The Columbine massacre was on this date in 1999. Instead of energizing our country to get gun violence under control, it kicked off a new normal. One of the best explanations ever of journalism's destructive impact on mass shootings came from Roger Ebert in his review of Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant.”

Genuinely the funniest needle drop I’ve ever seen in a movie

Without stating your age, post your favorite film released the year you turned 18.

“Yeah, I miss the real. Recordings from back then sound like a pile of dogshit. How about it Sammy? You still got the real in you?”

On his reaction notes one of my students said I Am Your Grandma made him rethink his choice to go to college. The power of cinema, baybeee…

When you just did your experimental cinema lesson in Intro to Film #LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.

“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”

Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

“pissholes in the snow”

The Absolute Hell of Watching a Movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in 2026 Once America's most promising movie theater chain, the Alamo Drafthouse has become a QR-coded symbol of corporate enshittification.

As someone who always wanted to go to a Drafthouse but never lived in proximity of one pre-pandemic, this is a dark read www.indiewire.com/features/com...

A great American movie!

Earth and Moon from DSCOVR NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured this unique view of the Moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. This view shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth. Ian Regan processed this version of the image to account for the Moon's motion. NASA / NOAA / Ian Regan

I hadn't seen this before. This is pretty remarkable.

Earth and Moon in one NASA photo.

ht @astrokatie.com

I would have called campus security.

Sterling K. Brown explains the streaming economics of why we don’t get more eps

Yeesh. What is this from?

I got lots of problems with these people but one of the biggest complaints I have is none of them know any of the pop culture references they keep using in memes. This guy literally threw the detonator out the window so no one would die

Honorable mentions: Mickey’s Trailer (Ben Sharpsteen, 1938); The Circus (Charlie Chaplin, 1928); Real Genius (Martha Coolidge, 1985)

Favorite first-time viewings of films in March:
Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)
City of Hope (John Sayles, 1991)
Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008)
Heat Lightning (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934)

“I accuse my parents!”

It Happened One Night

Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it.

"The overwhelming use case for AI video generators continues to be what it has always been: people making porn, nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation, and low-effort slop at scale." www.404media.co/disneys-open...

“Quentin Tarantino was plagiarized-” I’m gonna stop you there

If Sinners came out in the 90s there would be an SNES and Genesis game that would be made by totally different developers. The Genesis version youd play as Smoke and you’d have a gun and in the SNES version you play as Preacherboy and you fight vampires with your guitar

In honor of the Oscars tonight, here are the ten Best Picture nominees ranked with Arrested Development scenes.
1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

10. Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)

a man is holding a hammer in his hand and saying `` i 'm a monster ! '' ALT: a man is holding a hammer in his hand and saying `` i 'm a monster ! ''

9. Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)

8. F1 (Joseph Kosinski)

7. Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)

6. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

5. The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)