Sunday, November 30, 2025
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Monday, October 13, 2025
The Return of VistaVision
New York Times - "‘One Battle After Another’ Is in VistaVision. Should You Care?"
No Film School - "What Is VistaVision? Inside the Classic Widescreen Format Behind Hollywood’s Biggest Films"
"Although it will also be shown on IMAX screens and in several other formats, “One Battle After Another” is the latest film to be shot mainly in VistaVision, which uses larger film negatives for sharper quality. It follows use of the format in “The Brutalist,” the nearly four-hour period drama that earned its cinematographer, Lol Crawley, an Oscar.
“One Battle After Another” will also be projected in VistaVision in only four theaters around the world — in Boston, London, New York and Los Angeles — because very few are equipped to do so. (“The Brutalist” was shot in VistaVision but not projected in it.) Still, more VistaVision releases from major directors, including Yorgos Lanthimos, Greta Gerwig and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, are on the way, which may lead moviegoers to become acquainted with a technology that hadn’t been this popular since before Anderson was born."
Napheesa Collier Speaks Out
Napheesa Collier’s full statement today, where she challenged Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and the WNBA with directness and stunning detail we rarely hear from active players. Worth listening to every word. pic.twitter.com/IRTvTc52EA
— Malika Andrews (@malika_andrews) September 30, 2025
The Ringer - "The WNBA Is at a Breaking Point"
Uniqlo's Quest for Global Dominance
New Yorker - "Inside Uniqlo’s Quest for Global Dominance"
"In 1972, having graduated from college, Yanai started working at the family’s shop. Two years later, he officially took over the business. Every night, he recorded the day’s sales in a handwritten ledger, poring over it until he could recognize trends. After he ordered the clerks at the store to discontinue the unprofitable practice of extending credit on suits, all but one of them quit. In 1984, he opened a larger store, in Hiroshima: Unique Clothing Warehouse. He may have lifted the name, without permission, from New York City’s beloved Unique Clothing Warehouse, which stood on Broadway and Eighth Street from 1973 to 1991 and is remembered for, among other things, employing Jean-Michel Basquiat before he became famous.
Uniclo, as the company was originally known, offered a multitude of brands at bargain prices. “NON SEX NON AGE NON SIZE” read a slogan that Yanai himself painted in colorful letters on the front of the company’s second store. Yanai soon switched to manufacturing his own products. Many of them drew from the ametora tradition—which by then had expanded to include other “American” styles such as outdoor wear—a heritage that continues to inform the company’s offerings. “It’s that reductive, nonchalant, unadorned basic,” Marx told me. “For instance, a Shetland sweater—what Uniqlo does is to take that spirit and then try to create a sweater that is technically the best, most sweaterlike sweater than can be worn by anyone in the world.”
By the nineteen-nineties, Uniclo had expanded to more than a hundred locations, many of them barnlike roadside emporiums where customers could pull in and grab a pack of underwear. (Uniqlo still operates this type of store in Japan and other countries.) In 1988, Yanai established a subsidiary in Hong Kong, where a clerk accidentally transcribed the name as Uniqlo. “Let’s keep it,” Yanai said, figuring that the spelling had a certain dynamism. Japan was in a deep recession, but Uniqlo kept growing, offering bargains for the struggling masses and discretion for better-off consumers in an era that frowned upon conspicuous consumption."
...
"Lingering by one of its attenuated, knobby legs, I struck up a conversation with a quiet, conservatively dressed man. He was wearing a Uniqlo lapel pin, in the manner of an American politician’s flag. It was Koji Yanai, one of Yanai’s sons.
I told him that I was writing a story about Uniqlo and asked if there was anything about the company that he thought was misunderstood. “In the past, we haven’t always been good at telling our story,” he said. “But most apparel brands are not existing like us.” I had heard Uniqlo executives compare the company to Apple, releasing gradual updates each season, “like iPhone 4, iPhone 5,” or to a supermarket of clothing, serving daily needs. Koji preferred another, even further-reaching metaphor. “We want to be the infrastructure of clothing,” he said. “Water, gas, electricity, and Uniqlo.”"
Oregon—"Our tradition to is to be untraditional"
"THE DUCKS MAY not have a different uniform for every game, but the fact that it feels like they do, or that it feels like they could if they wanted to, is a unique feature of Nike's influence.
According to Farr, while Nike sponsors many programs across the country, it tiers schools, and that determines access to perks such as special releases and custom apparel, with Tier 1 being the highest -- that is, unless you're Oregon.
"[Nike] always told us," Farr said, "we were Tier 0."
"When I got to Oregon, I thought the practice jersey was the game jersey," said wide receiver Evan Stewart, who transferred from Texas A&M. "It's just different here. You look good, feel good, you play good.""
The 2026 World Cup Ball—Trionda
The Athletic - "Hello, Trionda. Adidas’ new World Cup ball and everything you need to know about it"
"“Trionda” stands for three (tri) waves (onda). The ball’s design features a red, green and blue design to represent the World Cup’s trio of host nations, Canada, Mexico and the U.S. There is also iconography significant to each country featured throughout the ball – a star for the U.S., a maple leaf for Canada and an eagle for Mexico.
These icons are displayed loudly in graphics splashed across the ball’s panel designs and are also more subtly embossed onto its matte base. The ball also features a subtle nod to the World Cup trophy, with gold embellishments detailed throughout.
This is considered one of the brightest balls Adidas has ever created, Handy said. That’s a far cry from Adidas’ first World Cup ball in 1970, which featured the classic black-and-white color pattern with iconic hexagon shapes throughout."
Saturday, September 13, 2025
The State and Principles of Wikipedia
The Verge - "Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring"
By Josh Dzieza
"Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation. It’s what Google puts at the top of search results otherwise awash in ads and spam, what social platforms cite when they deign to correct conspiracy theories, and what AI companies scrape in their ongoing quest to get their models to stop regurgitating info-slurry — and consult with such frequency that they are straining the encyclopedia’s servers. Each day, it’s where approximately 70 million people turn for reliable information on everything from particle physics to rare Scottish sheep to the Erfurt latrine disaster of 1184, a testament both to Wikipedia’s success and to the total degradation of the rest of the internet as an information resource."
The Rip
A House of Dynamite
Written by Noah Oppenheim
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Marty Supreme
Sean Fennessey on Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
From Letterboxd:
Review by Sean Fennessey
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair 2006
★★★★★
Watched 25 Jul 2025
Sean Fennessey’s review published on Letterboxd:
Regal Pyramid Mall Cinemas, Ithaca, NY
October 10, 2003
I drove a black Saturn SL1 to the mall. The car belonged to my girlfriend, although we were broken up at the time. This is relevant because we weren’t apart long and would eventually spend the rest of our lives together. We were in college, she in Baltimore, me in Western New York. How I got the car amidst “the break” is beyond me. Her dad owned it, technically, I was just the boyfriend. But I was happy to have it. So I drove to the mall for a date I’d circled in red pen on the calendar.
I went with my friend Mox, a fellow Tarantino allegiant. We’d seen the trailer, read the occasional Ain’t It Cool News missive, the Entertainment Weekly hype pieces. But there wasn’t much to sate a voracious young fan in the relative Stone Age of early aughts movie anticipation. This was the fourth Quentin Tarantino film, bifurcated by the studio in a capitalist strategy turned artistic choice. Mox and I entered the multiplex, sat for 111 minutes and 10 seconds, and exited as changed men. Electrified. Intoxicated. Hype exceeded. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the great moviegoing experience of my young adult life. There were memorable, formative times before this. Movies that were bigger or “better.” But nothing that felt like this, the tingly, anxious feeling of arrival that hits when a movie sends you beyond the seat you’ve chosen. For Mox and me, we were experiencing references, sign posts, and homage that we barely understood. A lot we would eventually catch up to. But on this day, and for a few months, there was one movie. It’s the movie that made me what I have become, if I had to put a name to it.
The second half of the Kill Bill saga arrived four months later, in a new year. I’d graduated from college by this time. Girlfriend and I got back together, moved to New York together, charted a life together. I saw Volume II in a Long Island multiplex with “Stadium-Style Seating,” all the rage in Farmingdale in those days. It was a more serious, more mordant affair. A family story, with the revenge realized and ruefully accepted. It felt like a modest letdown compared to the indescribable high of Volume I, the “How are we still alive?” sensation of the crazy 88 battle.
I carried the memories of both with me every time I revisited them, favoring Volume I over II, the whiz-bang of the choreography, staging, Spaghetti Western tracing over samurai-yakuza coloring book framework over the more restrained, mournful conclusion. I “got” Volume II, but I lived for Volume I. This more or less held true for 20+ years. Each time I popped it in or caught it on cable, I needed to complete the whole story, but I could rarely get back to the exultation of O-Ren Ishii’s scalping, the quiet sound design against the gentle falling snow at Volume I’s conclusion.
In 2006, Quentin Tarantino debuted “The Whole Bloody Affair” at the Cannes Film Festival, a slightly recut, extended collision of the two movies that amounted to a 247-minute behemoth. I never saw it. As far as I know, there’s just one print of it that exists. I saw it today, with the French subtitles from that screening hardcoded to the print.
In The Whole Bloody Affair, the old Klingon proverb quote that appears on screen at the start of the first film has been replaced by a dedication to the Japanese “master filmmaker” Kinji Fukasaku, who’d died in 2003. That’s as crucial a change as exists, and situates the movie more deeply, as something that extends well beyond the revenge trope that Quentin has always located as his most comfortable narrative motivation and into a wider history of crime films, martial arts pictures, Asian cinema, and high-class exploitation. This version revealed how sincere but surface level most of my love for Volume I was 20 years ago. I don’t hold it against myself. I was 21 – I hadn’t seen much from the Shaw Bros. or Corbucci or Russ Meyer. I was working up to it. So filling in the gaps deepens the experience. I find this to be true for just about any movie ever made, but few more so than Tarantino.
It isn't about catching the references that elevated this for me. The superficial thrills still hit – the moment when Morricone’s “Death Rides a Horse” swells as The Bride prepares to annihilate the 88s had me welling up in the Vista Theater, transported back to a time when my body felt strong and my heart was as open as it had ever been. What changed in this viewing was more clear and a reminder of why Tarantino’s work is still so special to me. Even as a teenager I saw the ways that Jackie Brown expressed a maturity and wisdom that was unusual, but especially so for a pop culture-addled wunderkind who’d just experienced the most singular rise to fame and fortune for a filmmaker since Spielberg and Jaws. What I didn’t understand about Volume II was the profundity of B.B. and Beatrix’s union, the depth of loss, love, and connection between a four-year-old and her mother. The entire movie — the entire Affair – hinges on getting back to a child she doesn’t realize exists. We think we are on the revenge journey to end them all. That isn’t it at all. It’s about a woman on the road to becoming whole. She does have to kill many evil men and women to get to this destination. She does need to gouge eyeballs out, punch her way through grave burial, murder a woman in front of her own young daughter, kill her rapist, and perfect the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. But it’s all to be with her daughter.
So me and the girl who were split up when I saw Volume I – when I couldn’t stop ranting and gushing about how awesome it was – have a four-year-old girl together. Best thing that’s ever happened. And when Beatrix laid eyes on B.B. in the final reels of this four-hour mega-movie, I burst into tears. I just had no way of comprehending it all 20 years ago. I’m still sort of pulling it all together right now. How Quentin, who was not a father at the time, understood how to dramatize this metaphysical connection in his kung-fu revenge epic is completely lost on me. He is one of the true emotionalists in contemporary movies, an artist who uses genre as a trap door for something much deeper and ineffable. This is why I keep going back to what I love.
Related,
Lördagsgodis
New Yorker - "How to Eat Candy Like a Swedish Person"
"Nordic countries, in general, are crazy for candy. On a trip to Iceland a few years ago, I was amazed by the wide selection of sweets sold by the pound at even the most average-looking gas stations. But if any one particular country knows its candy, it’s Sweden, whose residents, according to a study by the Swedish Board of Agriculture, eat more per year per capita—more than thirty pounds per person each—than the citizens of any other nation. In Sweden, every Saturday is effectively a national holiday, called lördagsgodis, which means “Saturday candy.” Every corner store has a wall of pick-and-mix bins. The history of how this tradition came to be is surprisingly dark: in the nineteen-forties, in conjunction with several candy corporations, the Swedish government performed tests on patients in a mental institution to explore the hazards of consuming sweets. When it was determined that too many would make your teeth rot, lördagsgodis was born—Swedish citizens were urged to have as much candy as they liked, as long as they limited their consumption to one day a week."
Friday, July 25, 2025
The Odyssey
July 17, 2026
Adapted by Christopher Nolan
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Cinematography Hoyte van Hoytema
Music by Ludwig Göransson
Starring
Matt Damon,
Tom Holland,
Anne Hathaway,
Zendaya,
Lupita Nyong'o,
Robert Pattinson,
Charlize Theron,
Jon Bernthal
Project Hail Mary
Monday, June 23, 2025
MLB is Growing Again
Bloomberg - "Major League Baseball Is Growing Again. Why Isn’t Its TV Money?"
"Major League Baseball’s TV conundrum
Major League Baseball is off to its best start in years. Viewership is up across all its major national TV packages, led by ESPN, where ratings are up 22%. TBS and Fox have scored 16% and 10% lifts, respectively, the league said this week. Game attendance hit a seven-year high in 2024 and is inching up again this year. (The viewership on Japanese TV network NHK is also up about 22%.)
And yet, the league is scrambling to find a buyer for a major TV package that includes 30 regular season games, the Home Run Derby, the Wild Card playoff round and up to 10 spring training games. ESPN said in February that it would end its broadcast deal with MLB after the 2025 season, pulling out of the relationship three years ahead of schedule. The sports network had been paying the league $550 million a year and wanted to pay less than half that price.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred initially responded by saying ESPN was a shrinking platform, only to later concede “we liked the deal we had” and that he wishes he didn’t have to sell these rights at this moment. NBC and Apple are in talks to buy some or all the games, though neither is willing to match the $550 million price tag. Fox has expressed an interest in more baseball as well. Other potential buyers, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon and Netflix, are all sitting on the sidelines."
The Great American Fried Chicken Sandwich
The Atlantic - "The Golden Age of the Fried-Chicken Sandwich"
"American eaters have become accustomed to, and expectant of, the opportunity to customize everything. This is why ordering from Starbucks feels like taking the MCAT, and another reason fried chicken is so appealing—it’s a relatively bland meat that takes well to being dressed a gazillion different ways. Case in point: Wingstop’s crispy chicken sandwich is available with a choice of 14 sauces, plus four dips. When it first came out in 2022, the chain sold more than a million sandwiches in six days.
This, really, is the key to fried chicken: It is an ideal blank slate for a novelty-obsessed food culture. Although fried chicken can be an absolute party, texturally speaking, it doesn’t have much to offer, flavorally speaking, at least not without additions. This isn’t a weakness; it’s a strength. “Americans are ornament-, garnish-, kick-it-up-a-notch-oriented,” Freedman told me. (We have become less spice-averse in the past generation or so.) Fried chicken works with all manner of trend and cuisine. Right now you can find a Bolivian fried-chicken sandwich, marinated in South American beer and served with serrano-habanero-chili vinegar, in New York City; a Cambodian one with pickled papaya and long beans in Chicago; and a Thai-inspired one served with your choice of Southeast Asian–style sauces in Glendale, Arizona.
The fried-chicken sandwich is one of the great American inventions—a holy mash-up of tradition and newness, convenience and indulgence, crunchy and soft. It is the perfect food for this culinary moment. But wherever we trend next, it will be there, too, because the fried-chicken sandwich can be whatever we want it to be."
