Intro:
Hey hey! Grateful to take the reins at Hope For Film. I am Mo_Diggs and I write about media, culture, politics and tech here and here. As I have mentioned numerous times, this decade is unique because film, not music, is at the center of countercultural rage and countercultural cool. These are some of the best reports from the line of battle!
1
The End of Spectacle
Alex Rollins Berg typically writes great essays on film but he may have outdone himself here. AI has made spectacle besides the point now. People want stories now. The blockbuster success of The Odyssey this past weekend proves the point. It is one thing to retell a classic tale and another to try to revive He-Man again.
2
A Film For Our Times, Unfortunately
I have been excited about Backrooms and Obsession more as a business story; how both films outperformed a Star Wars sequel. But increasingly I have had to make the distinction between liking a film’s box office performance (and the implications for what that means for future films) and liking the films themselves. I liked that last year’s Sinners was a blockbuster based on an original idea, but I did not consider it Best Picture material.
Sam Jennings is a current film critic who hearkens back to the critics of yore that wrote reviews you couldn’t flatten into a RT score. His ambivalence for the film Backrooms beguiles me that much more than most critics cut-and-dry thumbs up/thumbs down. While criticizing the film’s emptiness, he also acknowledges how well the film reflects our current mood. Ironically I am even having difficulty encapsulating his opinion in this paragraph, all the more reason to give it a read for yourself. Like most great critics, agreeing with him is not a requirement for enjoying and appreciating him.
3
Small Cinemas in a Quiet Neighborhood
What most people don’t get about revolution: it is as much about moving with secrecy and stealth as it is about massive explosions. Filmmaker Magazine’s comprehensive overview of the microcinema movement in Ridgewood, a relatively quiet countercultural hub in Queens, is the type of article you revisit again and again. Not just to read about the great theaters and series; living close to Ridgewood like I do, in Bushwick, it lovingly captures its charms. But please share the link discreetly.
4
The Dumb Comedy Renaissance
Here’s what I wrote in my newsletter back in 2024:
Cult film Hundreds of Beavers (when’s the last time you heard “cult film” regarding a contemporary movie) was shot on a shoestring budget and self-distributed. Through word of mouth and online buzz, it more than made back its money. Hundreds of Beavers (which I haven’t seen yet) is the inverse of Snakes on a Plane. Snakes on a Plane was a Hollywood film that got mocked many months before its release. The title — and the revelation that foul-mouthed star Samuel Jackson was attached — led to memes and fan-made trailers (including the infamous line that was later added to the actual movie: “I’m tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane”). The actual release fell short of studio expectations because, at that time, Internet culture was not synonymous with culture. Hundreds of Beavers, of course, had no pre-release hype. Unlike Snakes, Beavers was confidently stupid, from the page to the screen. It might not be a Clerks-level success, but its profit margins were good enough to to get it profiled in Variety.
A year later, I wrote this about Friendship:
If it surprises you how popular this film is with the youth, you are forgetting that comedy is the lingua franca of Gen Z. It is also mind-boggling that most studios had cold feet about Tim Robinson as a movie star, when most youths are laughing at his “I Think You Should Leave” sketches on TikTok and Reels while avoiding going to the multiplex to watch any of the “more bankable” stars. Friendship might just become this generation’s secret handshake, like Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited was for a different one. The roaring laughter of the theater audience (which hasn’t been heard after years of Hollywood avoiding comedies to better appeal to global markets and indie studios steering clear so as not to disturb their stuffy liberal patrons) is like the signal of a new age, like the opening arpeggio of The Byrd’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” that announced the arrival of the Sixties.
Right diagnosis, wrong patient. Turns out Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is the film that has inspired a cultish legion that no rock band this decade has inspired. AV Club’s Erik Adams explores how the anarchic spirit of dumb comedy is back in films like Gail Daughtry and Jackass: Best And Last. It’s only fair I give him a block quote:
But with the death of the theatrical studio comedy, and comedy itself turning into an increasingly irksome battleground in the Forever Culture Wars, it became more difficult to find the proudly silly and the inventively asinine. The art of the hard joke seemed to escape an entire generation of TV writers. Every new Adam Sandler Netflix movie felt cheaper and lazier than the last. David Zaslav did his best Judge Doom impression and tried to drop two whole Looney Tunes features into The Dip.
But in this wet, hot, American summer of 2026, the tide seems to be turning. A new Jackass opened a few weeks ago; the latest from David Wain, Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass, is out this weekend. Coyote Vs. Acme finally sees the light at the end of the tunnel painted onto a rock wall in August. A new age of stupid comedy is dawning. It’s about damn time.
5
Jonathan Rosenbaum
I cannot tell you how many people I meet that don’t know who Jonathan Rosenbaum is. He is a legendary film critic who wrote for The Chicago Reader and helped define the midnight movie along with Village Voice legend J. Hoberman. He is on Substack now and the fact that I have more subscribers than he does is unacceptable. Much of his writing was from the frontline of New Hollywood as well as the ‘90s indie film revolution. He happily skewered the sacred cows of both movements (Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino respectively). While reading his deep dive on Richard Pryor, I stopped with petulant impatience when he maligned Live on the Sunset Strip, but I came back weeks later and realized…he didn’t malign the special. He simply didn’t submit to it with unwavering fealty. Like a true critic, where most people see gods, he sees mortals who deserve less — or more — zeroes in their paychecks.
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I lived in Chicago from 1995–2004 and am quite familiar with Jonathan Rosenbaum's reviews for the Chicago Reader!