2026-04-30 12:41:06
The new series Widow’s Bay came to Apple TV this week, along with a flurry of press. I was surprised to see anything about a new series leak into my sphere of internet awareness, since that never happens anymore. The only others I can think of are Pluribus (haven’t seen it yet, plan to) and Severance (watched a few episodes and had to take a break when it got a little too heavy). Every time I open the Apple TV app to watch a movie, the landing page looks like a mockup of a fake streaming service made for a movie or something, full of made-up shows and movies starring recognizable celebrities, but I’ve never actually heard of any of them.
I figured the only reason Widow’s Bay would work its way into my awareness would be that it was either really weird, or really good. As it turns out, both are true.
The series stars Matthew Rhys as the beleaguered mayor of a small island town in New England, Kate O’Flynn as his perpetually put-upon assistant, and Stephen Root as a local resident familiar with the island’s cursed history. In the first episode, Mayor Tom is desperately trying to keep the residents on their best behavior to impress a travel writer from the New York Times and bring in much-needed tourist money, all while an ominous fog has come in and descended on the town.
Because the series was created by Katie Dippold, a writer for Parks and Recreation, I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to that series. It’s understandable, since they both focus on workers in a small-town government with strong and frequently clashing personalities. But the comparison doesn’t really get across the tone of the series or what makes it work. There’s really no hint of situation comedy here.
It reminds me more of Northern Exposure than anything else. A bunch of quirky, insular locals in a small town, clashing with “outsiders” who just want everybody to behave normally for once. That series played its humor so straight that even the Emmys got confused and classified it as a drama. For what it’s worth, I already think Widow’s Bay is a lot funnier and more sophisticated, relying less on quirkiness for its own sake, and having characters that actually talk and act like real people.
Maybe an even more apt comparison would be “funnier Jaws,” but told from the mayor’s viewpoint instead of the sheriff’s?
And it is genuinely funny, but calling it “comedy horror” could give the wrong impression, too. The closest comparison I could think of there would be something like Barbarian or even Weapons, where the humor doesn’t undermine the scares and vice versa, but it all kind of blurs together because nobody quite knows how to make sense of any of it.
The first episode was a strong start, but the second is what really impressed me. It has Mayor Tom accepting a challenge from the locals to stay overnight in the town’s hotel, to prove that the years of rumors about it are just superstition, and that it is safe to host tourists. It does such a good job of capturing that “alone in the house at night” feeling, where you know that all of the stuff you’re supposed to be afraid of isn’t real, of course, but also what if it’s not?
It also has a great gag where Tom is looking through the hotel’s oddly sinister board game collection, which has games titled Daddy’s Home, Teeth, and a card game just called Run. And on the in-room television, nothing is playing on any channel, apart from this “Welcome to Widow’s Bay” video.
There’s an impressive creative team involved with the show, full of people familiar with blurring the lines between horror and comedy. It’s a reminder that Apple productions haven’t suffered from a lack of talent or money; it’s more likely that there’s just more stuff than most people can be expected to keep on top of. Widow’s Bay already has me hooked, though, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how weird and scary it can get.
2026-04-29 14:36:44
The Long Goodbye is a prime candidate for working through my movie backlog, since I’ve had it on the must-see list forever. It’s long been praised as a classic, by a lot of people I respect. It essentially created a genre of one: the contemporary neo-noir. And it’s a meandering Raymond Chandler mystery starring the coolest private detective.
But it’s also a Robert Altman movie, and that’s given me pause. I think it’s sacrilege for a film school dropout to admit it, but I’ve never had any patience for Altman’s movies.
I believe I understand the appeal: the ones I’m familiar with are mash-ups of Hollywood high concept and cinema verite. Taking something that could otherwise seem inescapably artificial, but presenting it in a style that suggests reality. Languid pacing, long shots that don’t play out as you’d expect, either starting off slow, or petering out without a conclusion, or going off on tangents, or ending without having accomplished much of anything.
And of course, all of the ad-libbed dialogue and crosstalk. If I had to choose one thing that turns me off Altman movies, it’s that.
So I can appreciate how The Long Goodbye uses the style to maximum effect. Classic noir tended to be so hyper-stylized and melodramatic that there was rarely any sense of realism to it. It suggested gritty, hard-edged, true crime drama, but always felt like fantasy. This gives everything a contemporary update: not just the cars, clothes, and language, but the overall tone as well. And it does end up bringing the best of both worlds, the old-school storytelling of a twisting mystery with a naturalistic style that keeps it grounded.
And there’s a lot to like about the movie. The setting of Marlowe’s apartment, for one thing. It’s at the top of a hill overlooking the city, connected to an apartment full of pot-smoking, frequently-nude women, all of it accessible only via an elevator. Marlowe’s distinctive car makes him seem perpetually out of place, known by seemingly everyone in Los Angeles but also oddly unstuck in time. The script efficiently sets up its key points with a concision that I envy, leaving plenty of room for the scenes to drive home character and setting instead of plot. There’s a mix of tones that feels dated but rarely jarring, with bizarre bits of wackiness combined with tension or violence that make everything seem surreal.
Plus, it’s got Sterling Hayden and his beard working together in a memorable performance as an alcoholic larger-than-life writer. The character had to be at least an indirect inspiration for John Mahoney’s in Barton Fink.
In fact, the whole movie feels like a template for the Coen Brothers’ run of Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and The Big Lebowski. I deliberately try to learn as little as I can about the actual making of the Coens’ movies, so as not to do anything to damage my own oversized impression of them as pure brilliance released from their minds already fully formed and perfect. As far as I know, the similarities are nothing more than their also being fans of Raymond Chandler. But it certainly feels like The Long Goodbye proved that it was possible and effective to make modern noir that blends classic and contemporary.
But I’ve got to say that I didn’t really enjoy it. I might have, if I’d seen it years ago, without having seen the movies that came after it. But in 2026, it kept feeling dated, and slow, and often just plain corny.
And the aspect that kind of surprised me: I felt that Altman’s style wasn’t just “not to my taste,” but actively worked against the movie. Marlowe’s constant muttering to himself initially seemed important to establish his character as a sardonic smart-ass, but with all the repetition, it started to feel not like “show, don’t tell,” but “show and tell and tell again.”
For instance: the opening 10 or 15 minutes are all about his interacting with his cat, his neighbors, and the people around town. I thought it was slow but really strong at establishing everything key to his character. Not just to introduce him as a chain-smoking private detective stereotype, but to show what he values and how important it is to him to help people. But all that is undercut just a short time later, when some cops are hassling him, and he gives them a complete account of everything that we just spent 10 to 15 minutes watching.
And as the movie goes on, all of the cross-talk and ad-libbing has the opposite effect of seeming naturalistic. It just draws attention to how much the actors are all performing. It’s a bit like the effect of using shaky cam in a modern movie: yes, that is how an amateur would record everything if the events were really happening, but because it’s so different from the default language and style of cinema, it draws more attention to itself.
It feels like a nitpick, but another thing that was distracting was seeing an entire scene between Mr and Mrs Wade while Marlowe was waiting by himself on the beach. By that point, the movie had established that everything we were seeing was from Marlowe’s perspective, so I spent the entire scene wondering whether he was overhearing the conversation, or if we had suddenly switched to a different viewpoint. If the style hadn’t been working so hard to present itself as semi-realistic, I wouldn’t have questioned it, and just rolled with the idea that we were third-person omniscient the whole time.
All of that, plus the slow pacing, plus the constant repetition of the theme song in different styles throughout, just left me with the sense that the movie had been hard at work undermining itself. The dramatic moments didn’t land with me because they were presented so matter-of-factly. The attempts to ground it, or give it a veneer of naturalism (if not realism), backfired because I was constantly reminded of how artificial it all was. By the end, it felt not like I’d been part of a story, but like I’d just watched a bunch of loosely-related events happen.
Still, I’m very glad I watched it. This isn’t the usual case of disappointment after seeing a movie that’s long had the reputation of being a classic. Here, I think I can see exactly what the appeal of the movie is for other people, and even more rare, I have a pretty good idea of why it didn’t work for me. It’s probably wildly inaccurate to say that several of my favorite movies couldn’t have existed without The Long Goodbye doing it first, but I still can respect that The Long Goodbye did it first.
2026-04-29 01:00:00
Where my 80s kids at?!
The Karate Kid was trying hard to bring the High-T Bloodsports Underdog Story energy of Rocky III to a teen audience, right down to getting Bill Conti to do the score, and trying to get an anthem that hit as hard as “Eye of the Tiger.”
But even though it was co-written by Conti and the great Allee Willis, “You’re The Best” by Joe “Bean” Esposito could never live up.
Lowered expectations is built into the song. “You’re the best… around” is the kind of back-handed compliment that always tricks me into thinking people are being nice, when in fact they’re ruthlessly trashing me. I guess it rhymes and scans better than “I suppose you’ll do.” Or “We couldn’t find anybody else.”
Tina Turner didn’t mess with any such qualifications. She says you’re simply “The Best.” (Even if the video makes it look like she’s hyping up a horse, Catherine the Great style). Don’t accept any less.
You’re better than all the rest.
Better than anyone.
Anyone I’ve ever met ah dammit that ruins my entire premise.
2026-04-28 08:42:41
I first heard about The Primevals via Letterboxd, so all I knew about it was that it was about tracking a Yeti in the Himalayas, it contained a lot of stop-motion animation combined with live actors, and it was released in 2023.
So watching it, I figured I knew exactly what it was: a movie from the 2020s made in homage of the kinds of adventure movies that came out in the early 1980s, which were themselves homages to movies from decades earlier. And while The Primevals was a little too slow and kind of inert to really wow me, I had a huge amount of respect for just how fully they committed to the bit.
It was only after I finished that I discovered the real story behind it: it was released in 2023, but had been a passion project for animator David W Allen as far back as the 1960s. He’d gone through several attempts to get it funded and completed over the decades, and the original teams included legendary animators like Phil Tippett. Filming for the live action segments took place in 1994. Allen passed away in 1999, but his friends and collaborators took the work and released in posthumously, over 20 years later.
And it’s pretty remarkable that all of that legacy is visible in the end product, but it also is completely believable as a 21st-century homage. The image quality is good enough, and the compositing between live actors and animated characters seamless enough, that I just assumed it must be a modern movie painstakingly recreating the look of an older one.
In retrospect, I should’ve been much more suspicious. The lead character is played by Juliet Mills, who I knew as the witch Tabitha from the underrated soap opera Passions. It should’ve occurred to me that she looked exactly same age as she did during that series. And all of the other performers have that late 90s/early 2000s look that is difficult to describe exactly, as if they’re all familiar as guest stars from an episode of Murder, She Wrote or Star Trek The Next Generation.
The end result is that the movie seems completely unstuck in time. The stop motion calls back to Ray Harryhausen if not older, the effects work and sets evoke the fantasy adventures of the early 1980s, and the actors and overall script seem to be working in the golden age of the SciFi channel in the late 90s or early 2000s.
It’s also a little racist, in a way that feels more dated and thoughtless than genuinely malicious. Our few Nepalese characters are quickly either killed or relegated to the background, and the main characters are all white. Including a safari leader with the impeccable name of Rondo Montana! Also, a brief scene in a street that’s supposed to be Kolkata1 has the only presumably-Indian characters be murderous thugs and thieves.
I have to say, though, that it was a pleasant change to see a story where all the conflict was external. Everybody in our team of protagonists are all nice and respectful to each other, without much attempt to stir up drama. I didn’t realize how much I missed watching a story about a bunch of characters without having to reach the inevitable point where they start turning on each other.
The story is little more than a loose framework designed to showcase a bunch of different stop-motion sequences. It’s got an awful lot of the live actors either walking from one place to another, or staring at something off-screen in disbelief. For an adventure story about tracking a live Yeti, there’s not a whole lot of action.
But if you’re a fan of classic stop motion, this has a ton of it, all excellently nostalgic. At the time I’m writing this, it’s playing for free with ads on Tubi. Fans of old-school stop-motion probably are way ahead of me on this one, and have already seen it. But if you like the style of Ray Harryhausen movies and haven’t yet seen The Primevals, it feels like a kind of undiscovered treasure.
2026-04-24 05:02:32
So much of our interaction with computers in 2026 is having to come to terms with everything getting more intrusive, more annoying, more time-wasting, and generally breaking the contract between companies and their customers. As loath as I am to use a Cory Doctorow-coined buzzword, I have to admit that he nailed it with “enshittification.”
But yesterday the internet made me throw a “why can’t we have nice things?!” tantrum — I finally deleted Instagram from my phone, after a couple of weeks of feeling like it was giving me psychic damage every time I opened the app. There’s been such a long, slow degradation of that platform that it took me a while to put my finger on exactly why it was bothering me so much. Eventually I realized that they’ve finally abandoned any pretense of being anything other than an advertising platform that occasionally and randomly shows you a photo from someone you might know.
I actually counted, for science, and saw that the stories1 were actually 8:1 ads vs entries from accounts I was following. And as for the real posts, the ratio was 6:1 ads or “suggested” posts vs followed accounts.
I’m still amazed that a company that’s put as many billions of dollars into social engineering as Facebook has could be so lackadaisical about blatantly destroying the user experience. Like they got impatient waiting for us frogs to boil and just took a flame thrower to the whole thing.
So I could use a win, and I’m trying to procrastinate instead of being productive anyway, so why not look for something to be optimistic about? And I found it when I sat down at my computer and realized I’d left it on all night, with several apps and browser tabs all open in the middle of doing stuff.
Actually, I realized I’ve been leaving it on all the time for the past week, if not longer. And yet everything was still running fine, with nothing slowing it all down or generating any zombie processes (as far as I could tell).
Which probably seems completely unremarkable for most people, but I can’t stress enough how alien this is to me. Even this many years into the iOS era, I still close apps when I’m done with them. No matter how many times I hear people insist that I don’t need to, I worked in app development just long enough that I don’t trust leaving anything suspended. And I’ve always shut my computer down when I’m done with it for the day, even if I frequently forget to turn off the monitor.
My brain is now so corrupted from decades of programming, in fact, that I get low-level anxiety when I’m in a conversation and someone suddenly changes the topic without finishing the last one. It’s like pushing items onto my mental stack, and if we don’t pop everything off, my mind will end up leaking.
My desktop computer, for the record, is an M3 MacBook Pro that’s now 3 years old, so it’s not as if it’s struggling. But there, too, I’m often having to balance my frustration with many of Apple’s business decisions against straight-up marveling at how good the computers are. I almost never use it as an actual laptop, but I’ve never once had the feeling that I’m sacrificing utility or performance for (theoretical) portability. It’s still way overpowered for anything I try to throw at it.
Back when Apple introduced the M1 MacBooks, I made the switch as soon as I could. It was genuinely amazing on its own merits, but even more impressive in comparison to the last several iterations of the Intel-powered versions. I’d just started to take it for granted that laptops simply run uncomfortably hot, and there was no way around it. Of course you don’t actually try to put it in your lap, what a silly, fanciful idea. And don’t touch the area above the function keys unless you want to get burned, but why would you want to do that, anyway?
Apple’s marketing is so hyperbolic in general that I didn’t realize until later that they’d been underselling the switch to their own chips. It genuinely feels like a huge company saying, “it doesn’t have to be like this, you know,” and “computers can actually be good.”
Again, this is all stuff that might seem inconsequential for anyone who’s not as terribly, terribly old as I am. But I’m typing this on a super-responsive bluetooth keyboard that I rarely have to charge, using a wireless ergonomic mouse that requires charging even less often. And I’m sitting next to my handheld PC (the Steam Deck) docked and connected to the monitor, which doesn’t run Windows but can still run 99.99% of the games I’m interested in playing, using the same keyboard and mouse.2 Every bit of this would seem weird if not outright impossible to me from 2016.
So occasionally it’s a good thing to realize that the boiling-frog syndrome happens both ways. Obviously, there’s a ton of stuff that’s deliberately weighing us down, making everything more annoying, more wasteful, more expensive, or just plain more unpleasant. But we’re also surrounded by things that are getting better without our really taking notice of it.
2026-04-22 01:00:00
I like Jack White, but sometimes the man has been his own worst enemy. For instance, he “Fell In Love With a Girl,” and thought it was significant enough to warrant repeating multiple times and hiring Michel Gondry to depict it in Lego.
But dude. Maybe we would’ve heard you the first time if you weren’t so loud. Turn down the volume on your guitar, ask your sisterwife to lay off the drums a bit, calm down, use your words, maybe stop affecting that weird pseudo-accent. At a certain point, our inability to understand stops being an us problem and starts being a you problem.
But also: I get it. Sometimes when you’re crushing hard, you just want to make absolutely certain that everybody knows about it.
Like say you’re just a simple guy from Liverpool who’s infatuated with a girl from the continent. And you try to say the only words you know that she’ll understand, so you write the song “Michelle” with your band. But she’s still not getting it for some reason. The only answer: repeat yourself, but in French. (Psst Paul, I don’t want to tell you your business, but it’s “je t’aime.”)