 25/1. The betting market has priced in the Red Sox 14 game win streak, now one win shy of the franchise record set by the 1946 club, and the odds of them winning the World Series have increased as more money has come in on Boston.
The Futures are a way to cut through the noise of the talking heads in the media and look at what the money is saying is going to happen, backed by some serious data analysis. The money says the most likely outcome is a Dodgers and Yankees World Series rematch. With the Dodgers having the edge in the potential matchup. But there’s a reason they play the games, the magic of sports is how often the unlikely actually occurs.
We’ll check in on where the odds have shifted after the trade deadline, and see who has done the most to best position their team for a run through October.
Streamers are suffering their worst subscriber churn, many are losing money, and they’re getting desperate enough to offer content for free.
Streaming has been a cash burn heavy game for over a decade. The idea that if you can simply make it to the end of the streaming wars and be one of the “survivors”, it means a bountiful return of never ending subscription fee and price hike cashflow, but is that actually going to be the end result?
Competition with the dopamine deity of social media apps, gaming, and the ubiquitous YouTube swallow up enormous swaths of Americans’ attention, which is a finite resource, and it could be the iceberg that sinks the age of stream.
The Apples, Amazons, Googles and to a lesser extent the Netflixes of the world have the capital to burn, a primary business not reliant on streaming income that provides that capital (aside from Netflix), and the luxury of playing the long game.
Apple uses Apple TV+ as a boutique offering. They dump billions into it so they can rub shoulders with so-called A listers (most of whom are far less relevant now than when they were actually featured in box office hits). Their shows and movies all have an overpolished and gentrified quality to them that comes off to me as dystopian. Yes, that is genuinely the feeling I get from them. They feel like the type of content shown in the latter stages of a fullscale technocratic takeover, and perhaps that’s exactly what they are.
Netflix doesn’t really produce shows or films, they produce “content.” They are diversifying their product, and I’m not talking about race swapping historical figures in a period piece, they’re buying up popular podcasts, offering gaming options, and dipping their toe, little by little, deeper into the live sports pool. They know the contest is for attention. But they’ve waited too long to gobble up live sports rights in a meaningful way, which is the most reliable way to get audiences to tune in and sit through highly profitable commercials. Their status as being the biggest because they were first won’t cover their warts forever. They must make the most of their current position before it’s too late, or their next modern remake will be the emperor has no clothes. The sequel to which will be a deep correction of their stock price.
Google has YouTube, and YouTube TV, and has positioned itself well with those services — offering things outside the competition’s mass production loops of churn slop. They’re attempting to create an all in one sports app with YouTube TV (insofar as that’s possible in today’s fragmented rights landscape): Local Networks, Cable Networks, NFL Sunday Ticket, ESPN Unlimited content integration coming, and add-on packages for niche content. They’ve also been dabbling in live sports broadcasts on YouTube, having an early season NFL game on the platform the last few years. I’d love to see the number of viewers the Super Bowl live and free on traditional YouTube would pull in.
NBC Universal (currently Comcast-owned) and Warner Brothers Discovery were not in such positions. Warner sold itself to Paramount this year for, debt included, $111 billion. NBC’s situation is its own flavor of frantic. Peacock lost $1.1 billion in 2024 and was still bleeding half a billion a quarter absorbing NBA and NFL rights, so Comcast did what a cornered giant does: it started cutting off limbs. First it spun the cable networks—USA, Syfy, Golf Channel, CNBC, MSNBC—into a separate company called Versant. Then, in June, Comcast announced it was spinning off the rest of NBCUniversal and Sky into its own publicly traded company, effectively stepping back from the media business to focus on broadband and wireless. If streaming is the golden goose of the future, why is Comcast calling it quits?
Paramount Plus has entered the fray with half-trillionaire Larry Ellison’s son David leading the recently merged Paramount Skydance. They’re in the process of getting regulatory approval for their acquisition of WBD which will see the apps likely merge and a goliath sports streamer emerge with rights to UFC, NFL, NHL, MLB, College Football, March Madness, and so on. They certainly have the cash to burn, and are currently very willing to do so.
Another thing to keep an eye on — Paramount paid $7.7B for 7 years of UFC content. The fight promotion’s parent company TKO has a market cap of $35B and that includes WWE. How long until a company has seen enough of these gargantuan sports rights contracts and simply begins buying up leagues when possible? No doubt the Saudi Public-Investment-Fund has its eyes on this angle as well — it already put $10 billion into the WBD deal and will be Paramount’s largest foreign shareholder when it closes.
Disney/ESPN can’t be forgotten in all this. There is talk of them offering a “free” tier of Disney+ in an attempt to compete for attention. They’ve lit more money on fire in the last decade than the federal K-12 budget. Their enormous sports library provides them a bulwark for now, but can Disney’s resorts keep printing cash fast enough to cover for their studio flops? Last quarter the parks threw off 71.9% of Disney’s entire operating income while the studio and streaming side limped along. The rides are carrying the company. Moana’s live-action remake just cratered — a $250 million movie staring down a $100 million-plus loss — and it’s not an outlier. It’s the latest name on a list that already includes Snow White, Dumbo, and The Little Mermaid. And yes, the streaming math does change the calculus on what a box-office bomb really is when the movies end up on the app in a few months where they can drive subscriptions.
Free streaming apps like Pluto TV, Tubi and Roku channel (who Fox just agreed to buy for $22 billion) recognize the new battlefield reality and opt to avoid the overhead: they replay classic television and movies and cheap-to-produce podcasts with ads generating all the revenue and avoid modern production costs and subscriber attrition.
The cliff we are approaching asks a simple question: will future earnings merit the acquisition costs of conglomerateting (yes, I just coined that term) and the exploding costs of live sports rights in a world with diminishing attention to give, and generationally receding live sports viewing habits?
What happens when the streaming investors realize they’ve been chasing a pot of gold that isn’t going to be at the end of rainbow?
Could we be heading for a hilarious era where we are down to four to five mega streaming networks: Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Paramount, and they all offer most of their content for free just to get as many eyeballs on their product as possible?
Every now and then I come up with the odd jingle that keeps rattling around my head, and once in a while I’ve even fleshed them out into full-length songs. Problem was, I’d have to track down a buddy of mine who plays guitar to actually put the finished product together. That’s no longer the case.
Suno is an AI that lets you upload your own lyrics and orchestrate the rest — the desired music, the style, the pacing, and even the specific stuff like where to drop a bridge, a breakdown, or a guitar solo, and come out with a fully produced song. My first experiment with it is a new one I wrote: a 2000’s-era country bar anthem in the spirit of Toby Keith or Big & Rich. It’s the story of a man who just can’t get enough of the good times.
Well I do my best talkin’ down at the honky tonk, I’ll sit there all night ’til I can hardly walk… That’s just the way I am, ya see, needa find some women that love me for me.
I love my job, and I love my life, Love my girlfriend, and I love my wife. Even when I got it all, I can’t help but stray— Cause I’m out here Honky Tonkin’ damn near every day.
Yeah I head right down, shufflin’ and a-walkin’, one thing on my mind, and that’s Honky Tonk Talkin’.
Honky Tonk Talkin’, that’s my style, Buy you a drink and stay a while. If you’re lonely, baby don’t keep walkin’— Come on over, let’s do some Honky Tonk Talkin’.
I sit at the bar, year after year, the only sweat I like is drippin’ from my beer. The band’s all tuned up, deliverin’ a hit, all I smell is sawdust and spit. My eyes scan the room, just a-creepin’ and stalkin’, lookin’ for a little gal who needs some Honky Tonk Talkin‘.
Yeah I head right down, shufflin’ and a-walkin’, one thing on my mind, and that’s Honky Tonk Talkin’.
Honky Tonk Talkin’, that’s my style, Buy you a drink and stay a while. If you’re lonely, baby don’t keep walkin’— Come on over, let’s do some Honky Tonk Talkin’.
She was wearin’ Daisy Dukes and some fine Tony Lamas, had to move in closer to this little fine mama. Now this little filly was all toned up and tan, the way she was shakin’, looked like she needed a man. She said, “Buy me a drink.” I said, “Honey, I just might.” She slid a little closer, and said, “Looks like we’re busy tonight.”
In walks Carla Jean and Betty Sue, the good old-fashioned Mrs. and the gal who’d never leave me blue. They ran into each other while I was out on the town, compared a few notes and done tracked me down. One thing on their mind, like a lion out stalkin’, they’re here to do a different kind of Honky Tonk Talkin’.
Honky Tonk Talkin’, that’s my style, Buy you a drink and stay a while. If you’re lonely, baby don’t keep walkin’— Come on over, let’s do some Honky Tonk Talkin’.
Honky Tonk Talkin’! Honky Tonk Talkin’, that’s my style,
Honky Tonk Talkin’! Buy you a drink and stay a while.
If you’re lonely, baby don’t keep walkin’— Come on over, let’s do some Honky Tonk Talkin’.
Spain cut down the defending champs with a suffocating performance in the World Cup final yesterday. Argentina was held quiet, not getting a shot on goal until the second half of extra time. The lack of a true striker on the Sky Blue and White squad forced Messi up front, where he was less of a factor, only having 15 touches across the 120 minutes. Messi is at his best when operating from the wing or just behind the striker, using his tactical brilliance to generate scoring opportunities, following up on rebounds, or threading a shot on goal from the top of the box.
As the games played out over the past five weeks, I thought often about how aspects of what I was seeing would never translate to a mainstream American sports audience. And there are two in particular.
Flopping: This can be given a yellow card after VAR review, but players will continue to hit the deck and scream bloody murder anytime they’re grazed by an opponent. The art of drawing the foul and selling the injury is a part of the game, but it’s not enjoyable to look at. If Joe McCarthy were alive he would investigate it, and rightfully so, it’s downright unAmerican. We don’t like when LeBron James and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander do it in basketball either.
Offsides: This is the most egregious issue when watching a game. A beautiful goal plays out, and the offsides flag goes up because a player’s shoelace was a millimeter beyond where his defender was, and the goal is disallowed. This happens often — it feels like at least once a game.
The good news is that, and you’re gonna think this sounds insane when I say it, Canada is doing something about it. Yes, Canada. The country that couldn’t even do basic forest management, leading to the Northeast getting engulfed in wildfire smoke to the point that the Cleveland Indians had to postpone their game against the Pirates — and had the World Cup final’s air quality in question in the days leading up to kickoff at MetLife Stadium.
But the Canadian Premier League — yes, that’s a real thing — is testing out a new “daylight” offsides rule. Right now, as I mentioned, the offensive player being even the slightest bit past his defender the moment his teammate sends a pass negates the play. The daylight rule would require the offensive player to be completely beyond the defensive player, with visible daylight between their bodies. The issue with the current model is that timing your run as an offensive player to be fully behind the defender is a near-impossible task, since players are moving up and down the field constantly. The daylight rule would open up offensive scoring, create more breakaways, and force defenses to be honest with their line positioning.
It would make the game far more enjoyable to watch for an American audience that has just shown it’s willing to tune into the world’s game — with record ratings for Fox and Telemundo during this tournament.
A highly subjective list of films I return to again and again. A few mild spoilers ahead.
15. Rear Window (1954)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly
“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.” — Stella
The first Hitchcock film I fell in love with is still my favorite. The apartment courtyard perspective from Jimmy Stewart’s rear window is brilliant. Grace Kelly is at the height of her perfection, and humor and tension is blended perfectly in a script that has enough of a jolt to offer a satisfying end, and closing with Jimmy in a worse situation than when the film started with two broken legs is Hitchcock’s playful irony personified.
“Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” — Cliff Booth
Full disclosure, after the first viewing, I really wasn’t a huge fan of it. It is now without question my favorite Tarantino film, and the most restrained of his work. Save for the Bruce Lee/Cliff Booth backlot fight scene. QT is determined to get 1969 Los Angeles and its era of filmmaking over with the audience, not himself. The 93 KHJ Boss Radio playing throughout as Cliff’s muscle car races around Tinseltown creates the perfect atmospheric hang out film. The Rolling Stones “Out of Time” is ominously perfect as we approach the inevitable demise of Sharon Tate, only to have Tarantino swerving us with a fairy tale ending, where his restraint pays off as he uses the finale to unleash a torrent of his signature stylized violence, creating the perfect unexpected ending to the film.
Questions about Roman Polanski’s involvement, the potential of this being a Hollywood sacrifice or ritual, in particular since she was pregnant, Polanski having released Rosemary’s Baby the year before… All of that we’ll discuss some other time.
But for now, this holds the distinction of being both a favorite all time film as well as a highly rewatchable mood movie that can be thrown on anytime.
13. Casino (1995)
Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci
“I fucked up, Frankie. I fucked up good this time. I should have never started with this fucking broad.” — Nicky Santoro
Sharon Stone’s psychotic-bitch performance is so spot on you feel sorry for any of the men she has dated. There is no way aspects of that aren’t genuinely her. She should have won the Oscar for it, but flashing her pubic hair crossing and uncrossing her legs in Basic Instinct a few years prior ruffled some serious feathers at that Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
It features the same music-infused, documentary-style filmmaking that made Goodfellas great, but the edge is darker, the fall is longer, and the 70s Vegas nostalgia hits like a degenerate gambler on 17. Pesci’s performance is his best in my opinion, even when the violence is look-away from the screen for a moment level intense.
12. The Game (1997)
Directed by David Fincher. Starring Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger
“Discovering the object of the game is the object of the game.” — Daniel Schorr
You’re into The Game from nearly the beginning — a lunch with brother Conrad Van Orton (Sean Penn), a cryptic invitation, and it just builds and builds from there. Douglas plays the escalation perfectly. Underneath the thriller mechanics it’s a genuinely Gnostic-coded film: illusory reality, elite depravity, the false death and rebirth. Consumer Recreation Services, CRS, the perpetrators of The Game, give a not so subtle nod to the three-letter agencies that control our own reality and experience. Using psy-ops and trauma to move us across the board as they see fit.
It works out two things about modern life that most movies won’t touch — the false reality we’re handed as normal, and the hidden hands behind the curtain, pulling strings sometimes just for the sport of it. The Game is an initiation. It’s a natural companion piece to Eyes Wide Shut in that sense. As well as a counterpart to The Truman Show, all released in the back half of the 90’s. There’s also an iconic representation of San Francisco, one I grew up a couple hours away from that I feel no longer really exists in the same capacity — wealth, status, one of the most geographically blessed and architecturally stunning cities on earth, a world apart from what it’s become. The bones remain, but the soul is gone. The Game is a window into a not-so-distant past, and the revelation of a not-so-hidden ruling class.
11. 1917 (2019)
Directed by Sam Mendes. Starring George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong
“It’s easier not to go back at all.” — Lance Corporal Schofield
A film that should have won best picture, but was too masculine, too white, and too authentic to do so in the modern era.
The moment that makes this film an all-time favorite for me is Schofield finally breaking over the top and sprinting horizontally through the charging line, trying to reach the commanding officer before the second wave of the doomed attack goes off. It’s one of the most moving, most earned scenes I’ve ever watched, and it never diminishes — every viewing hits the same way. Roger Deakins shot nearly the entire film on a single 40mm lens — one unchanging eye, so the camera could slide from a wide trench shot into a close-up without ever breaking the illusion of one continuous take. The large-format digital camera he used is what gives the trenches and the breach their scale and depth, putting you in the mud alongside Schofield the whole way.
It’s beautiful, it moves fast, and like a great roller coaster, you’ll be ready to get in line to take the ride again once it’s finished.
10. In A Lonely Place (1950)
Directed by Nicholas Ray. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame
“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” — Dixon Steele
My grandfather passed away when I was two years old. In some ways, from the things I have heard about him, Humphrey Bogart reminds me of him. A cigar smoking, daily drinking, wry humored man with a sharp intellect driving things under the surface. That connection is one of the reasons I love Bogie as an actor.
It may not be Bogart’s best performance, but the script doesn’t require that. There’s much talk of a “male-loneliness epidemic”, Dixon Steele was living his own self imposed isolation long ago, and doing it with style. Gloria Grahame is stunning, and the story of her real life struggles with building a lasting marriage peek through into her character here. It’s an easy watch, and a great window into a rightfully romanticized era.
9. Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
Directed by Don Siegel. Starring Clint Eastwood, Patrick McGoohan
“No one has ever escaped from Alcatraz. And no one ever will!” — Warden
Alcatraz and the San Francisco Bay filtered through seventies American cinema grit, and a cagey Clint Eastwood leading the way — yes, I’m most definitely in.
I love the story, on screen and off. I’m a believer they did actually make it to Brazil, as History Channel’s special “Alcatraz: Search for the Truth” alluded to. It aired October 12, 2015, and that’s the special where the Widner family — the Anglin brothers’ nephews — brought forward the 1975 Brazil photo and the Christmas cards. The film version of the real-life prison escape delivers on all fronts.
No need to overthink this one, it’s a fantastic watch or rewatch.
8. The Revenant (2015)
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy
“I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I’d done it already.” — Hugh Glass
The Revenant is home to the greatest Native American attack sequence on film, the greatest grizzly bear attack scene on film, and some of the most breathtaking nature cinematography in cinema history. The film is paced perfectly with an incredible score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, and an “I will die for this mother fuggin’ Oscar” performance from Leonardo. One of my all time favorite in-theater experiences. I think I’ve just talked myself into watching it again this week.
7. Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
Directed by Mike Figgis. Starring Nicolas Cage, Elisabeth Shue
“You can never, never ask me to stop drinking.” — Ben Sanderson
What happens if you stare into the abyss, and decide to jump in? This film is not for everyone, it’s dark, it’s depressing, but it’s undeniably real. Nic Cage took home his lone Oscar for his portrayal of Ben Sanderson, a Hollywood screenwriting cast off on a suicidal alcoholic mission to drink himself to death in Sin City. Ben makes the company of working girl Sera (Shue) and they embark on a romance of despair. The music, the cinematography, the performances, the cringe of a drunk hitting rock bottom and smiling through it— it will have you rethinking all the times you had one too many and made a fool of yourself in front of friends and family, and thanking God for abstinence and moderation.
6. Chinatown (1974)
Directed by Roman Polanski. Starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” — Walsh
They call it the best screenplay of all time, and it may very well be that, but stopping there is selling the film far too short. A beautiful noir shot in full color, that by the way looks stunning on 4K (the images almost look 3D they are so rich in detail), the story of a hard-nose private dick who starts pulling a thread on a case and ends up with a whole ball of yarn in his lap he lacks the power to do anything with. Faye Dunaway’s dark secret reveal is an all-timer cinema surprise, and the final scene puts a perfect final touch on the message of the film. A Polanski masterpiece released just five years after the loss of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate, as we mentioned in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
5. Taxi Driver (1976)
Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster
“Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” — Travis Bickle
1970’s New York City, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Bernard Herrmann’s score, and a vicious script from Paul Schrader. Driving the streets of New York at night with the jazz score carrying you along is mesmerizing, yet the next chaotic incident is always out there, usually waiting around the next turn. One of the first films to hit me in my formative years with a, “this is my favorite movie of all time, this is it.” feeling.
A broken man in a broken world trying to do right in a broken way.
4. Barry Lyndon (1975)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson
“It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.” — Closing narration
I saw this movie for the first time only in the past year. Stanley Kubrick’s misunderstood masterpiece. It stuck with me for weeks after the first viewing, the utter beauty of the film, the palette, the grand set design and period perfect costumes all served as accents on the message that struck me flat— do we live our lives, or merely survive them? Hopping from one opportunity to the next, as fate twists its way around us over the years, as we become different versions of ourselves, as actors in a play we didn’t write, as a means of self-preservation, and the dire consequences that living such a life can bring about when ambition reigns without conscience.
Perhaps the most gorgeous film ever shot, each frame presenting itself as a living painting of the era. There is a driving score that Kubrick re-orchestrated himself that marches us along like a funeral procession, beat by beat, ever closer to our inescapable fate.
Watch this immediately if you haven’t already, and dispel any expectations you have of what a Kubrick film is before you do so.
3. The Godfather Part II (1974)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall
“I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies.” — Michael Corleone
I’m in the camp who prefer the second act of The Godfather to the first, but that is in no way intended as a slight at the original. Part II builds upon the foundation of the family. We split time between Robert De Niro as a newly arrived Don Corleone in the early 20th century, and Michael Corleone in a post Don world, evolving into what he went away to World War 2 to avoid becoming; his father. This is my Star Wars, a trilogy of dynastic power and character devolution, chronicling an authentic ascent into power, and all its dark corridors that ensnare you along the way.
This is family.
2. No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” — Ellis
This is as close as it gets for me to a perfect film. On the surface we have a three man chase, scene by scene, one following another, with a ticking clock to see if Llewellyn Moss can get away with the money before Anton Chigurh can track him down, and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell bringing up the rear, assessing the damage in the wake of the storm. It’s perfectly cast, perfectly shot, perfectly paced, and perfectly ended.
It holds true to the Cormac McCarthy novel for much of the film, and uses much of the same dialogue. The script for the film is one that I find highly quotable, even though I’ve been told, “it’s not that kind of movie.” But how can you not love lines like “supposedly ky-yotes won’t eat a Mexican.” and “I know something better. I know where it’s going to be, it will be brought to me and placed at my feet.” and “It’s the tide. It’s the dismal tide. It’s not the one thing.”
The film is not what many expect, and that sours a lot of first viewings. Its pacing, style and abrupt violence can be off-putting for some, but are part of the recipe that makes it a film that has stayed with me for nearly twenty years.
Every answer you seek about the film’s plot was most likely presented in a frame that went unnoticed upon first, second or even a tenth viewing. From Chigurh walking outside and checking his boots, a green light before a car crash, or the loose screws next to the vent, the Coens put together an absolute masterpiece with subtle clues embedded the whole way through.
1. The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Directed by Mel Gibson. Starring Jim Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern
“See, Mother, I make all things new.” — JesusChrist
The most important film ever made. The art of cinema has never put the greatest story ever told on film as well as Mel Gibson did so with The Passion of the Christ.
Against the industry itself that sought to suppress it, this film was made with craft, care and respect for its source material— the gospels themselves, in such a way that led to a finished product that is truly transcendent.
This is an annual Good Friday viewing for me. A film that I think of, without exaggeration, daily.
Gibson’s decisions were flawless; casting, script, costume, imagery, pacing. When to show things, how long to show them, etc. The list of correct choices he made in succession to put this together is hard to quantify. The clearest and cleanest explanation I have for it is that he was being driven by a force far greater than himself. I’m sure he would agree.
Yes, the Honda Odyssey gag is an original meme. I’ll be posting more of these here on occasion — consider them the Sunday funnies or political cartoons of this publication.
The Odyssey, the highly polarizing new film from director Christopher Nolan, opened yesterday. The media and establishment cinema sites have heaped praise on it, and reports have come out that Rotten Tomatoes is pruning user reviews to keep the score high. Meanwhile, I’ve heard plenty of dissenting opinions on social media taking aim at the dialogue, acting, pacing, and overall production. I’ve read there are a few big set pieces that genuinely wow, but the film itself is a genuine disappointment to many longtime Nolan fans — and then there’s a shocking wrinkle where IMAX viewers are getting a significantly better view of the film than everyone in a regular theater.
Here’s the short version of why: Nolan shot the entire film on IMAX cameras in the format’s full 1.43:1 aspect ratio — the tallest, most complete frame there is. But only a small handful of true IMAX 70mm theaters in the world can actually project that full frame. Everyone else is watching a cropped movie. Standard IMAX screens show it at 1.90:1. Regular digital and 35mm showings crop it down further still, to a conventional widescreen ratio. So depending on where you buy your ticket, you are not just getting a smaller screen — you are literally seeing less of the image Nolan shot. Same movie, meaningfully different film, and most people who buy a ticket this weekend have no idea which version they’re getting. And judging by the frame comparisons, the standard version of the film looks significantly worse. When has an artist of the craftsmanship of Christopher Nolan ever volunteered up their work to be circumcised by the aspect ratio of the vast majority of screens that will be displaying it? Stanley Kubrick famously sent theaters a written directive for Barry Lyndon in 1975, spelling out the exact aspect ratio projectionists were required to use and leaving no room for improvisation — which makes it all the more strange that a director as controlling as Nolan is letting The Odyssey go out into the world as two visibly different versions of itself.
One of the more interesting analyses I’ve come across is from Jonathan Pageau, who was highly impressed with the film and considers it, in his words, a Trojan Horse. Early in the film there’s a scene where the blind servant Eumaeus is training Telemachus in swordplay — the boy keeps getting beaten because his defense is too fast, so Eumaeus tells him to slow down, open his chest, invite the attack, and use his opponent’s own momentum against him. Pageau reads that as the key to the whole picture: Nolan does the same move on the audience, absorbing the blow of wokeness and inclusivity right up front so he can turn it back around on you by the end. His thesis, as I understand it: Nolan is aware of how repressive the current filmmaking environment is, has adopted that veneer to get the thing made and released, and has smuggled inside it a film that at its core is about the return of the father, the son inheriting his authority through an act of filiation, not revolution (as we have seen throughout the past decade in storytelling) and the restoration of an order that had been failed by the very people meant to guard it. The casting of Elliot Page, formerly Ellen Page, is intentional, as she represents Sinon (not from the Odyssey, from the Aeneid), the character who stays with the Trojan Horse to convince the Trojans that it is a gift. In this version, Sinon doesn’t know that this is a trick — he thinks it is a legitimate offering to Athena. Sinon is a shepherd, sent to war to fight as a “replacement man.” The casting being intentional by Nolan on two fronts: the Trojan Horse being delivered by the unaware, and because the character in the story is a stand-in for the real man who was to be tasked with this duty.
Several great filmmakers have worked inside repressive environments and still gotten their real, human, and even subtextual meanings across. Tarkovsky wrestled with faith, despair, and spirituality inside the Soviet Union. Alfred Hitchcock built an entire career navigating around the Hays Code. Jafar Panahi has kept making films in Iran after being formally banned from filmmaking by the regime — one of them reportedly smuggled out of the country on a flash drive hidden inside a cake.
But a hidden message does not a great film make. A film is the cumulative result of thousands and thousands of interconnected decisions — palette, acting, script, atmosphere, mood, visual effects, and on and on. The mystique of movies is that all of those variables blend together, and the end result lives or dies on the final product that enters our eyes and ears. If The Odyssey really is an attempt to subvert the subversion, does that make up for the areas where the film is lacking in other categories? Each person must decide that for themselves.
Nevertheless — this still has not moved me to want to view the film in theaters, or spend any money in support of it, though I am open to the possibility of Pageau’s interpretation. I believe the film will continue to be used as a bellwether in the culture war playing out across the West. Whether it’s ultimately remembered as the high-water mark of Hollywood’s self-destruction, or as a brilliant Trojan Horse rammed into the heart of modern deconstructionist art, is a fate yet to be known.
Newly declassified intelligence documents were the centerpiece of President Trump’s address to the nation last night — documents detailing Chinese interference in our elections, widespread vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure, and declassification of materials exposing that the CIA had this information beginning in 2018 and withheld it from the President during his first term.
“The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election, and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them…. The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him.” —President Donald Trump (via Newsweek)
Meddling in a foreign nation’s elections (as the CIA has done for several decades) is either an attempted or successful coup, depending on the result, both of which are tantamount to an act of war.
Journalists accepting payment from a foreign adversary to slander a sitting president is giving comfort and aid to an enemy. An act of treason.
The President also spoke about FBI investigations into voter fraud, directing Director Kash Patel to reopen the bureau’s 2020 case into a Michigan voter registration drive — canvassers in the Muskegon area allegedly signed registration forms in other people’s names and submitted fraudulent registrations for voters who don’t exist, and were paid in gift cards per the number of applications. He also cited a DHS review identifying more than 275,000 noncitizens registered to vote across just four states.
For the many of us who were aware of the 2020 heist as it took place, and lived through the most destructive administration in American history as a consequence of it, this has been a long time coming.
The question is not whether the allegations in these declassified documents truly happened, it is the same question that we had in the weeks preceding January 20, 2021. Will President Trump cross the proverbial Rubicon, and do whatever is necessary in his power as Commander-in-Chief to restore the republic?
That is the singular lens by which I view this administration and have done so since the second term began. While my reaction to the day-to-day news and operations of the second Trump Administration vary widely, ultimately what it will be defined by is whether President Trump was willing to assert his power to expose the depths of corruption in our intelligence agencies, in our media, and within our elected officials — how they have all been influenced and compromised by foreign nations, and then take steps to remedy that for the future of the United States.
That, in partnership with returning us to a nation of citizens, would be an extraordinary course correction for America. They are, however, not the only issues plaguing the nation.
For that to happen, this would need to be the first step in a series of bold and decisive actions which are not inhibited by negative coverage from the very press who was alleged to have been compromised. And not subject to the wavering public opinion polls that may come out of it. This must be done without reservation or purpose of evasion, head on.
As long as foreign influence by nations such as China, Russia, and Iran is at the forefront, there will continue to be an elephant in the room regarding the foreign nation that demonstrably has, without question, the most influence over our elected officials, their policies, and our media.
As far as the CIA is concerned, it has been functioning as an apparatus outside of executive oversight to the detriment of American sovereignty, and the stability of the world, for several decades. The essential aspects of intelligence gathering can be done by other salvageable three letter agencies and through military intelligence.
There is but one solution for the Company, and it was reportedly stated by President John F. Kennedy in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, that he would splinter the CIA “into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
Is this the fabled “Dark Winter” of which Joe Biden hath warned us?
The annual clock changes are not something I look forward to either time, and have long been in opposition to. It feels like such a government mandated absurdity. We don’t merely want to control you, we want to control time itself. It reads like a line from a Dr. Strangelove scene that didn’t make the final cut. I refer to it as the 23 hour day in spring and the 25 hour day in fall. Typically, an extra hour added into a weekend would be something I’d support, but Fall Back leads to the dark winter officially kicking off. When suddenly the sunset begins creeping back towards, and even prior to, 5 PM. And as difficult as that is, it is far better than what the House of Representatives had cooked up to remedy it.
The Sunshine Protection Act would lock the entire country into permanent daylight saving time — the summer clock, all year long. “Permanent daylight savings time was repealed within a year because it didn’t work,” warned Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon as the bill moved through committee. —CBS News
This was, surprisingly, a bit surprising to me. Congress had a 50/50 shot to get this right, with a simple Google they could have found which setting to lock us into year round, and yet they still chose the wrong one. A broken clock may be right twice a day, but a broken congress never is.
If the U.S. were to adopt year round Daylight Savings time, northern states (and I don’t mean that in a Civil War sense) would face sunrises as late as 9:30 AM — places like Bismarck, ND would be hardest hit. I can assure you that a Bismarck winter is hard enough to endure without the sun coming up an hour and a half after school begins. Clearly there are also issues of safety; work commutes, school buses, roads getting plowed and salted, it would all be thrown off by the extended morning darkness. Another crucial factor is circadian rhythms being thrown off. Morning light is the master reset button for the body clock. When sunlight hits the eyes shortly after waking, it signals the brain to shut off melatonin production and start the day’s hormonal cycle — cortisol up in the morning, melatonin back at night, each roughly 24 hours apart. That first dose of daylight is how the body knows when to wake, and it sets the schedule for everything downstream. Get that light late, and the whole rhythm drifts with it.
Congress just voted 308-117 to put half the country on shift fatigue. And yes, if you wake up at 4 AM every day already, go to work when it’s dark out, and are dying to let us know, we salute your service. But it’s not viable for our entire society to operate on such a model.
Permanent daylight savings time has been tried before, in the US in 1974. Nixon signed it as an energy-saving response to the oil crisis, and clocks sprang forward that January with no plans of ever falling back. Support sat at 79 percent when it started and collapsed to 42 percent after one winter of children waiting for school buses in the dark, some carrying flashlights, and after lawmakers cited the deaths of eight Florida schoolchildren in the weeks following the change. The promised energy savings turned out to be barely measurable. By October, the experiment was dead and Ford signed the repeal. It was also tried more recently in Russia, in 2011, which, due to the country’s broad latitudinal range, endured even larger negative effects than in the US. Winter sunrises in the northern regions were delayed until after 10 AM, morning road accidents went up, and the stress and health complaints grew loud enough that Putin signed the reversal in 2014. They have since adopted Standard Time all year long.
Standard is the standard. Do we need sunlight until 10 PM in June? As spring overtakes winter, day by day the sunset pushes back enough that the winter blues are still shaken off without jolting us into the much longer days in mid-March.
It looks like this won’t become law anyway, because Sen. Tom Cotton is putting a stop to it. I’m not quite sure how this bill affects Israel, though, as that is typically the only reason I see Cotton taking any decisive action in Congress these days. Here’s the thing: the medical and sleep-science consensus is overwhelmingly on the side of permanent standard time, and Congress knows this — sleep researchers and health groups have been on record about it for years. Yet the bill that sailed through the House is the one every expert says is the wrong setting. It’s as if Congress chose the wrong time format to lock us into intentionally, knowing it would fail and returning us to the twice a year change as though that is the only alternative, when Standard Time is right there, shining down upon us like the morning sun, just waiting for us to look up and realize it.
I watched the first three innings of the All-Star Game last night and felt nothing. No Ohtani, Skenes not starting for the National League, Skubal not starting for the American League. It felt more like a best-stats-so-far-this-year and most-fan-votes game than an All-star game.
Sure, if I was in Philadelphia and found a last-minute ticket for around a hundred bucks, I’d go check it out. A chance to be at an All-Star Game is historic, and getting to see all these players, many of whom will be future Hall of Famers, together would be surreal. But as a spectator watching on TV, what exactly am I looking at?
I’m watching a game that has no bearing on the division races or playoff picture. My main concern is that the players I like don’t get injured, and I felt for Rays fans who had to watch Junior Caminero get hit in the hand by a 97-mph sinker. After the game, Cardinals pitcher Riley O’Brien apologized, saying, “I definitely wasn’t trying to do that. It got away from me.” Caminero took it in stride, saying, “We’re here to have fun. We’re here to enjoy the night.” I understand that, but as a fan, it wasn’t easy to do as a television viewer.
The All-Star Game has long had a problem with the relevance issue, and they errantly tried to correct it for years by awarding home-field advantage in the Fall Classic to the winner. It did give the game stakes that made it more interesting, but it was in no way fair to the teams that would meet in the World Series at the end of the year.
Every single out and every single at-bat in a baseball game has meaning. It all becomes a part of your permanent record, your career statistics, and how that measures up against others across time. No matter how mundane the play, you know that you’re watching a small piece of history.
I think of, weirdly enough, a blockchain. And no, don’t worry, I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist who’s about to go on a diatribe about how it’s the future and everything is Bitcoin. I’m definitely not that guy.
But blockchain technology is layers and layers of code placed together that become something unique, part of this massive catalogue that comprises how the technology works. Each play in baseball is, in essence, a line of code in the history of America’s pastime.
What was on last night has no bearing on that, and it’s one of the reasons it couldn’t hold my interest for more than a few innings. I prefer to treat the All-Star break like the players who didn’t get selected, as a brief four-day reprieve from a long and grueling season to dabble in my other interests.
The French National Team, Les Bleus, has been eliminated from the World Cup by Spain after a 2-0 finish at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.
My two thoughts going into this tournament a month ago were:
Not France
Not England.
And while England is still alive in the tournament and will face Leo Messi and Argentina tomorrow in the other semifinal in Atlanta, the French were my public enemy number one. The team that looked to reach its third consecutive World Cup final today feels nothing like the French squad from 2006 that I cheered on in that tournament, and against the flopping Italians in that absurd final. Zidane, Ribéry and Henry played the game with elegance, grit and authenticity. I don’t say that lightly. I’m not easily moved to support the French.
While this French side lacks any semblance of the appeal the team from two decades ago may have held for me, they were perhaps the most high-powered offense this World Cup had to offer and a solid favorite to win the competition, growing steadily as such with each passing round.
To quote a man who himself has not been having the best week, Conor McGregor, “Precision beats power, and timing beats speed.” That is exactly how Spain dominated this game. In a match that was 50/50 in terms of possession, it felt tilted in favor of the Spanish. They struck with lethal precision not only in the game’s most critical moments, but through all the small battles upon which those tipping points are built.
France’s advances were turned away by a highly aggressive keeper, Unai Simón, who wasn’t afraid to run out of the box and cut off a charging Mbappe on multiple occasions. The last fifteen minutes of the game saw the action vacillate between Spain extinguishing France’s desperate attempts to get on the board and a brilliant game of keep away to kill time, masterfully executed by the Iberians. Mbappe being unable to get his final two shots on target contributed to the French misery. Spain will almost certainly be the favorite heading into Sunday’s final, whether it be against either England or Argentina.
And should the English manage to get through the White and Sky Blue tomorrow, they may be reminded that Spain was the original empire upon which the sun never set.
