We’re back with thoughts on the things I experienced over the past week: 2(+) movies, a TV show available on YouTube, 2 novels, and one concert.

Movies & TV

Rent-A-Cat (Naoko Ogigami, 2012)
Well this is how I learned that my first ever critical home is no more. I last saw Rent-A-Cat 14 years ago, at the 2012 Japan Cuts film festival, and when I went to find my review… flixist.com returned an error. Sad. I feel like I should write a eulogy… 

In any case, I loved Rent-A-Cat then (thanks Wayback Machine!) and liked it a whole lot now. I stand by my critique that it is a 90-minute movie with a 110-minute runtime, but it's really four episodes of an early 2010s web series unceremoniously strung together. Each of the segments (appropriately separated by a few seconds of cute cat footage) is wholly self-contained but follows the same basic structure with many of the same side characters and also cats. And the cats are all very cute doing cute cat things across the frame. And that's what you're there for, as they offset the melancholy that's often on display as Sayoko rents cats to lonely people who need the holes in their hearts filled. And it's those lonely people who really get most of the film’s pathos. There is this notion of character growth apparent in her ever-expanding list of life goals, but she does not change in any meaningful way. Rather, she’s the catalyst for other people's growth.

And that's a shame when this is all there is – when it is not the web series it seems like… but I dunno. Hard to stay mad at this many cats. 

Disclosure Day (Stephen Spielberg, 2026)
Real good. Recently read Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem books, so I’ve got some broader thoughts on “What if aliens were real” that I’ll put into a full review later this week.

Dragon Fight (Billy Tang, 1989)
The latest film screened in the monthly Sundays on Fire series, Dragon Fight is a 1989 Hong Kong action film starring Jet Li and Stephen Chow shot in San Francisco. You've never heard of it. I'd never heard of it. It's so rare that there seemingly isn't even a 35mm print with English subtitles, meaning our beloved host Grady Hendrix had to manually trigger an SRT file being projected on top of the film. (Honestly, more readable than the ones burned into most of these prints!)

And man I'm glad he went through the effort because Dragon Fight is awesome. It’s got everything you could want from a San Fran-set action movie: cars launching over the hills and landing in showers of sparks, a guy in a helicopter shooting up a yacht, an out-of-nowhere sequence in a strip club, and just the most swearing I’ve ever heard in a Hong Kong flick (there’s a fair amount of English, and a fair amount of that English is just people shouting “Fuck you”). Also, ya know, the type of fight scenes you don’t see in American movies because American stunt performers have rules that say “You can’t do things that are guaranteed to cause us bodily harm” and so they flew in Hong Kong perform don’t fly in Hong Kong performers to suffer the stunts. These aren’t the craziest fights or falls or hits that I’ve ever seen, but they don’t need to be to be a good time.

And this is a good gosh dang time. 

Taskmaster (UK) Season 21
Taskmaster is really such a beautiful premise: five mostly-comedians do silly things at the bidding of a man with a clipboard to then be judged by a different man sitting on a throne in order to win a cheap golden bust of the latter man’s head. Comedy ensues.

And the beauty of that premise is just how infinitely far it can go. I watch every episode week after week, and I’ll admit that over a thousand tasks across the hundreds of episodes across the UK, Australia, and New Zealand… it’s all blended together a bit. But I'm still watching and still enjoying. 

And sure, Season 21 will ultimately be remembered as “The one with Kumail Nanjiani” by everyone up to and including me… but it's also the season where Veep creator Armando Iannucci revealed his backup plan as a Ben Kingsley impersonator, where Joanna Page told an epic tale to contextualize every moment she was given the opportunity, where Amy Gledhill didn't realize that hitting a balloon filled with paint would cause it to burst, where Joel Dommet was subjected to perhaps the cruelest single-person task to date… and so many more hilarious moments that make the show just keep on working week after week. 

If you’re not watching Taskmaster, which is for free on YouTube, what the heck dude. Watch Taskmaster! Australia’s Season 5 just started!

Books & Other:

A Children’s Bible (Lydia Millet, 2020)
The latest pick in the Anthony Jeselnik Book Club (the subject of an upcoming review!), A Children’s Bible is a unique spin on calamity: a climate-change-fueled superstorm strikes a Somewhere, New York estate where a group of wealthy families are vacationing for the summer. A flood, even. Like in the bible. 

Despite the name, this isn’t actually a religious story: there is no god*, but it’s best to think of it through that sort of lens. Taken literally, the events are often impossible (or at least incomprehensible), but as a parable (which the internet tells me is distinguished from a fable largely by its used of human characters), I rolled with them and rarely asked the sort of questions I otherwise might have… not that you need to question what it’s all about because this book is very happy to tell you what it’s about.

We see everything through the children, ages 9-17, because they’re the only ones who really do anything most of the time. And eventually this comes when the parents get all uppity about the kids being all disrespectful and the kids are all “You did this” and the parents are all “What could we do” and the kids are all “Literally anything” and the parents are like “Oh yeah I guess so lol” and so the kids have to take over and deal with the ramifications of their pathetic parents’ non-actions. (It’s like that scene in Mad Max Fury Road when they’re yelling at Nux except way less awesome.)

And sure it’s preachy, but that doesn’t make it wrong. This is absolutely how I feel about older generations and also my own generation and also myself. It did not get me to think differently about the world because I already think plenty about the climate apocalypse, but for people who don’t consider this stuff as much? Maybe it will get them thinking a bit differently. The best time to start to care was decades ago but the next best time is right now. 

Death of the Author (Nnedi Okorafor, 2025)
It’s quite the statement to name a book this way. It’s like calling your movie “Auteur Theory.” Or maybe like when Nate Parker named his 2016 Nat Turner film The Birth of a Nation: an ironic reclamation of the title from D.W. Griffith’s KKK, uh, classic. (Interesting to consider if it would have had any meaningful impact on that name had sexual violence allegations against Parker not completely derailed its release.) Unfortunately, there’s really no good reason for Nnedi Okorafor to have named her book this way, because it at best feints towards Roland Barthes’s theories around what happens when a work leaves the author’s hands and enters a reader’s… and certainly has nothing of substance to say about them. (Honestly, it’s barely about an author at all: Zelu wrote a bad novel that she disavows and then a good one everyone likes and then spends the rest of it mad that everyone wants her to write that sequel she’s already been paid millions of dollars for.)

The book is told in three formats: 

1. The story of Zelu, who writes an extremely popular science fiction novel called Rusted Robots and we are vaguely told will do some shit that gets her canceled or whatever

2. Interviews with her friends and family alluding to the shit she does that will eventually get her canceled or whatever

3. Passages from Rusted Robots

I liked the first part most of the time (when I wasn’t being expected to feel bad for a multi-millionaire with writer's block), hated the second part all of the time (I cannot fathom caring about what a writer’s family/friends think about them), and liked the third part some of the time (not my kinda book but I see the appeal).

But it really all fell apart for me at the end. After all this setup, we’re never told what this awful thing Zelu did is, so we have to assume it’s the final decision she makes, which is objectively pretty wild but also feels absolutely like the kind of thing someone could weather? (A book about that would have been at least 30% more interesting than this one.)

But the frustration of that total copout pales in comparison to the MC Escher-esque revelation that Rusted Robots is not a book within Death of the Author, but that Death of the Author is a book within Rusted Robots which was actually the real timeline the whole time wooowwwww

Fucking stupid. 

Anton Brucker’s Symphony No 8 in C Minor, as performed by The Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall 

Some friends had a Thing come up and offered us their obstructed view tickets and honestly “unexpectedly and for free” seems like a much better way to get to Carnegie Hall than “practice.” In any case, it further solidified two thoughts I've long held:

1. Live music is amazing. 

2. Classical music is extremely boring.

The acoustics in that concert hall are unmatched: dozens of instruments naturally mixed by the shape of the space, a space you are sharing with hundreds of other people, each of whom receive those sounds ever so slightly differently. Their presence is as crucial as the orchestra’s: there really is nothing quite like the moments before the music begins as every single one of those people settles into silence. 

But almost immediately, my mind started to wander. In that 80something minutes, I wouldn't say I really “listened” to more than ¼ of it, and I liked what I heard well enough but inevitably I would look at the conductor and start thinking about Tar… or look at the three harpists (who as far as I could tell played a totally of four minutes) and start think about work… or look at the guy in front of me who was seated literally around the pole and thinking about how frustrating it is to buy sneakers… or but actually and because I was thinking about all of it! The music became background noise for my buzzing brain. 

Though there's certainly worse background noise out there.