BLUE BEETLE (Ángel Manuel Soto, 2023)

(Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto from a script by Gareth Duner-Alcocer; starring Xolo Maridueña, Belissa Escobedo, Bruna Marquezine, Adriana Barraza, Damián Alcázar, Raoul Trujillo, George Lopez, and Susan Sarandon. Released 15 August 2023; watched 2023w47 via Max )

If you'd've told me ten years ago that the best film in the DCEU would be BLUE BEETLE, I wouldn't have believed you. Yet here we are - and it is, by far, the best: a perfect balance of heart, humor, and thrill. A shame it was lost to the box office undertow of the end of the DCEU and its (much-needed) rebirth into the Gunn/Safran DCU, but hopefully BEETLE finds the audience it deserves in streaming (ironic, given its origins) and physical release. Relief, too, that Xolo Maridueña will continue as Jaime in the new canon; here's hoping for his return sooner rather than later. Wonderful film.

The week’s newsletter is out, the dogchildren are fed, first 30 pages of the day read, and… I guess that’s it. A few more day schedule shifts, and I should have something approximating a proper rise to fall ratio. A pleasant freedom in operating under the mindset of having nothing to prove.

Usually a good indicator that I'm bringing a sequence in for a landing when I delete everything I'd written before – all the notes, scribbles, frustrated pissings and moanings to myself – and churn out a page of something that resembles a workable synthesis. Always seeking that balance between the work being breathless and possessed of room to breathe.

need to revisit but Fassbender brilliant

I WAS TOO YOUNG TO HEAR SILENCE – Patrick Shiroishi

Saxophone (+ glockenspiel) in a parking garage should not be this stunning but I can’t stop obsessing over the magic Shiroishi creates here. Makes me think of what Sonny Rollins's days of woodshedding on the Williamsburg Bridge must have sounded like:

A single saxophone, a glockenspiel, two microphones, a zoom recorder. These are the materials Patrick Shiroishi brought down with him late one night into the cavernous parking structure below a hot pot restaurant in Monterey Park. It was around 1:30AM; the spot was not too far from where Shiroishi grew up, a blank slate shown to him by his dear friend, Noah Klein. A vacant space for a new kind of collaboration—between saxophone and silence, between noise and reverberation, between negative space and self.

In a single, improvised take, Shiroishi recorded his third solo LP, I was too young to hear silence. The record plays like a stripped-down ode to its star instrument. Solo saxophone dazzles and cascades through tangible air, each note hugged and trailed by a lush, natural reverb. Each silence, of which there are many, feels deliberate, sustained, honored.

https://patrickshiroishi.bandcamp.com/album/i-was-too-young-to-hear-silence