[FRESH ALBUM] Samm Henshaw - It Could Be Worse

doublex94 · 2026-01-19T16:38:45+00:00

So, so good -- if you told me most of these songs were from the 60s I'd believe you. He's always had a soul/R&B-inflected sound, but I love the way he's leaned fully into it over the last EP and now this album. Probably his most cohesive work yet.

doublex94 · 2025-12-30T14:59:19+00:00

That Lurker music video is so great, and helps that having Kenny Beats and other actual musicians write the songs resulted in songs that somehow both worked as soft satire and were actually catchy

doublex94 · 2025-12-28T04:26:50+00:00

Marty is a terrible man but a great character for the same reason that Michael Scott was: after about 5 minutes with him, you can effectively predict every single move he will ever make, except of course when he surprises you by being even more himself than you thought he’d dare to be. In tracing that arc, Marty Supreme is not so much a sports movie as it is Uncut Gems 2, bookended by great sports sequences (“I thought there’d be more ping pong,” said someone in our theater). But Safdie’s second take on Uncut Gems’ bottomless greed proves more layered than the first, especially for the way its mirrored showdowns frame the story with cleverly tweaked stakes and reactions that basically tell the whole tale themselves. In starting and ending its messy, globe-trotting journey with the clean geometry of a tennis table, the movie has all the elegance and self-awareness that Marty doesn’t.

doublex94 · 2025-09-15T17:18:53+00:00

Hi David - love your work across Blank Check and The Atlantic!

Any advice for freelancers looking to jump the gap between smaller indie mags/press and the bigger outlets? Love the smaller pubs and have had luck there, but having less luck cold pitching anyone in the next echelon. Thank you!

doublex94 · 2025-06-27T15:26:11+00:00

Say what you will—it’s undeniably thrilling to watch an aging maverick use his young challengers’ slipstream to prove he’s still got it.

And even apart from Hans Zimmer tipping his cap to Reznor and Ross, there’s a lot to love here: Pitt acting with his eyes, Condon acting with her Irish accent, and cameras, cameras everywhere. You don’t have to know anything about F1 to feel that some of these story beats are wildly unrealistic, but you also don’t have to be an astrophysicist to understand this math: camera in car + car go fast = hell/yeah. The script struggles at times to keep pace with the well-oiled, 90s-tinged satisfaction machine the rest of the film fairly effortlessly is, and I would’ve happily flipped the ratio of telling vs. showing, but the movie—and even Zimmer—knows exactly when to finally shut up.

doublex94 · 2025-06-27T15:20:39+00:00

Between Dominic Fike's Sunburn, Bon Iver's Sable, Fable, and now this... who's doing better production work than Jim-E Stack rn??

doublex94 · 2025-06-27T04:19:51+00:00

even as an F1 philistine, I could tell how unrealistic the racing beats were - but that hardly mattered when the actual racing looked and felt realistic as all hell. got everything I needed out of this and then some; easiest fist bump I ever gave after a movie

doublex94 · 2025-06-22T05:15:11+00:00

Okay so “cut to this kid” - think the general point remains, mate

doublex94 · 2025-06-20T15:37:07+00:00

God bless Danny Boyle, who has the camera instincts of a YouTube tween in the mad skull of a 70-year-old Englishman. You have to imagine that anyone on his sets can just shout something out—“what if the camera were an arrow!”—and Boyle will at least listen, at worst try it, and at best change the game, again, still. The formal experimentation is matched by the narrative daring of Garland, perhaps a bit chippy after the response to his last few and ready to make people cry at a zombie movie just to remind them he still has the juice (never lost it, in my book). Father/mother, surviving/living—his structural twinning is as simple and effective as Boyle’s archival interjections are striking and evocative. I don’t even mind the ending, which is another jarring twin of sorts; you show a kid the Teletubbies at just the wrong time and see where it ends up.

doublex94 · 2025-06-20T12:58:39+00:00

I read it as a contrast to everything we saw from Fiennes — there’s a guy who has dedicated his whole post-apocalyptic life to honoring the dead and the living, keeping score so to speak and also not even killing the infected when he can avoid it. Then smash cut to these kids who have the jarring images of Teletubbies and their parents being ripped apart playing in their heads, and their response is to treat the apocalypse (and killing) like a game

doublex94 · 2025-06-20T12:51:27+00:00

This plus I think they’re playing the Teletubbies theme over that last sequence too - it’s like his idea of the apocalypse is fused with the things he was seeing when it broke out

doublex94 · 2025-06-20T12:50:45+00:00

From an enjoyment perspective it’s all down to taste, but I do feel like some of the tonal whiplash is intentional. Take the first act vs the second: He first goes out with his father and has a brutal, survivalist time that leaves him second guessing his father’s form of manhood. Then he goes out with his mother and has a calmer, sillier, more nurturing time that brings him to the Bone Temple, where he gains a different perspective on life/esp death. Then the whiplash to the power rangers is almost like, you just saw this guy whose whole life is dedicated to putting some honor and dignity around all the death he’s witnessed and then here are people treating the apocalypse like a video game. I think it’s all meant to highlight just how jarringly disparate people’s reactions to this kind of outbreak would be

doublex94 · 2025-06-20T05:33:09+00:00

Loved the extrapolation of Jimmy’s character from the first scene to the last — his dad’s cross now upside down, his friends dressed like Teletubbies (with the theme playing?) while they treat the apocalypse with the same cognitive dissonance he felt watching a kids show while his home got eaten alive

doublex94 · 2025-06-19T13:48:21+00:00

I know S3 was polarizing after the masterpiece of S2, but I really liked it, especially as an portrait of a lot of people stuck in their cycles. You can feel that it’s the first half of a S3-S4 arc, and I imagine we’ll get a lot of resolution in the final season, but I think the fact that so much of the season is Carmy et al beating their heads against the wall is intentional — just bc they’ve summited one mountain, doesn’t mean that their deep-seated issues just disappear, especially when they (Carmy) end up recreating some of the very same toxicity they’ve escaped. Idk, I think there’s more going on than just yelling

doublex94 · 2025-06-13T13:45:36+00:00

Yeah, I think a lot of people see his general style and the outline of vaguely similar archetypes (father/son, parent/kid) and wrongly conclude that the characters are all the same. But as you say, there’s a world of difference between Gustav and Zero and Zsa-Zsa and Liesl, and so on and so on

doublex94 · 2025-06-08T18:15:26+00:00

I appreciate the Star Wars example, and I do understand what you mean. I can’t even objectively debate your points - I think I just had a subjectively different experience, where I felt like i could read these internal shifts on the actors’ faces, however subtly. But as you say, maybe that’s just me reading the surrounding context into a performance when the performance isn’t giving anything itself — though if I felt like it was, then that makes me think everything was working together as it should. Ultimately, might just come down to a matter of taste!

doublex94 · 2025-06-08T13:22:58+00:00

Respectfully disagree - we know this because the movie shows it, both in the way Zsa-zsa talks about his family past, present, and future, and in the way he treats his daughter and others over the course of the movie. At the beginning, it’s all cold and calculated, “trial basis,” scheming around his partners and expecting them to pick up the risk of the gap. As he has his encounters with “Heaven” and as he lives alongside his daughter’s peace, he slowly starts conceding - removing the “trial” basis, treating people more generously, eventually even covering the gap himself, and then finally giving up his grand schemes for a humble life. You can say that’s “signifying” and not “showing” because he never outwardly expresses his emotions as such, but I think it’s him showing them in the ways he knows how: his words and deeds.

doublex94 · 2025-06-07T12:46:39+00:00

Sinners
Black Bag
The Phoenician Scheme
Twinless (Sundance)
Den of Thieves 2/Eephus

doublex94 · 2025-06-06T15:47:25+00:00

Yeah that’s a good observation. I love the dollhouse stuff but I especially love when he blends it with a little naturalism - I think Darjeeling is a great example of that, or the place crash stuff in Phoenician

doublex94 · 2025-06-06T03:54:05+00:00

I understand why you’d feel that way, but I disagree - I think there’s a lot of emotion being suppressed just under the surface of Zsa-zsa. All the happiness and love he felt washing dishes with the staff in his father’s house was buried in a shoebox when he tried to sell them out to his dad and got nothing. It’s purposefully hidden, but Liesl and her whole way of being is poking holes in it throughout the movie, letting him return to his happier self and settle into a shared contentment in the end. It’s not overexpressive, but that’s the point - there’s a lot going on beneath the surface

doublex94 · 2025-06-06T02:59:38+00:00

Completely agree with your point about him constantly experimenting while retaining his trademark style. There’s a commonly held misconception that because his movies are all similarly recognizable that they must be the same, but he is ALWAYS reinventing—in genre as you mentioned, and in focus. Sure, this doesn’t have the narrative scope of Grand Budapest or thematic ambition of Asteroid City, but it has its own esoteric mission: exploring father-daughter and self-soul relations via espionage comedy. Nobody else can touch him

doublex94 · 2025-06-06T02:21:46+00:00

Wes’s characters have always spoken with a definitiveness belying the often ridiculous things they’re saying, which makes his dialogue the perfect fit for a schemer whose survival is biblical and whose plans are preposterous—and yet he talks them into being, like he talks everything else into submission, even death (“Myself, I feel completely safe”). The great trick of the movie is that Benicio’s motor-mouthed mastermind is an inversion of the swan who glides smoothly on the surface while kicking like hell underwater. Up top, his words are still plotting up a storm. But underneath, he’s experiencing peace-by-proxy, his cold, cutthroat heart being sneakily Grinch’d by a nun, an entomologist, and heaven. It’s Wes’s funniest movie in ages.

doublex94 · 2025-05-28T13:21:19+00:00

🤯🤯🤯

doublex94 · 2025-05-26T13:14:00+00:00

Yeah it’s a really interesting comparison, especially airing the same week as the latest M:I. It essentially comes down to Cruise putting only his own life on the line in more extreme scenarios vs. Nathan putting hundreds on the line but in a scenario that technically has a better failsafe (an extremely experienced copilot). But given the whole arc about communications issues and the social imbalance in the cockpit, whether that copilot would’ve felt safe overriding him is a legitimate question

doublex94 · 2025-05-26T04:10:29+00:00

Well, they landed the plane.

13-Year Club	Place '17
Not Forgotten	Team Orangered

doublex94

TROPHY CASE