So, I made it all of two months until I missed a scheduled post on this website revamp. Luckily for me, the deadline was purely one of my own making and the only person annoyed with my missing it? Me.

Which, let’s be honest, sometimes that can be worse.

But! Fear not my intrepid internal perfectionism, this is the year you shall learn to adapt. In order to do that, I’m going to take a page from the low-cost airline playbook… which ironically is nothing more than a scribbled note on a crumpled receipt for bottom shelf vodka (but I mean if you were an LCC what else would you drink?) that reads: you can’t be perfect… so be inept and charge $99 for it.

And with that here’s some reads and watches, and general rambling. For those of you following along with Nivalis, the cyberpunk slice-of-life video game I’m a writer on, our developer Ion Lands shared a new community update here.

Now, off to whatever else I was supposed to do today. Oh yeah, fill out the airline refund request form for an 18 hour and 4 minute delay while knowing full well that it’s going to get rejected. To quote South Park: We know you have a choice in airlines, and apparently you made the wrong one.

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Recent Films

• Theater Camp (Hulu) – a funny and heartwarming romp about a bunch of misfits and a stage – 4*

• Shiva Baby (HBO) – a dark comedic look at family dynamics and the fallout when your ex-girlfriend and sugar daddy are at the same funeral – 3*

• Oppenheimer (Peacock) – Christopher Nolan’s next chapter in his continual decent into directorial dominance – 4*

• Suncoast (Hulu) – a raw coming-of-age film about a young woman who bonds with an activist – 5* (see below for more notes)

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Recent Reads

• Big Swiss by Jen Beagin – Follow along for the inappropriate romp that occurs when a transcriptionist working for an… interesting… sex therapist develops a crush blinding infatuation with a client – 2*

• The Elissas by Samantha Leach – Pretty sure there were times that a stint in one of those troubled teen camps wasn’t too far from my future. Leach writes about the deaths of three friends who frequented these kinds of ‘camps’ and the void they left behind – 4*

• Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 3 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel – sometimes, you just wanna read about people getting it on – 3*

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*a longish note about Suncoast for those who have time to kill*

Among an absolutely stellar cast that looked completely natural and alive in every scene, Nico Parker and Woody Harrelson are lighthouses you didn’t know you needed guidance from.

While the bones are similar to other such stories (coming-of-age, dysfunctional family, unfair burdens) there is something so …organic… about Suncoast, and something that blends both ends of the troubled youth and experienced guide figure into one blurry watercolor.

Doris (Nico Parker) is a teenager living with her mother (Laura Linney) who unfortunately, though understandably (key word), is intently focused on Doris’s younger brother who needs to be taken to a specialized facility due to a crippling medical condition. It’s here that Doris meets Paul Warren (Woody Harrelson), an activist participating in protests surrounding a landmark medical case.

There’s a lot of ground to cover given that premise and at first I was skeptical about whether or not Suncoast (written, directed, and based on the experiences of Laura Chinn) could cover all of it in the tight 1hr 49m run time.

It does.

And so much more.

Not only does Suncoast perfectly encapsulate Doris’s tumultuous home life, the push-and-pull want of being left alone and being starved for attention at the same time, but it also breathes an insane amount of life into secondary characters. Every interaction felt real, and each line of dialogue was as sharp as a knife ready to leave serrated wounds in your chest.

Ten movies in this year and Suncoast is easily the best so far.

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