The Long Shot

Somewhere around 3,000 nautical miles separate Liverpool from the Eastern Seaboard. Nowadays, aboard a cruise ship, the journey is an uneventful week at sea.

It’s been just about five years since Charlize Theron floored us as Imperator Furiosa, the one-armed, short-haired, bad-ass war captain turned renegade who robbed Tom Hardy of the spotlight in Mad Max: Fury Road even though it was Hardy, not Theron, playing the titular character.

Tom Cruise has been battling MiGs, arms dealers, rogue nations, Hitler, and extraterrestrials for as long as I’ve been alive. Yet it wasn’t until Top Gun: Maverick that Cruise finally confronted his true and ultimate nemesis, an enemy he’ll never defeat, but one that he’s obsessed with staving off for as long as humanly possible: Time.

To avoid a career arc that is beginning to mimic the trajectory of the once great, now neither good nor great Felix Hernandez, Jennifer Lawrence desperately needs a win — the kind of win that will allow her to reclaim the throne as the top female movie star on the planet. It’s been six or seven years — depending on how you feel about the X-Men franchise — since her last objectively great entry to a loaded filmography. Back in 2013, her second collaboration with David O.

So. Yeah. It’s been a while. When I started The Long Shot, my aim was to write once a week so that every Monday morning, you’d wake up to a newsletter in your inbox — probably buried in your promotions tab where you’d never see it, click it, or read it, but I digress. For the first 26 weeks of The Long Shot’s existence, I met that goal. And then law school happened.

The first rule of running a mailbag is that you need to get enough questions so that you actually have questions that require answering; otherwise you’re just a writer with an empty bag. The second rule of running a mailbag is that you need to have enough questions from real people; otherwise you’re just answering questions for people who don’t exist or your friends that you begged to ask you questions, which kinda goes against the entire point of a mailbag.

Hello movie friends — a quick update before today’s post: I start my last semester of law school next week, so the newsletters will be sparse over the coming months (I do have an Academy Awards post planned). But The Long Shot will be fully armed and operational soon. This year, I’ll get back to writing deep dives on the movies I love — just as soon as I graduate from law school in May and pass take the bar exam in July. Today’s rankings are entirely personal to me.

It wasn’t until the end that I understood why Knives Out2 is titled Glass Onion. The movie is as fragile and hollow as its name suggests. Sure, it might be perfectly pleasant, but crack open its superficial layer and nothing of substance remains. First, a few preliminary notes. This post contains spoilers for Glass Onion, which is now streaming on Netflix. Rian Johnson,who wrote and directed Knives Out and Glass Onion, is one of my favorite directors.

There’s a scene near the beginning of Killers of the Flower Moon that serves as an exercise in patience. Lily Gladstone’s character, Mollie, invites Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest, who is trying to win her heart and oil rights, inside for dinner. After she offers Ernest whiskey (the good kind), a storm erupts outside. Ernest gets up to close the window, but Mollie tells him to stop. “We need to be quiet for a while,” she tells him. Together, they sit.