Jay Gabler

Writer, editor, etc. For more information, see jaygabler.com.

[thetangential]

Thousands of visitors each year, writes Dan Martino, sign on for one-hour BYOB voyages aboard his Cottage City Oysters farm tour vessel. Each tour involves “a lively, multifaceted conversation about oysters, the culture, and the future of humanity, all while drinking our favorite beverages, eating an endless supply of freshly harvested oysters, and cruising around in one of the most beautiful and pristine ocean environments the world has to offer.”

Those conversations informed Martino’s The Oyster Book, and upon being informed of this on page four, it’s hard not to spend each of the remaining three hundred six pages wishing you were out there on the boat instead of sitting somewhere else reading the longer, less flavorful version of the author’s oyster schtick.

read more

[thetangential]

When a movie makes you realize “Empire Builder” is not a good thing.

[thetangential]

There's a certain type of moviegoer who sees these two stills and thinks, "Well, that looks absolutely miserable."

If that's not you, check out Sentimental Value.

[thetangential]

The British Arrows award-winning ads make a popular seasonal attraction because they're often wildly entertaining: witty and visually inventive. The presentation always involves some emotional whiplash, though, as cozy ads for tea bags and yeast go cheek-to-jowl with PSAs about domestic violence and cancer treatment.

Considering each year's crop, it's hard to resist the impulse to also consider the ads as a sort of barometer for the world's well-being. What hopes and concerns do they reveal? What anxieties do they play on, and where do they turn for comfort?

It's been an unsettling stretch on both sides of the Pond. The ads in 2010 touched on topics of personal responsibility (safe sex, intoxicated driving), while this year's clips include a plea for aid for children of war (with a harrowing portrait of Ukrainian refugees) and a reminder to support the independent press (a reminder that when Putin took office, he did so with praise for a rising tide of freedom).

Amid a numbing drumbeat of discouraging developments, this year's ads arrive as a welcome reminder that it is, in fact, still possible to actually feel things.

read more

[jaygabler]

Crazy how the UK still has department stores — with advertising budgets, no less!

[thetangential]

The best comedy comes from characters whose motivations we understand and can empathize with when they find themselves in funny situations. If a filmmaker just cuts straight to the funny situations, we have nothing to do but shrug.

In The French Italian, writer-director Rachel Wolther at first follows the former approach, drawing us into a relatable predicament involving a New York couple and their obnoxious downstairs neighbors. As the screw turns, though, Wolther loses the thread and loses our interest.

read more

[thetangential]

4-LOM is Zuckuss? Max Rebo plays with his feet? Mini-Rigs aren't real? Three Star Wars retcons Kenner kids can't accept

[thetangential]

Why has lo-fi music become ubiquitous in relaxation contexts? In part, it’s because the simple digital arrangements don’t demand attention: because they are unpolished, they give the listener permission to zone out. At the same time, there’s a poignance to the form’s often short, hazily evocative tracks. They will never be anything more than they are, and invite the listener to live in the moment.

Despite writer/director Hiroshi Okuyama’s high-fidelity cinematography, My Sunshine has a lo-fi appeal: cozy, yet yearning. The 100-minute feature is full of long close-ups and extended ice-skating sequences, inviting contemplation rather than cogitation.

The movie is so gentle, in fact, that at the halfway mark, viewers may wonder if the plot is going to have any conflict at all.

read more

[thetangential]

In the movies, there are three types of characters who go to support groups.

First are the people who find genuine redemption, joining the groups with sincerity — and doing so, typically, just before the ending credits roll. Good for them.

Then there are the charismatic troublemakers who only show up because they’re forced to, and often walk out with a new accomplice to share whatever vice they were supposed to be kicking.

Most characters fall into one of those two categories, but occasionally you’ll get a third type: the flim-flammer, someone who lies about a nonexistent personal tragedy or addiction in order to participate.

The best-known example of the latter is the narrator of Fight Club, and now, in Twinless, there’s a much less explosive addition to that canon.

read more

[jaygabler]

Among the thousands of people I'm connected to on Facebook, there's one who regularly posts rage-bait political content that somehow always shows up at the top of my feed, even though I never interact with it.

I know I could unfriend, block, etc., but I decided to give a try to the feature where you can tell Facebook you're "less interested" in a post. I've clicked that several times on this person's posts, to apparently no effect. The algorithm simply...insists.

[thetangential]

The heroine of Swiped encounters so many nasty surprises about people she trusted, filmmaker Rachel Lee Goldenberg might have thought it merciful to spare her audience any such surprises regarding Whitney Wolfe herself. This movie is so kind to Wolfe, even the shortcomings she admits to are more declared than demonstrated. The film picks up most of its edge not from content, but from context: in 2025, disappointing tech bros have discarded even the pretense of empathy as they rise to previously unseen heights of power. If nothing else, Swiped serves as a look-into-the-camera moment in the face of Mark Zuckerberg declaring that corporate America needs more “masculine energy.”

read more

[thetangential]

In an era when any significant pop-culture event yields competing insta-docs on multiple streaming services, there’s something almost quaint about a good old-fashioned reenactment feature. A filmmaker can really stretch their legs when freed from the cycle of witness, journalist, color commenter, rinse, repeat.

For the first hour of The Luckiest Man in America, director Samir Oliveros — who wrote the screenplay with Maggie Briggs — makes good use of that creative freedom in telling the story of Michael Larson. We’re not sure quite what to make of Larson, played by Paul Walter Hauser as an unkempt and jittery but seemingly good-hearted family man who drives his ice cream truck to L.A. for a chance to compete on the game show Press Your Luck in 1984.

Director of photography Pablo Lozano situates Larson in a grainy, color-saturated carnival hellscape. If Dario Argento had become a CBS journeyman, daytime TV might have looked like this. The idea seems to be to put us inside the mind of Larson, haunted by streak-ending “whammies” (including one in a full mascot suit) and taunted by the casino-like illuminated game board.

read more

[jaygabler]

Big announcement! I'm writing and narrating a five-episode podcast about the Edmund Fitzgerald. You can listen to the trailer now!

[jaygabler]

Ever since I was old enough to read chapter books, my all-time favorite book has remained the same: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. It has always struck me as a perfect fantasy, full of wonder and fascination.

Although I was raised Catholic, I was surprised to later learn that the book is a Christian allegory. As a child, I simply took it as a marvelous invention. Perhaps I failed to make the connection because the powerful, complex Aslan seemed so far from the judgmental Christ who had come to seem almost mundane through his classroom-wall ubiquity.

As actor/writer Max McLean points out, in character as Lewis during his one-man stage show Further Up & Further In, Aslan does not promise safety or comfort. Nor does he micromanage his followers’ lives. He merely sits in power, waiting and hoping the beings of Narnia will make a leap of faith: the only choice that can possibly save them.

read more

[thetangential]

Review: “Andor” final season is heart-stopping, jaw-dropping

The second and final season of Andor raises the bar so dramatically on what an adult Star Wars series can be, it nearly escapes the orbit of the franchise that birthed it. Still, there’s a moment in the original Star Wars movie that opened the door for a show like this, a show fans have long awaited.

It’s the moment when Luke Skywalker, returning to his home on Tatooine, finds his aunt and uncle — the only parents he’s ever known — incinerated. The graphic carnage is given Wagnerian weight by John Williams’s score, but isn’t overplayed. Luke has taken his “first step into a larger world,” in more ways than one.

The world of Andor is absolutely vast, and not because of the Force. The show explores a nascent Rebellion that’s heterogeneous in method and philosophy, from the secret military being funded by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) to the independent force led by an impatient Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) to the high-wire spycraft of Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård).

That much was outlined in the show’s acclaimed first season, but the second season is so epic, it makes the initial run feel like mere prelude.

read more

[jaygabler]

Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is full of Yorkshire vocabulary that will fascinate American readers. There’s “aught,” for example, which can either mean “anything” or “nothing” depending on the context.

The word that I find myself dwelling on, though, is “sozlike.” It’s a form of “sorry,” but that “like” is in there at every instance, making the expression sound conditional. I’m sorry, like…I’m, like, sorry?

Among the three girls at the center of Brown’s debut novel, the expression is sometimes made in the form of a simple shrug, omitting the explicit apology altogether. That’s a function of how well the girls know each other — mere body language is enough — but it can also be read as a symptom of a culture where neither emotional vulnerability nor self-expression are particularly prized.

read more

[thetangential]

Is there anything more redolent of the 20th century monoculture than a fascination with the inner life of Johnny Carson?

The hold Carson had on the nation’s attention in the late-night hours, most weeknights for 30 years, is difficult now to imagine. Tonight’s late-night hosts only pull a fraction of his numbers, even while following a formula he set in stone. The band, the announcer, the monologue, the desk, the couch, the skits. The formula still works, but the world has changed. No one will ever again be the default, as Carson was.

“Default” is not a very exciting way to describe a show-business professional, but the marvel of Carson was that he never wore out his welcome. The host had a sure sense of his skills and his limitations, including knowing exactly when to bow out. He said the May 22, 1992 episode would be his last, and it was. He went out on top, living out his 13 remaining years enjoying private pursuits like yachting and learning Swahili.

Carson became such a legend that it took a legend to write his biography.

read more

[thetangential]

Do we hate children?

I don’t need to detail what a person I know was talking about the other day when they declared about this country, “We actually hate children.”

Take your pick of reasons why a person might reasonably come to that conclusion. There’s the fact that child mortality is ticking up for the first time in decades. There’s the youth mental health crisis, and the growing bipartisan consensus that — whether you’re pro-natalist, anti-natalist, or natal-neutral — it’s increasingly difficult and expensive to raise a child in this country.

But is this all really happening because we hate children? The question is of particular interest to me not just because I happen to have a child, but because I spent years studying the sociology of childhood: tracking the changing ways societies have understood and interacted with their newest members. Have our attitudes towards children really, fundamentally changed?

read more