October Culture Diary
hunks, new Luca, & a really good picture of Pip
Welcome to Dispatch from MacGuffins, my monthly culture diary for paid subscribers. Every month I compile recommendations for things to watch, read, and listen to based on what I encountered in the past month, and write a little about what’s been going on in my life.
Thank you to my clever, beautiful paid subscribers who help me spend time on free content like Never Cursed’s long form film essays, screening lists, and Prix Fixe column.
If you want to follow along during the month, my Letterboxd is here and my monthly Spotify playlist is here.
Things I Wrote
The Quality Edit had me on to write about Kelly Reichardt’s latest The Mastermind, 70s hunks, and autumnal menswear.
I also put out two pieces for Never Cursed:
6 Pairings for One Battle After Another
Welcome to Prix Fixe, a series on Never Cursed where I pair a movie I love with a set menu of other things to enjoy (paintings, movies, music, poetry, etc.), each one resonating with the film in a di…
Movie Season 2025 Master List
Every fall I go through the fall/winter movie release calendar and make a master list of all the movies I’m excited to see in…
Things I Watched
I did a mini Coen Bros / PTA retrospective at the beginning of the month, rewatching Burn After Reading and No Country for Old Men from the former and Licorice Pizza (still don’t get it), Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood from the latter. NCFOM is so beautifully filmed, even on my smudgey laptop screen - I really want to see it again in theaters the next time it’s programmed in NY. I appreciated Magnolia much more after living in LA for a decade than I did when I saw it for the first time in college. Its scattered rhythms and full deck of isolated characters recreate the city’s strange mix of desperate loneliness and naive hope. Favorite performance this go-around (aside from PSH) was Julianne Moore. This version of her despairing Valley housewife feels like a feral street cat being slowly backed into a corner (vs. the hollowed-out delicacy of her similar role in Safe).
I caught six new releases (After The Hunt, Frankenstein, Hedda, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Mastermind) and sadly only really liked two…
If I Had Legs and The Mastermind are my two favorite releases of the year so far, both well worth seeing in theaters. IIHLIKY because I don’t know if its emotional, visual, and auditory immersive-ness would make you want to scream in the same way if seen alone on a smaller screen. The Mastermind because it’s gorgeous, like everything Reichardt makes, and you’d miss out on a lot of funny, subtle performance moments watching at home. I want to see both movies a second time before writing more — they’re slippery and beguiling, in very different ways.
Hedda I feel a bit more conflicted about. I could absolutely feel Nia DaCosta’s passion for the source material, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. The last minute of the film makes it one of the most effective, subtle, and structurally subversive reworkings of a 19th c. drama that I’ve seen. Casting Nina Hoss, my #1 crush, as a gender-flipped version of Eilert Lövborg, Hedda’s former lover, is genius. DaCosta has a ton of visual flair. Maybe I’m talking myself into loving this movie… Whether you think it’s clever or craven, DaCosta’s choice to frame Hedda’s story as an Agatha Christie-esque spooky manor house murder mystery is a clear appeal to streaming audiences…TBD if that bums me out, or is a necessary evil for an Ibsen adaptation to get made at this budget. Only one thing truly tripped me up, but it was a biggie:
