Month: January 2025

2024 Capsule Movie Reviews

Francis Bass3 Comments

Sometime late in 2023 I got really into capsule reviews, and even bought a copy of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. I think there’s a lot of artistry to writing such succinct reviews, and a lot of fun to be had in reading them. So throughout all of 2024, for (almost) every movie I watched, I wrote a little review. Most of these are not movies that came out in 2024, they’re just the ones I watched that year.

Special favorites are rubricated (red.) I didn’t use any kind of star rating system, but the last line of each review is basically a rating. Reviews are arranged in order of viewing, with the most recently viewed movie at the top. My favorite movie of the year was Heaven’s Gate. My least favorite was Four Feathers.

NOSFERATU (2024). A woman is tormented by horny vampire nightmares. Her husband is called to Transylvania to broker a real estate deal with a Count. Guess who the Count is.
Thick-as-blood atmosphere, great performances, decadent stylings. Ending felt a little pat, but story is otherwise well paced and constructed.
It’s great.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON. A bank robbery is going very well until the robbers find the vault empty. Having to improvise to scrape up more cash, they soon find the bank besieged by dozens of cops and hundreds of onlookers, trapping them inside with a dozen hostages.
Another great Sidney Lumet movie where people with opposing views are stuck in a room all day and get very sweaty. Stellar performances from Pacino as the irresistibly charismatic bank robber and Cazale as his quiet, lethal accomplice. And from the whole damn cast—it’s all great.
All time classic.

MEDIUM COOL. Picaresque film following a Chicago TV cameraman in 1968 leading up to the Democratic National Convention. Mixes real documentary footage and scripted scenes fairly seamlessly. Stupid climactic sequence and stupid ending, but all in all the movie has a lively, authentic feel.
It’s medium cool.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. Coming of age film about two brothers whose parents are getting divorced. Father is a formerly great novelist, mother is a rising literary star. These people all have problems and frequently behave horribly and insufferably and my god is it funny.
It’s the filet of Noah Baumbach.

LONGLEGS. A serial killer whose victims all kill themselves/each other. Actually it’s the devil.
A-grade execution of a D-grade story. The devil magic renders any twists arbitrary, makes the Nic Cage character not that scary because he can be as dangerous or as weak as the plot needs him to be.
Great cinematography, long shots slow-building tension. There’s probably a killer short film in here somewhere.
It’s fine.

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Public Domain Day 2025: Philly Photos!

Francis BassLeave a comment

Happy (one day late) Public Domain Day!!!! Yesterday, on January 1, 2025, works from 1929 entered the public domain, including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and The Skeleton Dance! You can read more about the Public Domain and what’s entering it this year on the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s 2025 page.

As always, I’m celebrating by releasing one of my works to the Public Domain. Actually, a collection of works—this year I’m ceding a bunch of photos of Philadelphia I’ve taken over the past five years. I am going to try to upload them to Internet Archive and Flickr sometime soon, but I want to take the time to add useful metadata to them. So for now you can just look at them on this site, or download them in one big zip file. I have more ambitious plans for next year. For 2025, this is what I’ve got.

I also normally try to write a post about the public domain or something … yeah I got nothing this year. You can see all my previous posts about the public domain, and all the works I’ve ceded to it, here. Maybe read my 2021 post, “A Plea for Authors to Consider the Commons”, if you haven’t already. It’s relevant again because this year, four major publishers—Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley—won their suit against the Internet Archive, forcing the Internet Archive to end its practice of Controlled Digital Lending. Fortunately, the judge signed an order stating that the court’s decision only covers books which the publishers have made available as ebooks. So the Internet Archive can still practice Controlled Digital Lending of books which are otherwise not digitally available—and that’s a lot of books! It’s not such a bad outcome as it could’ve been. But fuck these publishers and fuck the AAP and fuck US copyright law and fuck Sonny Bono, forever.

Year in Review and Year to Come

Now, some quick non-public-domain-related notes.

It’s been a long year. I’ve been busy. Mostly writing this stupid novel. Novels suck. What an awful form to exalt. What did Borges say? “What laborious and impoverishing madness, composing vast books; developing an idea for five hundred pages whose perfect oral exposition fits in a few minutes.” [“Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos.”] So I’ve gotten a lot done, but not much that’s in a ready, shareable state. Here are three cool things I put into the world in 2024:

And here are three cool things I hope to put out in 2025:

  • A halloween sadboy novella
  • Another short story zine, or two
  • A new short story in the April issue of Apex Magazine!

I’m very excited about that last one. The story, “I Remember a One-Sided Die,” will be my longest story to ever appear in a magazine—just over 7,000 words. So, look forward to that. Also, very soon I’ll release a big long post containing 40+ mini-reviews of movies I watched in 2024. And I’ll have another new year comic.

Okay happy new year happy public domain day here we go again another lap around the sun see you again soon!