SCRAPS!

For the last time in 2025, I thought that I would hop on here and give a quick update on where life has been. In general, December has been a chaotic month where it’s been difficult to sit down and do this type of writing justice. Part of it is scheduling conflicts, but it’s also that I’ve dedicated a lot of free time to backlogging my annual entries for my Snapshot series. What I’ve found is that I’m generally overzealous and may write more than I should in those essays, but I need to get them out. There must be some way to convey my feelings on the year that will be there for research purposes further down the line. Will they be my best writing? I hope so, but I’m nervous about a handful of entries. However, they capture where I was at in 2025, and that’s what I feel is more important.  To start breaking down what’s been going down since I last updated, I will say that this has been both a hectic month but also a fun one. I got to see Ben Platt at his residency at The Ahmanson Th...

Over the past few nights, my attention has turned to one news story. Among the endless array of controversies and disasters, something which has caused me to question the direction America is going in regards a university essay that went viral for receiving a 0%.  From afar, the situation sounds like the familiar half-hearted attempt to get credit. In my lifetime, there have been papers from classes I’ve been in that reek of last-minute attempts to cheat the system. I have written some of those papers, and, when I have, willingly accepted the ‘F’ despite initial animosity towards the teacher and the belief that the whole system was out of order. There is nothing like being a frustrating student, though that’s also something you tend to feel when you’re in middle school and not at the university level. By that point, you’re there for personal reasons taking classes that appeal to some larger interests in your life. I get some are probably forced to take courses they don’t want for t...

Once again, the updates feel few and far between in this column. While I recognize that I came out of the gate swinging initially, the past few months have been met with more of mixed results. I apologize and cannot guarantee that this will change anytime soon. However, I do think there’s still some part of me that’s self-conscious about publishing any significant writing when there isn’t much to say. For whatever reason, I’ve felt that way about November and, whatever fodder I had lined up for different essays on here, I lumped into How I Live Now over on The Memory Tourist. It’s the unfortunate irony of feeling like it’s the final encapsulation of ideas that I haven’t covered elsewhere. Something to consider at the moment is that I am working on my final entries for 2025, specifically what I have designated, “The Snapshot Series.” For the past few years, I’ve chosen different topics to explore at length by mixing personal anecdotes with what I felt they symbolically represented to me...

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...

A few months ago, I found a certain strain of videos entering my Facebook algorithm. Usually, it’s the generic stand-up or how-to’s that have enough going on in the thumbnail to make you click on it, but not enough to really make the next two minutes all the better for it. This isn’t to say that I haven’t found a lot of entertainment from there, but the endurance is often lacking even 30 minutes after I have moved further down the feed. The videos in question were from a place more reliable than a comedian doing crowd work. A lot of them were in relation to a recent 50th anniversary special for the sketch series Saturday Night Live, which, on top of inspiring a Jason Reitman-directed movie in 2024, seemed to be having a small renaissance. I’m not one of those who ever argues it’s not funny anymore. In my opinion, their turnaround for comic actors remains very high. Then again, I’m someone who actively appreciates what Pete Davidson is doing and have especially clicked on his SNL bits ...

September is on the verge of ending. It’s been bittersweet to see one month fade into the next, even if it’s going to be October. I have attempted to get into the spirit of Halloween by watching some old reliables. In this case, I revisited It: Chapter Two for the first time since theaters. What’s interesting is that I’ll always admit that it’s a flawed little beast, but there is something about its ambitions that I can’t fully shake. A large part of it is because the 2017 original was one of the most successful Stephen King adaptations in my lifetime. I want to embrace the self-indulgence to get to the bigger point. I still hope that Andy Muschietti goes through with his plan to edit into a book-appropriate version of the larger narrative. Which is all to say that It: Chapter Two isn’t a great movie, but I think it’s a perfect soft-launch of my next month. I need to get back in the habit of watching horror movies. Maybe this will be the year I watch the Terrifier series, or even dis...