SCRAPS!

For five years now, there hasn’t been a film that’s loomed over my head quite like Pieces of a Woman . Please don’t read that statement as endorsement or condemnation. What it means to me is something more sinister, more a reflection of failure on my behalf to achieve the most basic of utilities. Again, don’t look too deep into the film, because that’s not where the answer is. You won’t find the puzzle piece that makes everything to follow make sense. All you have to know for now is that Pieces of a Woman is single-handedly responsible for ending my career as a film critic. Let me back up for a minute. This isn’t a story of being blacklisted by anybody. Everything that happened was by my own hand in the privacy of my own house. However, it’s still painful to think of early 2021 and see Pieces of a Woman continually face me down during awards season, one that I felt shouldn’t have existed at all, and let me know that everyone else could assemble a couple hundred words stating whether ...

At the time of publication, I notice that I’ve fallen into an old habit that sank my previous public diary. My unwillingness to sit down and just write a few paragraphs every week has failed to suffice, and as a result, this is my first proper correspondence since September. While it’s true that I’ve written one post in October about Saturday Night Live , it’s a far cry from the previous months, which had a plethora of topics and kept the namesake feeling relevant. And so I make the familiar excuse that there’s no way to encapsulate an entire month in this essay, nor do I plan to try. The short of it is that Halloween ended up being one of the better seasons this year, and I think it’s because everyone got to let loose even as the world has been crumbling in its own way. The president has continued to deflate morale in the nation, and all we can do is crack jokes that I don’t think are funny and pass laws that will make *some* difference, but I also worry is just counterproductive when...