Now entering the summer months. Maybe a little bit of the summer doldrums — I can’t say that July’s releases make up an exceptional lineup. It is a very comfortable one with a handful of gems buried way down in there. So let’s do the hidden treasure first. We’ll get back to Harry Dean Stanton, I promise. Before that, though, I need to urge you to make time for Ninón Sevilla: Queen of the Mexican Cabaret. So I’ve only seen one of these, Victims of Sin, but it’s so good and I’ll take any excuse to recommend it. There’s a third act scene where Ninón Sevilla bursts into a room with iconic style and more people should see it, plus the musical numbers are stunning. So I’m gonna want to see the three of these I haven’t seen. Amazing introduction to cine de rumberas and to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in general; there are noir overtones and melodrama and they’re just so much fun. ...

I recently watched Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and respected it very much. Inevitably, I wound up comparing it to the other auteur school shooting movie based on an actual shooting, Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, which in my eyes is the best thing Villeneuve has ever done. The two movies are on par in terms of craft; my gut reaction is that Polytechnique is a wiser movie. So I wanted to think about why I reacted that way. ...

So here we are in sunny Minneapolis/St. Paul. I’m writing up some notes as we go, and will post the whole thing on our return to Seattle. Right now — Wednesday morning — we’re sitting in the Lost Fox coffee shop in Lowertown, St. Paul. This would very likely be our neighborhood coffee shop if we wound up living in St. Paul for the first year. There are power strips at each table and it’s roomy, plus the lattes are good. ...

To celebrate my retirement (which is a retrofitted justification; I’d have done this anyhow), S. and I woke up at 5 AM Friday, left the house at 5:30, and drove down to Portland for the Criterion Mobile Closet. We didn’t get back home until 10 PM. This… is our story. Seattle to Portland chews up about 80-90% of our ID.4’s battery, depending on weather. Usually we pause for a 30 minute charge somewhere north of Portland, so we have more flexibility coming home. This time we knew we had to get there early in order to secure a spot in line, so we just pushed through, arriving with around 60 miles of range left. Plenty. ...

Now that I’ve slept for a week or so, it’s about time I wrote a post about my SIFF experience. (Link goes to the stable film program page for 2026, not the top level page which is subject to change.) I made a mistake by attending a midnight showing the first Friday of the festival, which left me pretty wrung out for the rest of the week. I feel better now, though. ...

I won’t bury the lede: I’m retiring! After literally 30+ years working as a system administrator, manager, director, and general thinking-oriented person, I am hanging up my last employee badge and riding off into the sunset. I told my team last week, and May 28th will be my very last day. It’s a big step. Yes, I’m excited. Yes, I’m also nervous. S. and I were the right combination of lucky and talented to be able to retire comfortably at a relatively early age; after a lot of discussions with professionals over the last six months or so we decided it was better to take the leap and maximize our personal time in the decades remaining. Pokémon has been a good place to work, but my anarchistic self has never actually been all that comfortable as a manager despite the fact that I’m very good at it. ...

Decent month with a great themed collection as the centerpiece. Any time you can put one of the biggest stars in the world in your banner image has to feel like a win for the Channel and there’s George Clooney being all home spun front and center. Do you ever contemplate the fact that Clooney is a nepo baby, or is that just me? So let’s start with Odysseys, since that’s the collection we’re talking about. Brilliant theme, everything from Sullivan’s Travels to After Hours to, yes, O Brother, Where Art Thou? There is not a bad choice in the bunch, and the concept is focused. I think this one is simply deilghtful. ...

Our old friends Gretchen and Brad came up to Seattle to visit for the weekend, and we found time to try the new Bully Pulpit/Jason Morningstar game, Zhenya’s Wonder Tales. It’s been forever since we gamed together; they were pillars of my gaming experience back during my first run through the Bay Area. Champions, Feng Shui, Shadowrun — the good old trad gaming days. It was awfully nice to sit down and tell stories with them again. ...

About time for another Criterion Channel lineup. I’ll admit it, it’s been kind of a middling few months on the Channel, usually with at least one really exciting collection. I’m not sure May even has that one standout. Obviously the long-awaited Boston Crime collection is the answer here; until that day comes, it’s hard to complain too much. Still a cinephile’s delight. OK, let’s run it down. The first collection is ‘80s Remakes (and Their Originals) which is at the least a clever idea. Everything from The Thing and The Thing from Another World to Breathless and Breathless. I can’t say I’d go out of my way for most of these remakes, though — Carpenter being the clear exception. This feels more interesting as an exploration of how remakes can go wrong than anything else. ...

S. and I spent a long weekend up in Vancouver the other weekend to attend VIFF’s Mexico Noir series. Click through and read Sylvia Moreno Garcia’s essay on Mexico’s film noir during their golden age of cinema; if you’re lazy, though, the quick summary is that Mexico had its own film noir tradition in an era when Mexico was the largest producer of Spanish language movies in the world. Argentina and Spain were busy being fascist regimes, which always puts a pall on creativity. These movies are mostly unseen and unavailable today, so the chance to inject eight of them directly into my veins was too good to miss. ...