Odie Henderson
LightNews LightNews
banner
odienator.bsky.social
Odie Henderson
@odienator.bsky.social
1.3K followers 200 following 3.6K posts
Author of BLACK CAESARS AND FOXY CLEOPATRAS: A HISTORY OF BLAXPLOITATION CINEMA. Still the Boston Globe's chief film critic for now :) Former RogerEbert.com critic. Also former IT Diva (reformed). Black, bi, badass. View are my own! NSFC and GALECA member.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
odienator.bsky.social
Odie Henderson @odienator.bsky.social · Feb 19
I wrote a book on Blaxploitation Cinema! Ya damn right! It's called BLACK CAESARS AND FOXY CLEOPATRAS: A HISTORY OF BLAXPLOITATION CINEMA. Available at bookstores, libraries and even an audiobook (read by moi). If you want to get a copy, ask yo' mama!
The cover of my book BLACK CAESARS AND FOXY CLEOPATRAS: A HISTORY OF BLAXPLOITATION CINEMA.
odienator.bsky.social
There's a line in the Billy Preston doc THAT'S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT that will stick with me for a while. Sandra Crouch says "can you imagine if church was really what it says it is? People would be bustin' down the doors to get in here."
February 15, 2026 at 8:12 PM
odienator.bsky.social
About to watch the Billy Preston documentary, THAT'S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT. Looking forward to this one.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFWU...
BILLY PRESTON: THAT'S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT | OFFICIAL TRAILER
YouTube video by Abramorama
www.youtube.com
February 15, 2026 at 6:06 PM
odienator.bsky.social
I got out of tech at the right fucking time.
timkellogg.me Tim Kellogg @timkellogg.me · 13h
Token Anxiety

i think i mostly echo this for myself. with so much that can be done, i often feel like i *should* be doing something, always
Token Anxiety Nikunj Kothari C @nikunj • Feb 13 A friend left a party at 9:30 on a Saturday. Not tired. Not sick. He wanted to get back to his agents. Nobody questions it anymore. Half the room is thinking the same thing. The other half are probably checking the progress of their agents. At a party. All the parties are sober now. Young people don't drink because they're going back to work after. Not inspired by Bryan Johnson, although that's probably a factor. The buzz they want now runs on tokens per day. I keep noticing it on walks through the Mission. Laptops glowing everywhere. Cafes, sidewalks, heck even park benches. People walking with screens open like a flashlight guiding them somewhere. Less drunk laughter on the streets these days. More keystrokes. Dinner conversations used to start with "what are you building?" That's over. Now it's "how many agents do you have running?" People drop the number the way they used to drop their follower count. Quietly competitive. The flex isn't what you've accomplished anymore. It's what's working while you're sitting here not working. The vocabulary is what really gets me though. People describe models the way sommeliers describe wine. This one has better taste. That one hallucinates with more confidence. Opus is bold, Codex is smooth. They talk about harnesses and reins like they're controlling horses. Invisible whips directing invisible labor. Someone at a dinner said they keep labor. Someone at a dinner said they keep "Claude on a tight leash for code review but give it more slack for creative work." We've started borrowing the language of how we treat animals for something none of us actually understand yet. Waking up and checking what your agents produced overnight is the first thing now. Before coffee. Before texts. You open your laptop and grade homework you assigned in your sleep. Some of it is good. Most needs rework. But you start shipping a plan before you sleep just so you can wake up to more code written overnight. Saturdays became uninterrupted build windows. No meetings, no Slack, twelve hours of you and your agents. Sunday morning X is all terminal screenshots and shipping receipts. "What'd you ship this weekend?" replaced "what'd you do this weekend?" The anxiety is rational, which is why it sticks. Every week some new benchmark drops that makes last month's workflow feel prehistoric. Codex ships overnight processing. Opus gets faster. Context windows double. None of it reduces the pressure. It multiplies it. You can do more now. And someone already is. The window to be first at anything feels like it's shrinking by the day. Literally, by the day. I replaced Netflix with Claude Code. I lie in bed thinking about what I can spin up before I fall asleep, what can run while I'm unconscious. Reading a novel feels indulgent now. Watching a movie without a laptop open feels wasteful. This voice in my head that says "something could be running right now" just doesn't shut off. I'm not even building a company. I'm just addicted to building my random ideas. Everyone here knows they should step away more. That's not the problem. The problem is what your brain does when you try. I still take a x ss walks. The agents come with me now.
February 15, 2026 at 5:37 PM
odienator.bsky.social
Who knew LETHAL WEAPON 2 was a documentary?
February 15, 2026 at 5:05 PM
odienator.bsky.social
In honor of this month, I'll be posting an article a day that celebrates us folks. Today, it's one of the 14 Black Man Talks I conducted with Mr. Steven Boone. Since I'm doing the Sidney seminar on 2/22, here's our long read on Mr. Poitier and his career. bigmediavandal.blogspot.com/2016/04/blac...
Black Man Talk: Sidney Poitier: Defiance, Determination and Dinner
by Steven Boone and Odie "Od ienator" Hender son   (The following is a conversation between Big Media Vandalism founder Steven Boone an...
bigmediavandal.blogspot.com
February 15, 2026 at 4:40 PM
odienator.bsky.social
You can't keep Margo Channing--or her biggest fan--down! My intro for ALL ABOUT EVE has been rescheduled at the Paris! It's now 2/25 at 7pm. Come talk killer to killer with Henderson de Witt!

www.paristheaternyc.com/film/all-abo...
Paris Theater - All About Eve
www.paristheaternyc.com
February 15, 2026 at 4:23 PM
odienator.bsky.social
Get a head start on your Oscar pool with my first of three articles on the Oscar-nominated shorts. They hit theaters on February 20. By then, you'll know what I think of all 15, and what I think is gonna win.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/13/a...
Bears, pearls, siblings, an aspiring retiree: looking at this year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts - The Boston Globe
Globe movie critic Odie Henderson makes his prediction for which film will win.
www.bostonglobe.com
February 15, 2026 at 4:19 PM
odienator.bsky.social
Bostonians, come to my @thecoolidge.bsky.social seminar about A RAISIN IN THE SUN on Feb. 22 at 1:15pm. We're showing the movie afterwards. I put on a good show--informative, entertaining and not at all stodgy. This my 13th Coolidge seminar, and my 2nd on Mr. Poitier.

coolidge.org/package/semi...
Seminar: A Raisin in the Sun
Langston Hughes' famous question "What happens to a dream deferred?" inspired Lorraine Hansberry to write one of the great plays of the 20th century. In this seminar, Odie Henderson tells you how Hans...
coolidge.org
February 15, 2026 at 4:16 PM
odienator.bsky.social
While I'm mentioning brackets, don't forget to vote in the Globe's Olympic Movies bracket! We're on the 2nd round right now. Still mad THE CUTTING EDGE lost in the first round. I co-wrote the blurbs.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/11/a...
Bracket: Vote for the Greatest Olympic movie of all time in the Reel Olympics, Round 2 - The Boston Globe
Discover the best Olympics-themed movies with The Reel Olympics! Vote for your favorite and see which film will win Globe gold.
www.bostonglobe.com
February 15, 2026 at 4:03 PM
odienator.bsky.social
The Disney bracket today is a toughee! I bring it to your attention so you can vote! You're welcome!
mousterpiece.bsky.social Josh Spiegel @mousterpiece.bsky.social · 9h
Today in the second round of the Walt Disney Animation Studios bracket, a wayfaring young woman goes up against a kindly young bell-ringer. This should be fun.

1️⃣ <a href="https://poll.blue/p/3jH1QH/1" class="hover:underline text-blue-600 dark:text-sky-400 no-card-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-link="bsky">Moana
2️⃣ <a href="https://poll.blue/p/3jH1QH/2" class="hover:underline text-blue-600 dark:text-sky-400 no-card-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-link="bsky">The Hunchback of Notre Dame

📊 Show results
February 15, 2026 at 4:02 PM
odienator.bsky.social
Yuck! AN AMERICAN IN PARIS is on TCM. Not even Gene Kelly can save that dreadful script (which won a freakin' Oscar) and that ballet at the end is pretentious torture that goes on for 30 minutes longer than THE BRUTALIST. One of my least favorite musicals ever--and I love musicals.
February 15, 2026 at 1:23 AM
Reposted by Odie Henderson
stevensantos.bsky.social
White people have so long defined free speech as getting away with saying childish, witless insults. Real people are fighting for their lives and this is what they're fighting for.
michaelhobbes.bsky.social Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 1d
No. This guy isn’t even a Democrat and fat-shaming is not what people mean when they talk about ‘dark woke’ or ‘woke 2’.

slate.com/news-and-pol...
In January, Florida Rep. Randy Fine made a typically bigoted post on X about his colleague in the House of Representatives, Ilhan Omar. The post was in conversation with a specious right-wing conspiracy alleging that Omar's net worth had increased, nefariously, through a variety of unspecified means-perhare cryptically linked back to her Somali heritage. Fine asserted that to "solve all this," Omar ought to be "denaturalized and deported." The ugliness of the comment prompted Rick Wilson-former Republican strategist, he of the magnanimous Lincoln Project-to step forward. In earlier eras of discourse, the Lincoln Project attempted to coalesce an anti-Trump movement by appealing to our better angels; brandishing Sorkin-ish platitudes about the Soul of America. (There is a Lincoln Project-to step forward. In earlier eras of discourse, the Lincoln Project attempted to coalesce an anti-Trump movement by appealing to our better angels; brandishing Sorkin-ish platitudes about the Soul of America. (There is a reason the rganization name-checks the 16th president.) But Wilson took a much different approach here. Rather than addressing the content of Fine's character, Wilson homed in on something else: The congressman is very, very fat. "Hunting you with harpoons and whaleboats would solve all this," said Wilson, parroting Fine's diction. Among the responses threaded below Wilson's retort, one is an edit of promotional materials for a 2011 television adaptation of Moby-Dick. In it, Fine has been photoshopped in place of the whale. It goes without saying that for a very long time, fat-shaming a politician was previously verboten in the liberal playbook. I also do not possess the wherewithal to cast judgement on whether Fine —who has expressed some genuinely bloodthirsty sentiments about Palestinians— deserves to be bullied in ach a way. But what I can say is that, right now, we are in the midst of a marked pivot in the way the Democratic Party interfaces with its opposition. The shift in attitude hasn't been firmly diagrammed; instead, what's going on here is mostly subconscious, like a collective unlocking of forbidden territory.
February 14, 2026 at 7:19 PM
odienator.bsky.social
"My name is Cupid Valentino, the modern day Cupid."

Happy Valentine's Day from Odie 3000.

"Don't you supposed to be some kind of a player or something?"

youtu.be/b5HyMZdrNLY
Happy Valentine's Day
YouTube video by Outkast - Topic
youtu.be
February 14, 2026 at 7:02 PM
odienator.bsky.social
On this episode of COLUMBO that takes place on THE LOVVVVVE BOAT, the guy from QUANTUM LEAP and BLUE VELVET is framed for a murder committed by THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. Columbo must solve the case while battling seasickness. Directed by the star of THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE.
February 14, 2026 at 6:10 PM
Reposted by Odie Henderson
812filmreviews.com
A really fantastic and personal piece by @odienator.bsky.social about BOYZ N THE HOOD.
Praying for that fool: ‘Boyz N the Hood’ turns 35 - The Boston Globe
Globe film critic Odie Henderson reveals why he loves John Singleton’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece.
www.bostonglobe.com
February 14, 2026 at 12:02 AM
odienator.bsky.social
Sue me, but it still sounds like "chi-chi-chi! Ha-Ha-Ha!" in those movies! Happy Jason Day!
February 13, 2026 at 8:42 PM
odienator.bsky.social
RuPaul's Drag Cat! You betta work!
A photo of a grey cat laying in his bed. Behind him is a photo of a cat that looks just like him and is wearing a blonde wig.
February 13, 2026 at 4:45 PM
odienator.bsky.social
We also have a bracket at the Globe! Vote in our Olympics movie bracket. We're on round 2. Movies that are still in the running include BLADES OF GLORY, COOL RUNNINGS and MIRACLE.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/11/a...
Bracket: Vote for the Greatest Olympic movie of all time in the Reel Olympics, Round 2 - The Boston Globe
Discover the best Olympics-themed movies with The Reel Olympics! Vote for your favorite and see which film will win Globe gold.
www.bostonglobe.com
February 13, 2026 at 4:28 PM
odienator.bsky.social
Everybody wants to be a cat...🎶
February 13, 2026 at 3:03 PM
odienator.bsky.social
A better Heathcliff to spend your weekend with:

youtu.be/9LLb8EBU9nQ
Heathcliff (intro)
YouTube video by Mill Creek Entertainment
youtu.be
February 13, 2026 at 2:52 PM
odienator.bsky.social
My 10 unconventional romances piece is in the paper today. As promised, I'll tell you what they were:

HAROLD AND MAUDE
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND
THE FLY
STARMAN
HER
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
THE ANNIHILATION OF FISH
ELECTRIC DREAMS
WITNESS
LADYHAWKE

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/11/a...
From ‘Her’ to ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ here are 10 unconventional movie romances - The Boston Globe
Want something different for your Valentine’s Day movie?
www.bostonglobe.com
February 13, 2026 at 2:40 PM
odienator.bsky.social
I have four articles in the paper today, but this is the one of which I'm most proud. BOYZ N THE HOOD turns 35 this year, so I wrote an anniversary tribute.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/13/a...
Praying for that fool: ‘Boyz N the Hood’ turns 35 - The Boston Globe
Globe film critic Odie Henderson reveals why he loves John Singleton’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece.
www.bostonglobe.com
February 13, 2026 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by Odie Henderson
markharris.bsky.social
This is the way. When they come at us, we come back at them twofold. Raise that Pride flag every time they take it down. If they prevent that, surround the park with Pride flags. Ruin their petty little lives until they shit rainbows. Never stop. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/n...
N.Y.C. Officials Reinstate Pride Flag at Stonewall After Federal Removal
www.nytimes.com
February 13, 2026 at 4:56 AM
odienator.bsky.social
I was going to do a ranking of 007 theme songs at the paper, but I decided against it because i didn't want to be aggravated. But this would be in the top 10. They did Gladys wrong--she's the only singer of a Bond theme song who isn't mentioned in the opening credits.

youtu.be/ItDMFnCQT-o
Gladys Knight - Licence To Kill (Proms in Hyde Park 2018)
YouTube video by BBC Music
youtu.be
February 13, 2026 at 12:21 AM
odienator.bsky.social
I also wrote about SCHOOL DAZE's best musical number as part of my 11 Great Musical numbers piece at the Globe.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/11/a...
“Straight and Nappy/Madame Re-Re’s Beauty Salon” from “School Daze” (1988) All Spike Lee movies are musicals under the skin, but this actual entry in the genre features this brilliant satirical number about the serious topic of colorism. At a fictional HBCU, two groups of women wage a “West Side Story”-style dance battle in a beauty salon. Bill Lee’s (Spike’s dad) lyrics to “Straight and Nappy” are wickedly funny, and choreographer Otis Sallid’s moves put recognizable stars like Jasmine Guy and Tisha Campbell through their paces. Give us another musical, Spike!
February 12, 2026 at 11:30 PM