Spectre Collie
type: channel
description: The Journal of Poorly-Explained Phenomena
date: 2026-03-25T03:01:11Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: One Thing I Really Like About Project Hail Mary
items: Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Get the Cool Old Brown Shoeshine
items: The Wretched, or, Good Salt Circles Make Good Neighbors
items: Get Movies About Rich People Or Die Trying
items: Saltburn, or, I Am Stretched On Your Grave
items: One Thing I Like About Ready or Not 2
items: Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: I Have Had It With These Monkey-Fighting Snakes in This Monday to Friday Country
items: Heebie dBs, or, The SFXorcist (One Thing I Like About undertone)
items: One Thing I Guess I Like About The Bride!
items: Let It Go (One Thing I Didn’t Like About Hoppers)
items: A Universal Picture
items: Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Chillin’ With Mario

One Thing I Really Like About Project Hail Mary
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-24T22:16:06Z
subject: Movies
subject: One Thing I Like
description: Project Hail Mary has almost all of the stuff I love about Spielberg sci-fi with almost none of the stuff I hate. (Mildest spoilers for stuff that's in the trailers)
encoded: There’s one scene in Jurassic Park that I hate. It’s the one where Grant and Sadler first see the dinosaurs free-roaming through a field, and he’s so awestruck that he fumbles with his glasses, and then he reaches around and physically turns her head to take a look at them. Even back in the 90s, when I was much less cynical and more impressionable, it felt like they had put all of this effort into making dinosaurs that seemed as real as they could possibly make them, and then undercut the whole thing by having humans behave in a way that was cringingly fake. I think it’s a huge part of why I’ve never quite been able to really love that movie as much as everyone else seems to. And it’s perpetually frustrating, because Steven Spielberg is indisputably the master of fun, accessible, action and sci-fi movies, and an absolute genius at executing on an action sequence. But so many of his best movies are undermined with these moments that just feel saccharine, maudlin, or just full of forced awe and wonder. So the one thing that impressed me the most about Project Hail Mary was that it delivered on those heart-caught-in-your-throat moments of Spielberg’s best sci-fi — I’m not too proud to admit that it had me on the verge of sobbing at a couple of parts — but without explicitly telling you, this is awesome. You should be in awe of this. Of course, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have established their own style by this point, which is always threatening to undermine everything. With them, it’s “flippant and quirky,” and especially early on, it feels like it’s always just on the edge of going too far. Ryan Gosling’s character1 sometimes seems like they were trying to create the male version of a manic pixie dream girl, with his cardigans and his novelty science teacher shirts. As he was digging through his belongings, I was dreading the moment he’d pull out a ukelele. I kept thinking “you’re a grown-ass adult. Either put your glasses on your face or push them on top of you…

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Get the Cool Old Brown Shoeshine
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-24T20:01:43Z
subject: Music
subject: Tuesday Tune Two-fer
description: Two tunes to almost kind of make a travelogue of the week's highlights
encoded: Last week we went to see the House of Kong installation in Los Angeles (which has ended by now), a collaboration between Gorillaz and Meow Wolf that was an interactive celebration/history of the band with a promotion for their new album. It was pretty neat, although as someone who’s a mid-tier fan of Gorillaz at most, I think it would have had a bigger impact on fans of the band than fans of location-based entertainment. There were a few guys in our group who seemed to recognize everything and were really into it; for me, they had already played the only three songs I know within the first 10 minutes. One of those songs is “19-2000”, and I wish that the superior Soulchild remix version had been the one to get the animated video.1 If it sounds like I’m underselling it, I don’t mean to. It was a pretty ingenious way to not only satisfy fans, but pull newcomers into the elaborate, years-long art project they’ve built up around the music. In particular: at exactly the point where it feels like an overblown hagiography of the band, overstating the depth of its character- and world-building, that’s when the immersive part takes over. It didn’t turn me into a super-fan, but I did think it was a perfectly-balanced combination of promotion/hype-building and interesting experience on its own merits. (I especially liked my husband’s main take-away, though: “I knew living in London was expensive, but how can you be in Blur and make Tank Girl and still need to share an apartment?”) Yesterday, I saw Project Hail Mary, which has surprisingly effective music throughout, and uses The Beatles’ “Two of Us” really well. It’s been stuck in my head ever since, because it’s I’m-not-researching-it-but-I’m-99.9%-sure-is by Paul McCartney, who’s cranked out so many unforgettable melodies over his lifetime that even his lesser-known songs2 would be career-defining for other songwriters. But in my brain it’s always quantum-entangled3 with a song I like even better, which is George Harrison’s “…

The Wretched, or, Good Salt Circles Make Good Neighbors
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-24T08:29:29Z
subject: Backlog Zero
subject: Movies
subject: 1
description: The Wretched is a pretty fun indie horror movie that's most notable for its point of view (Spoilers after a warning)
encoded: The Wretched is the kind of movie you’d stumble onto when channel surfing late at night, watch for a few minutes, and then get engrossed enough to watch until the end. It’s an unrated independent movie with a modest budget1 that feels like it punches above its weight and ends up being pretty fun. It’s about a teenage boy whose parents are going through a divorce, so he travels to stay with his dad in a small resort town on the water. He deals with teen stuff like having to get a job, trying to make friends with the local kids, having a crush on a co-worker, struggling with the divorce and his dad’s new girlfriend, and also he suspects something evil is going on with the family next door. I didn’t stumble onto it; I kept hearing the title casually mentioned along with other horror movies, so I finally decided to go in blind without hearing anything else about it.2 The piece of trivia that always gets associated with it is that it beat Avatar‘s record of most weeks at first in the box office… because it was released in 2020, when nobody was releasing movies to theaters. It might have also gotten a slight bump recently because the lead actress is the voice of the main character in Hoppers. To me, it felt indie but not low budget. The effects and make-up work is pretty good, there are some surprisingly gruesome scares starting with the opening scene, and it’s darker and a little more intense than I would’ve expected. It did feel rough, though, cutting between storylines in a way that was disorienting; I found myself often asking “wait, who’s that person? Whose house are we in now? Is this a different scene?” And it’s entirely a me problem, but a few of the actors look just similar enough that you can get confused if you’re not paying close attention. (Maybe if you’re not trying to do something else while watching it, you won’t fall into the “old man thinks all dark-haired women are the same character” trap). I liked it overall, but I didn’t think I had anything that int…

Get Movies About Rich People Or Die Trying
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-23T00:42:34Z
subject: Movies
description: Responding to different takes on the movies I watched yesterday, and thoughts on the whole idea of "getting it." Spoilers for Saltburn and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
encoded: I didn’t intend to make a double feature yesterday of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and Saltburn, but they have a few things in common. They’re both about normal people1 trying to exist in a world of clueless over-privileged people. And they both have interpretations that I’d assumed were patently obvious, but apparently weren’t. Saltburn After I complained that the plot and ideas in Saltburn were so clearly spelled out that it went beyond frustrating into insulting, I went online looking for an image for the post. And I saw multiple essays with takes on the movie that were so different from mine that it felt as if we’d been watching entirely different movies. The only thing that reassured me that we were in fact talking about the same movie was that they all mentioned drinking spoogey bath water. Seeing so many different interpretations, even ones that I completely disagree with, gave me a little bit more respect for Saltburn having more ambiguity than I’d given it credit for. And it made me think more about what it means to “get” a movie, specifically the distinction between getting the plot and coming to a conclusion about what it “means.” It didn’t save the movie for me. I still don’t like the ending, since it presented a series of quick-fire flashbacks to suggest some intricate Kaiser Soze web of deceit that was being spun the whole time and you didn’t even realize! Even though I’d already suspected as much in the first twenty minutes, and had it already confirmed by the halfway point. It’s possible that I read mention of The Talented Mr Ripley2 without remembering it, and that planted the idea in my head. But by the time Oliver was fingering a young woman he’d just been told had severe self-esteem issues, I thought it was all but explicit. Later, when he’s sexually assaulting the bitchy cousin, it was clear that the masks were off, and the movie had already given away the last of its secrets. Maybe there was supposed to be an ambiguity as to when exactly Oliver’…

Saltburn, or, I Am Stretched On Your Grave
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-22T17:30:00Z
subject: Backlog Zero
subject: Movies
description: I might have enjoyed the 90 minute long, modern take on British classics that's buried somewhere inside Saltburn
encoded: Since I liked Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” so much, I was pretty geared up to finally watch Saltburn. Somehow I’ve managed to stay almost completely unspoiled over the last few years, apart from the scene referenced in my title, and that it had Jacob Elordi and Rosamund Pike. Oh, and also that it was either a bold and absolutely shocking take on English period dramas, or it was an inept and overrated piece of garbage that should haunt its writer and director for the rest of her career. One of those two. As it turns out, I don’t think either of those are true. It’s not for me, but even as someone completely unfamiliar with the classics that inspired it (I’ve heard Brideshead Revisited mentioned multiple times, along with another title that would be a spoiler even to mention), I could see and appreciate what it was doing. It’s a darkly comic and horny take on stories about the British aristocracy, and people of lower classes longing for that life of wealth and privilege even after seeing all of its gross excesses. In fact, that’s probably the biggest reason I didn’t like the movie: I could see what it was doing after about an hour in, but then I saw that there was still well over an hour to go. And even once the movie had explicitly established what it was doing, it just kept going on piling on one more ending after another, as if it were Return of the King or something. Even after all that, I was eager to give it a begrudging pass, but then it added yet another ending that explicitly spelled out everything that I’d thought had been abundantly clear already. It’s one thing to overstay your welcome; it’s worse when you spend the entire time saying, “Get it? Did you see what we did? No, seriously, did you get it?” It’s too bad, because there were plenty of elements that I thought were clever and perfectly under-played. Anything with Rosamund Pike’s character, to start with. She’s got the more obvious comedic moments, like when she casually confides that she was…

One Thing I Like About Ready or Not 2
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-22T01:48:45Z
subject: Movies
subject: One Thing I Like
description: Ready or Not absolutely did not need a sequel, which is something the filmmakers seemed to take as a challenge
encoded: To be clear: it’s not just that Ready or Not didn’t need a sequel; the thing that I liked most about it was that it seemed so defiantly anti-sequel. It was this weird, completely self-contained one-off, so adamantly its own thing that it felt like a relief from Hollywood’s worst tendencies to try and make everything a franchise. It had just enough lore and world-building to support this one clever story, and it gave that story an explosive finale that seemed to definitively state The End. Like a crew that spent months building an elaborate miniature just for the sake of blowing it up at the end as spectacularly as possible. Plus, like Abigail, it had a perfect ending line. The only points in favor of continuing it: the title, which practically begs for a sequel called Here I Come, and the fact that the first movie cast someone completely perfect for the lead role. Before the movie, I watched an interview with Samara Weaving on the Dead Meat podcast. There were two highlights: one was her saying that she knew she was cut out for weird genre movies when she discovered that she could “scream like a goat.” The other was describing the meticulous process the make-up, effects, and editing crew took in order to make Ready or Not 2: Here I Come pick up exactly from the final moment of the first movie. To the point that I couldn’t see exactly where the transition into new footage happened, and I would’ve otherwise just assumed that it was something they filmed as part of the original, just in case it ever went to sequel. It made me go into this movie more receptive than I would’ve been otherwise. If this had been just an obligatory sequel, there are much, much easier ways they could’ve picked up the story. They could’ve simply jumped forward in time a few hours or a day, and it would’ve worked just as well. Deliberately picking up right after the first movie feels not like a necessity but a stunt. And even a bit self-consciously a stunt. We see our protagonist Grace being ca…

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: I Have Had It With These Monkey-Fighting Snakes in This Monday to Friday Country
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-17T18:05:00Z
subject: Music
subject: Tuesday Tune Two-fer
description: Two instrumental tunes in honor of St Patrick's Day
encoded: It grieves me to say it, but I’ve probably got as much of an authentic tie to Ireland as a Shamrock Shake. My mother spent some time looking into our genealogy, and you only have to go back a generation or two to land in Ireland, but I think I’m too much of a Scottish/Irish/English/German mutt, myself. That didn’t stop me from going heavy into my Irish phase in college, though. (Never underestimate the need of a southern American teen to feel like he comes from somewhere not embarrassing). I became obsessed with the Pogues and spent a lot of time driving around Athens screaming over traditional songs or songs meant to sound traditional. I didn’t and still don’t know much about Irish history, but that didn’t stop me from hating Oliver Cromwell and cursing him out at least once a day. I always liked that the Pogues would devote at least one track of each album just to showing off how many outstanding musicians were in the band; it wasn’t all just about Shane MacGowan’s lyrics. One of my favorites was “Wild Cats of Kilkenny” from Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. For a nerdy college kid trying to get in touch with his roots, a version of the Doctor Who theme that turned into an Irish reel felt like it was speaking directly to me. My love of the Pogues eventually turned me onto the harder stuff: actual traditional Irish music. One highlight was a live album from The Chieftains, titled An Irish Evening: Live at the Grand Opera House, Belfast. There’s a track on there called “The Mason’s Apron” that goes into an extended flute solo by Matt Molloy, and it was, and still is, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard. Even seeing it in video, it’s kind of hard to believe it’s one person. After the applause, Paddy Moloney sums it up perfectly with “Not bad. Not bad at all. There were two flutes in there somewhere.” Happy St Patrick’s Day! Might be a perfect day to get my at-least-partly-Irish ass over to a Jewish deli and get some corned beef and cabbage.

Heebie dBs, or, The SFXorcist (One Thing I Like About undertone)
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-16T05:47:57Z
subject: Movies
subject: One Thing I Like
description: The creepy podcast movie undertone has the great sound design you'd expect, but also pairs it with just the right old-school visuals. (Spoilers after a warning)
encoded: undertone1 is about Evy, co-host of a podcast about spooky phenomena. She’s the hard-line skeptic, and her co-host Justin (who we never see) is the true believer. He’s based in London, so to account for the time zone difference, Evy has to record the podcast alone in the house, in the dark, very late at night. Also she’s the sole caregiver for her dying mother, who was a devout Catholic, and the house is full of Catholic imagery along with Evy’s ever-increasing stress and guilt. The topic for this episode is an email that Justin received, with a cryptic message from an anonymous address, and 10 audio files attached. They decide to listen to them for the podcast, Justin listening and looking for hidden messages in the audio, Evy ready to debunk every one of his theories. It’s really not hyperbole to recommend seeing this in a theater with a good sound system, since as you’d expect from the premise, the movie achieves a lot of its creeps via sound design. Just the transition when Evy puts on or takes off her noise-cancelling headphones is effective. There are lots of “did you just hear that?!” moments, and undertone is surprisingly sparing in its use of sounds that seem to move out of the screen and into the theater with you, so they never feel rote or overdone.2 If you want to see it but don’t want to go to a theater, I highly recommend watching it with headphones. (And I’d still recommend a theater if you’re at all interested, because a lot of the fun of this one was feeling the need to periodically look around the theater to see where that noise was coming from, or whether that weird shape in my peripheral vision was a ghost or just someone getting up to go to the bathroom). But even with that caveat, the thing that surprised me the most about undertone was that it didn’t rely solely on the sound design. It feels like a deliberately old-school horror movie in all the best ways. Trading all of the gore and violence for good old-fashioned creepy stuff like dark hallw…

One Thing I Guess I Like About The Bride!
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-12T20:54:49Z
subject: Movies
subject: One Thing I Like
description: The Bride! is ultimately more memorable than good, but it does have an interesting take on why this movie exists at all
encoded: Fairly early on in The Bride! our title character and Frankenstein both go to Chicago’s well-known “pre-war Berlin” neighborhood for a night of dancing. Which makes sense, as it’s a safe space — or is it?! — for people that society might consider outcasts or, maybe even… monsters? You can tell it’s the queer neighborhood, because someone has meticulously written graffiti on the wall that reads “2 + 2 = 5?” There are no rules here! Question everything! That’s not the one thing I like about this movie. I just have to mention it as the clearest sign of how it works, and how it’s just not something to be taken that seriously. Later on, there’s a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which is corny as hell but is also just almost clever enough for me to give it a pass. But over the end credits, “Monster Mash” plays. This is a movie that takes as much as it gives. I was completely won over by the teaser trailers, with shots of a black void with Jessie Buckley’s head in a bell jar, speaking to the camera, intercut with flashes of dance numbers and Bonnie and Clyde references and huge title text. This was clearly a movie that was taking a big swing, and I was going to see it no matter what. Even though early impressions weren’t great. Alonso Duralde described it as “if Moulin Rouge! were a proto-feminist horror movie,” which seemed both promising and intimidating. That movie kept trying to throw me off, by being so loud and corny and over-the-top, but it eventually won me over completely. The Bride! is similar in that there’s a lot of movie there, and it demands a lot of patience from the audience, taking all of the excess in stride. But it also doesn’t have anywhere near as much earnest sincerity. Not that it’s insincere; I have no trouble believing that the movie believes in everything it’s saying (whatever that may be, exactly), and that all the performers are fully committing to the bit. Just that it never loses the feeling of a bunch of well-known actors sinking…

Let It Go (One Thing I Didn’t Like About Hoppers)
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-11T23:00:00Z
subject: Movies
subject: One Thing I Like
description: Hoppers is like a louder, blunter Pom Poko, which isn't so bad unless you think too hard about its messages
encoded: My anti-Pixar theme week continues, with a scathing take-down of… well, hang on. I’m still not interested in jumping into backlashes or hot takes, or complaining about something instead of finding an interesting idea at the core of it. The whole idea of my trying to stick to the “One Thing I Like” theme isn’t at all a reminder to find something positive to say, even when I think the subject is garbage.1 I’d rather not waste time on something I don’t like, in favor of celebrating the stuff I do like. It’s only worth mentioning at all if I think there’s something interesting to be said about why exactly I don’t like it. Anyway, yesterday I saw Hoppers. And while it’s definitely not for me, I can totally see why other people are enjoying it, and I don’t want to be completely dismissive of it. But over the course of the day, I caught myself turning my main criticism of it into a grudge, and piling more and more points against it as time went on. My main criticism is that Pom Poko is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I can’t help but see all the ways that Hoppers tries to do the same thing and keeps coming up short. “Not as good as one of my favorite movies of all time” is an impossibly high bar to set, admittedly, but I will point out that Hoppers itself tries to lampshade comparisons to other movies by having a character stress that it’s nothing like Avatar. The comparison was so hard for me to shake that it undermined the one thing I liked most about Hoppers. The movie very cleverly gives a visual indication when your viewpoint is swapping between the animal world and the human world, by having the eyes change. When they have big, white, cartoony eyes, with pupils and everything, you’re in the world of the animals, able to talk to them and understand what they’re saying. When they have little black circles for eyes, they’re animals, and humans can only hear them making animal noises. But as I kept thinking throughout Hoppers, “Pom Poko did this, too, but more su…

A Universal Picture
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-10T21:29:20Z
subject: Movies
subject: Nonessential Thoughts
description: Re-thinking my earlier defenses of Pixar, since you can't actually be universal without first examining what you consider normal
encoded: Pixar’s new movie Hoppers is out, and not only does it seem to be a hit, it’s getting pretty much unanimous praise from critics and audiences both. So it was a brilliant PR move for Pete Docter to turn the attention back to Elio. And to do so by saying the worst thing he possibly could’ve said. Believe it or not, I’m not particularly interested in jumping onto the dog pile. I already got my zinger in: “‘We’re Making a Movie, Not Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Therapy,’ says the writer and director of Inside Out.” [pause for approval from the internet]. If I’m being honest, I really didn’t like Elio, and I’m highly skeptical that making it more explicit that the main character was a gay kid would’ve done anything to change that. Personally, I’m more interested in the whole topic of diversity and representation in popular entertainment. The difference between just acknowledging that it’s a noble goal and something that we should all strive to achieve, and really understanding why it’s important and committing to doing it right. Because Docter’s comments put me in an awkward position. For years, I’ve been trying to defend Pixar against the criticism that the studio makes nothing but movies about the experiences and anxieties of straight, white men*. Except that they’re sold as “family movies” because the straight, white men have been represented by toys, cars, ants, monsters, fish, rats, adolescent girls, and, occasionally, straight, white men. So when critics would respond to something like Toy Story 4 with “oh, not this bullshit again,” I was always insistent that the business of the studio should be kept separate from its creative output. I believed — and still do, to some degree — that they were doing exactly the right thing with the movies themselves, it was just the studio structure that was undermining that. When I look at the “golden age” of Pixar, I think the one thing that makes the movies feel timeless and universal is that they didn’t have the overridin…

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Chillin’ With Mario
type: item
creator: Chuck
date: 2026-03-10T18:46:01Z
subject: Music
subject: Tuesday Tune Two-fer
description: Two tunes calling out the man of the day for Mar 10
encoded: It’s March 10th, which means people all over the internet are celebrating brand awareness by promoting their favorite Mario. If you were really invested, though, you wouldn’t limit it to just one day. The Beastie Boys understood this by using every chance they could get to promote their favorite Mario, Mario Caldato Jr. In “Intergalactic,” he likes to keep it clean. In “So What’cha Want?” either he can’t front on that, or the song is dedicated to him and you can’t front on that, I was never clear which. In “Three MCs and One DJ,” Norton is chillin’ with him. I’m sure there are plenty more; those are just the ones that I’ve heard so many times that my brain calls them up even more easily than my phone number. And in “The Grasshopper Unit” they’re asking him to rewind the tape and punch him in. Hello Nasty is my favorite of the Beastie Boys’ records, and I can still remember listening to it for the first time1. It was around half way through this song when I thought, “this is one of my favorite albums of all time.” It still is. 1 After getting stuck playing “Body Movin'” on repeat about a thousand times