What Are We Doing?

Charliebird

Dear Friends,

Many events today are driven by greedy sadistic billionaire bullshit. The world is rife with it. In Hollywood, this has taken the form of the big news of the week, as the Ellison family’s Paramount, with substantial funding from the Saudi National Fund and other foreign entities, are the new buyers of Warner Bros Discovery, having made a superior offer to Netflix’s. Netflix received a $2.8 billion kill fee: I find that disgusting. For the country and the film business the switcheroo from Netflix to Paramount is just going from bad to bad. There are many entities fighting this merger; maybe it’ll collapse.

It’s a particularly weak week for new movies with only one wide release: the horror sequel Scream 7. There’s an obvious pick of the week for us New Yorkers, however: Charliebird, which won the best narrative feature award at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Written by and starring Samantha Smart, and directed by Libby Ewing, the Texas-based film is about a music therapist and the bond she forms with a troubled teenage patient. We’ll see it on Tuesday (Mar 3) at the Angelika at 7:25pm.

When I started this weekly movie pick 15 months ago, I thought it might develop into a cinema club of some kind. I haven’t really tried to make that happen, but now I’d like to try. Starting on March 31, at the end of the month my weekly pick will be tagged as the Last Tuesday Movie Club, and not only will I choose the movie, venue, and time per usual, I will also choose an after-movie hangout spot. I suppose I’ve experienced a lot of pleasure going to the movies every week, but not enough discussion. Save the date!

To the pleasure of films and the discussions they spark,

Josh