Well, folks, we do have a movie.

Do we ever?

Do we ever?

This one's a long time coming, by the way.

Sometimes when we look for movies, the choice is a very direct one-to-one relationship with whatever's going on in the world.

Other times, there's an almost indefinable mood we're trying to get.

Like, this week, we were looking through lists of movies,

rattling off titles, the Empire Top 500, the IMDB top 250, the site and sound pull. We were going

through lists, just trying to find something that's like, what am I feeling? I want to get that

mood. And there was a title we stumbled on that we just, for some reason, couldn't leave. And I can't say that

it is directly one-to-one related with the moment right now, but of course it isn't, because it's

Southland Tales.

I'm going to tell you the story of the Jeremy down the road not taken.

Watching it now, I mean, if there's anything that's interesting or evocative about it,

it's that you've got all these sort of mass culture figures from the 2000s, playing like

action stars and porn stars and influencers and tech barons and the lines between all of these

figures are sort of dissolving. And it looks

very 2006. It looks very 2023, very 2016 in its aesthetic. It feels like this soup of just like the

last 15 or 20 years. To the extent that this movie has any sort of power, I think it's in that soup quality.

The first 10 or 15 minutes, I would praise as an effective projection of what a certain kind of like

mid-2000s Radlib sensibility had on its mind during the Bush era. But the majority of the

film that follows it, to me, is sort of a more, I don't know, realistic

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