Emily "Babe" St. James
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emilystjams.bsky.social
Emily "Babe" St. James
@emilystjams.bsky.social
Writer! TV: Yellowjackets. Novel: Woodworking (out now). Podcasts: Arden. Journalism: Vox, A.V. Club, NYT, etc. Like a large language model but for my formative trauma. Newsletter here: https://episodes.ghost.io/
My wife, a friend, and I were having a fun Christmas in a small town in the Oregon mountains one year, and a huge blizzard hit Christmas night. For some reason, Dairy Queen was open, so we got that, and it was the best.
November 24, 2025 at 8:10 AM
Panda Express for lunch; in n out for dinner. California!!
November 24, 2025 at 7:04 AM
She seemed to be there with her kids, so I would have also accepted, “She and Paul Thomas Anderson are the parents of those children.”
November 23, 2025 at 5:24 PM
I think it’s not a bad way to spend an evening.
November 23, 2025 at 5:11 PM
F4 was just too low energy for me in the early going. I didn’t really buy the family chemistry, which is deadly for that project.

Ironically, I thought the cast in the 2015 F4 had the best family chemistry, despite that film being awful in every other way.
November 23, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Thank you for reading it!
November 23, 2025 at 2:56 AM
I think Prelude to War is kind of the best of them. Huston's war docs are much more bracing and cinematic.
November 23, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Frank Capra finding hippies annoying is very on brand for him anyway.
November 22, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Post-WWII he became more or less a pacifist and even said in an interview he would have made a documentary about the Vietnam War called Why We Should Not Fight, but then in other interviews he would be, like, "THESE KIDS TODAY COULDN'T FIGHT A WAR, NOT LIKE WE DID IN MY DAY," so.
November 22, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Capra's politics are extremely muddled -- he was fairly conservative personally, but almost all of his great films espouse at least a superficial progressivism (for their time) -- but he did seem to have a real appreciation for diversity, at least until he retired and became an embittered old man.
November 22, 2025 at 11:24 PM
A lot of these films feature footage taken directly from German, Japanese, and Italian sources, turning fascist propaganda inward against itself to expose both its lunacy and its inferiority to a free and democratic society. Weirdly bracing to watch in 2025!
November 22, 2025 at 11:24 PM
This is also my go to and is, yes, something I do in the IP.
November 22, 2025 at 10:55 PM
In a couple of years, I am going to teach them about the inherent blind spots in any awards giving institution, but they’re still just 3.
November 22, 2025 at 7:12 PM