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.

Panda Express for lunch; in n out for dinner. California!!

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.”

I think it’s not a bad way to spend an evening.

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.

Thank you for reading it!

I think Prelude to War is kind of the best of them. Huston's war docs are much more bracing and cinematic.

Frank Capra finding hippies annoying is very on brand for him anyway.

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.

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.

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!

This is also my go to and is, yes, something I do in the IP.

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.