JJ

@jjdotbiz

i've got style, miles and miles | researcher for the podcast ‘blank check’ | writer for 'check book,' the ‘blank check’ newsletter, and elsewhere sometimes | phd in movies from the university of wisconsin-madison

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Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir jjdotbiz.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

JJ@jjdotbiz· 17d

Cleansing the timeline with this: Martin Scorsese was unaware of the initial controversy surrounding Kundun because he was too locked in on the Gallagher brothers lmao.

222 Scorsese on Scorsese

"As soon as the film was announced it attracted hostility from China, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman commenting that 'this kind of action does not conform with reality'. Scorsese only learned of this indirectly."

SCORSESE: “I was in England and the big drama on television news was that Oasis had broken up, which filled every bulletin, so I had no idea what else was going on in the world. I like Oasis, so I thought it was a pity, but that’s the kind of thing that happens. Then I happened to see the financial news, which had an item on the Chinese having lodged a formal complaint against a film being made about the Dalai Lama, and that was the first hint that there were problems.”

JJ@jjdotbiz· 17d

Ok, fine, one more thing: I think people this smart shouldn't be using the word "slop" at all but especially not in this context. Be serious, the way you are about everything else other than movies, apparently.

Rebecca Solnit: "Also it seems more a shame than a guilt culture; this guilt seems very anachronistic Hollywood biopic slop and just not interesting. Too, I can't watch Matt Damon without thinking he's taking the minivan to the mall; he's not a crafty, cunning, many-turning guy. She thinks so too:" Then she links to Emily Wilson's article.

JJ@jjdotbiz· 17d

Lady Gaga: There can be 100 people in the room, and 99 don’t believe in you, and one does and that was him.

JJ@jjdotbiz· 19d

The other contenders right now, I think.

JJ@jjdotbiz· 19d

My favorite album of the year so far.

JJ@jjdotbiz· 22d

No Frontwards but... good band imo.

Pavement setlist at the Salt Shed in Chicago on 7/22/2026

Grounded
Summer Babe
Gold Soundz
Silence Kid
Black Out
At&T
In the Mouth a Desert
Linden
Embassy Row
Elevate Me Later
Trigger Cut
Fight This Generation
Zurich is Stained
The Hexx
Painted Soldiers
Unfair
We Dance
Cut Your Hair
Harness Your Hopes
Date with Ikea
Range Life
Spit on a Stranger
Conduit for Sale
Stop Breathing

Encore

Stereo
Perfume-V
Here

JJ@jjdotbiz· 24d

I think this is the first time I’ve ever actually used the “change banner” feature.

My Letterboxd “review” of The Odyssey, five stars and a heart:

ME: Okay so in this post, well

TELEMACHUS: …

ME: First, let me explain the discourse of the day so this makes sense to you haha.

PENELOPE: Oh you’re funny

JJ@jjdotbiz· 29d

This is so bad

JJ@jjdotbiz· 29d

Today marks ten years since I married my wife, the person responsible for pretty much everything good in my life. We are headed back home to Milwaukee tomorrow to celebrate. And nature has given us quite a wonderful gift.

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jul 13

Sorry to admit that I am my own editor.

Back in the Bottle

The highlight of Finding Dory—in this humble researcher’s opinion—is its big final action set piece, in which a fucking octopus drives a damn truck. But, Stanton revealed to BFI, the film almost had another big action set piece:

For almost two years, there was an entire storyline where Marlon and Nemo got separated from Dory early when the squid chased them, and they didn’t even know where she went. They got stuck in the container yard, you know, the container graveyard, and they bumped into the tank gang, all stuck in one water bottle, sealed. Like, how the heck did that happen? And it turned out we made them this crack Mission: Impossible team. Once they got out of their bags, they went everywhere. They went over the DMZ, they had done everything. And they helped Marlon and Nemo, through all these crazy adventures with flying fish and everything, make it and find her. And it was really funny…6

The sequence was removed, Stanton said, to help center the film’s emotional arc on its protagonist: “[E]very time we were with them, we were forgetting Dory’s agenda. And it was diluting you caring about her as you went through the movie.”7 The IMF, it turned out, was for the Birds, and not the Stantons. (Let’s see if this makes it to publication.)

MJ Renderman (Let’s See If This Makes It to Publication)

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jul 7

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jul 6

YouTube page for New Order’s “World in Motion”. Top comment: “Welcome back everyone”

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jul 3

10 years ago today, my oldest, Ricky, first graced the Earth with his presence.

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 25

Liked by Letterboxd.

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 24

I think this is the single most unnerving vocal delivery I have ever heard in a video game.

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 22

Might be something nastier than a cold tbh.

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 17

r/blankies post from five years ago

"Hi, all! I'm JJ, Blank Check's new researcher!"

585 votes . 115 comments

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 17

He just like me fr

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 15

Oh they cooked with the art (and the movies) for my birthday month…

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 13

Spoilers I guess.

Breaking into the local news station, demanding I be put on air in a few minutes, telling the director he’s going to want to get New York on the line, they’ll be picking this up, sitting down at the desk, staring down the barrel of the camera, announcing that today is Disclosure Day, and then hitting play on the song I posted on IG stories and Bluesky to zero combined likes

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 11

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 8

Sharing this one here in full for the Substack-averse.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE AUSSIER (ONE LAST TIME)
Peter Weir’s Quiet Goodbye
There are many ways one could measure the career high point represented by Peter Weir’s eleventh and twelfth theatrical feature films—1998’s The Truman Show and 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World—but here’s just one: both films netted Weir the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, making him just one of three directors to ever win that award for two consecutive films. (The other two: John Schlesinger for 1969’s Midnight Cowboy and 1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday and Alfonso Cuarón for 2013’s Gravity and 2018’s Roma.) Despite Master and Commander’s relatively meager box office returns, Peter Weir had, by most accounts, entered the most acclaimed period of his illustrious career, three-plus decades in.

The good times, however, did not roll. The seven years between the release of Master and Commander and the release of Weir's thirteenth-and final-film, The Way Back, marked the longest gap in the director's filmography. In that interim period, Weir signed on to a number of doomed projects:
The War Magician, a WWII drama produced by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; Pattern Recognition, a William Gibson adaptation penned by Children of Men's David Arata and later Game of Thrones' D.B. Weiss; and, most notoriously, Shantaram, a globe-spanning crime film starring Johnny Depp.
But Weir was not taken to lamenting these lost films. "If I look back at the ... three," Weir told The Playlist, "I don't have any regrets. There's not one that I feel I should have pursued further. I think they were all sort of aborted naturally."_ From a certain perspective-and you really have to stretch your neck to see it this way, admittedly—you might even consider this a productive era. "If I can use the analogy of a pilot," Weir explained to The New York Times, "for those five or six years I was constantly inside the simulator, doing a lot of writing, thinking about how to make a story work on the screen."2

That work would culminate with The Way Back, a movie with a fifth of the budget of Master and Commander, cobbled together with funding from a non-profit education organization (National Geographic) and an Emirati film studio (Imagenation Abu Dhabi), that grossed about a third of a Blackhat at the domestic box office. If there was anything to rue, it was a bygone industry. "The market," Weir said in Time Out New York, "is now primarily for children or the films are childish."3 Weir expanded on these thoughts in The Washington Post: "I am surprised, even amongst acquaintances of friends of my children in their thirties, that ... you revisit childhood by going to the cinema as an adult. I find that quite fascinating, in a way."4 Fascinating does not necessarily mean good, I think it's safe to say.
Despite the choppy waters, Weir intended to stay afloat. "I could always get out if I wanted to," he told Time Out. "But in a way, filmmakers never retire. I think you just have to adapt."_ Evolution was easier said than done, though—especially in your late sixties.
"At this point in my life," Weir shared, a little wistfully, in The New York Times, "I want a large canvas." Weir's sojourn in Hollywood may have come to a close, but, in 2011, he

was hopeful, despite it all, that there was still more to come: “I remain optimistic, with some reserve, that the wheel will turn.”7
In May 2012, it seemed like it might have been: at the Cannes Film Festival, Weir shopped an adaptation of A Visit from the Goon Squad author Jennifer Egan’s 2006 novel The Keep, an Eastern European haunted house story centering on two estranged American cousins. Attached to star were Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace.8 In November, the German company Integral Film joined the France-based SBS Prods as a co-producer on the project, with shooting set to take place in Thuringia and near Berlin in 2013.9 But the project died a quiet death; the large canvas remained unpainted.
Twelve years later, Weir made it official at the Festival de la Cinémathèque in Paris: “I am retired,” even though that was something filmmakers never do. He added, “Why did I stop cinema? Because, quite simply, I have no more energy.”10

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 5

Realized while compiling this dossier that Martin Scorsese, best known for mob movies, actually has a varied filmography, when you take a closer look.

The Age of Innocence (1993) Research and Notes for Blank Check

Table of Contents

1-8 Development
8-11 Cast
11-16 Production
16-18 Release and Reception

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 5

Film Comment, July/August 1977

This interview took place May 25, 1977 during a break at Goldwyn Studios, where Martin Scorsese has been dubbing his new film, New York, New York.

Martin Scorsese: Hello, I've had two hours sleep. I'm exhausted

JJ@jjdotbiz· Jun 2

Heads-up that the June 11th Blank Check Special Features Patreon episode about the Billie Eilish concert doc will ALSO include an hour of audio from our Wisconsin Film Festival screening of Babe: Pig in the City this past April.