"they leave for the sake of leaving, and without knowing why, they always say, 'we must go.'"

I'll say it again: it may be an 18-minute movie shown in a theme park, but this is the defining cinematic experience of my life. 200 degrees of a mesmerizing, hypnotic dream world. every time I get to see it again feels like a gift.

I've seen a few people over the years infer that some of the film feels a little corny…

"My goal, tonight, is to feed our imaginations; to awaken the mind's ear, through art, to a wise and enriching life."

I felt like surely I should at least log this once before the end of the year—though of course, I've watched it several dozen times in the last few months alone.

Long story short: I made a movie! Filmed over summer 2022, I spent nearly 2 years working with 90 hours of footage in post-production to eventually assemble this…

wow. it's unreal how stitched-together this feels. sauceless as hell. it wants to be Winter Soldier so bad, but the thing that made Winter Soldier great was the interiority it offered for Steve Rogers, finally letting us into his personal life even right from the opening scene. it's baffling that after The Falcon and The Winter Soldier established such a rich world of Sam's family relationships and home in Louisiana, this movie decided to just ignore all of it; he's…

my god, what a sloggy stinker! I didn’t think it was possible to exemplify the phrase “lost in the sauce” so precisely, and I can’t think of any other finale that so neglected and overlooked everything that was ever good about the preceding series in the first place. a couple impressive sequences and stunts, but overall there’s *nothing* here that hasn’t been done with better stakes (and for the love of god, with more fun) in other entries.

many have talked…

I’m seeing a lot of enjoyably quippy Letterboxd reviews saying that this is a funny movie about priests gossiping, and that isn’t untrue—but it also neglects to mention that it’s a very earnest and profoundly soul-stirring picture about the tension of faith, the desperate search for certainty, and the true purpose of the church in the world. the ending touched me dearly and I think it’s brilliant. this is the kind of well-staged ”men in rooms” drama that feels like…