Reading, Watching, Listening 8/31/2025
A few words about TIFF coverage
Welcome to the latest Friday newsletter. It’s Sunday, but Sunday is better than Friday anyway, so let’s roll with it. It’s been a busy few weeks, and now the busyness is about to ramp up as I head into TIFF. I’ve got a few assignments already, and I’m hoping to nab a few more, but I’m still constructing my schedule—by which I mean I looked at it for five minutes, my head started to hurt, and I walked away—and figuring out what to prioritize.
I’ve been thinking through how I want to do TIFF coverage for the newsletter this year. I already know I won’t be going as nuts as last year, when I saw something north of 40 screenings over nine days, writing about all of them. I still plan to write about everything, but few things. A bit more focused. So I’ll be less tired. Though I’m sure I’ll still be plenty tired. So it goes at a film festival.
For a bit there, I toyed with the idea of making my TIFF dispatches for paid subscribers only, but I’ve decided not to do that. I’d like the festival blogs to be open and accessible to all. I may look for extra content to include, perhaps, as a locked-off section at the bottom of posts, you know, to incentivize all you beautiful moochers to spring for a paid sub. We shall see.
In the meantime, you can look forward to following along with all my TIFF updates when the festival kicks off later this week. My first dispatch will be up Thursday morning with a report from Peter Kuplowsky’s annual pre-festival starter screening, Midnight Dankness. Expect a new update every morning throughout the festival, with a nice little wrap-up at the end.
In case you missed it the other day, I wrote a new post for the newsletter inspired by videos I watched by the YouTuber The Elephant Graveyard, who has developed a compelling theoretical framework for understanding the state of comedy and the world. It’s a theory about guys who want to be new guys.
I ran with the theory, linking it to Alex Russell’s great new movie Lurker, as well as Adam Friedland’s difficult and emotional interview with US congressman Ritchie Torres.
Reading, Watching, Listening
So here’s what I’ve been consuming recently.
“AI is a Mass-Delusion Event,” by Charlie Warzel, is a great new article in The Atlantic about, well, the mass-delusion event that is AI. Warzel gets at what is perhaps the scariest thing about the technology at the moment, which is that the thing it seems to be best at, above all else, is driving people completely insane.
“Breathlessness is the modus operandi of those who are building out this technology. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is quote-tweeting guys on X bleating out statements such as ‘Everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop—basically marx’ worst nightmare/fantasy.’ How couldn’t you go a bit mad if you took them seriously? Indeed, it seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service. If you are genuinely AGI-pilled—a term for those who believe that machine-born superintelligence is coming, and soon—the rational response probably involves some combination of building a bunker, quitting your job, and joining the cause.”
Reveries, by Graham Mason, is a short film, but more like a visual comedy album written and performed by Matt Barats and Anthony Oberbeck. My first exposure to the Reveries was actually the third film in the series, The Mind Prison, which was screened at Bleeding Edge Fest 2 last weekend in Toronto.
Two mysterious drifters trapse around America, talking their cool, calm wisdom, and it’s hilarious. Great stuff to get high to.
Jaws in IMAX. You know Jaws? The best movie ever? It’s back in theatres right now for its 50th anniversary, including in IMAX, which is how I saw it. You should go see it to while it’s still around. It’s Jaws. You owe it to yourself.
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, and thanks for subscribing. It really means a lot. Come back later this week for all that TIFF goodness.