Films

My taste in films is difficult to explain. I’ve tried a few times. It never quite lands cleanly. It’s not a genre. It’s closer to a pattern, a film that feels like it’s asking something, not just showing you something. You finish it, and instead of moving on, you sit there for a minute. Sometimes longer. The pattern shows up most clearly in what I think of as “one-room films.” Small cast. One location, or close to it. No spectacle to hide behind. No world-ending stakes. Just people in a room and something unresolved between them that refuses to stay quiet. ...

If you have not watched Westworld, Season 1 is one of the better things you can spend a Sunday on. The premise is a theme park populated by AI hosts, androids built to be used, reset, and used again. On the surface it is a Western. Underneath, it is asking something harder: what makes experience real? What makes a self a self? If a person’s memories are written and rewritten by someone else, does anything they feel still count? ...