Tederick.com is on vacation this week. Well, kind of. Not really. Halfway. Anyhooooooo here are some assorted tidbits:
Supergirl
She’s here and she’s so messy. It’s been fun watching my most popular Letterboxd review, for Supergirl (1984), become more and more popular in the run-up to Supergirl (2026). I cannot think of two more different films; I’m kind of glad I didn’t rewatch the Helen Slater movie in the past few weeks. The dissonance would have ripped my head apart.
Look, people are being assholes about this movie. I’m astonished they still need to be; I’m astonished whatever incel CHUD grievances sent them after, say, Brie Larson and Captain Marvel still needs to exist in 2026, even if it’s still only less than a decade later.
The movie’s underperforming and isn’t as good as it needs to be to outweigh that, is all. Which is disappointing. For all its premise of a new fresh take, the DCU might be on its way to proving that the MCU was more externally constrained than we give it credit for, i.e. that there’s only a handful of ways to successfully do these things at this scale and have it pay off creatively and financially.
I’ll tell you what, though: the new film works nicely with last summer’s Superman. There, the innovation (besides the setting — an established, fully-stocked superheroic world) was the unalloyed decency of the central character; table-stakes for a Superman story, or so one would have thought until the 21st century. Supergirl, though, answers the innate optimism of a Superman who is just a good, moral person, with a foil who can be all of those things but only if she can drag herself out from under her seemingly bottomless reserves of grief. It’s a far darker movie as a result (child slavery?!) but feels gentle at the same time, more inviting to an audience who — too — spends a lot of time, these days, grieving a world they loved and which has been destroyed. It’s about a character who feels real and recognizable, rather than an ideal who we could, and do, admire.
I hope no one who finds Supergirl “just okay” (or worse) skips Tom Kane and Bilquis Eveley’s source novel, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, as a result. That would be like disliking Thor: Love & Thunder and depriving oneself of Jason Aaron’s fantastic run with the Jane Foster Thor. Neither movie (Supergirl or Thor 4) does a particularly great job of capturing the sense of character for Kara or Jane that made these comic runs into justifiable classics.
I’m rarely an absolutist when it comes to adaptation and I’m not being one here. I think Ana Nogueira threaded more than a few difficult needles in turning Woman of Tomorrow‘s episodic structure into something with stakes, clarity, and an emotional journey. But I miss Kane’s version of Rutheye, and think the film would have been better for her perspective on the Kryptonian warrior she travels with and comes to understand over the course of those eight issues.
Anyway, overall good movie, will watch it again.
The wrong friction
It’s always worth thinking about reintroducing friction into our lives as we continue to find ourselves increasingly anaesthetized by Silicon Valley’s all-points effort at reducing friction to zero. This piece by Nina Maria is the most recent I read about the concept, if you want to read it too.
But even reading that piece, and snarking about Tech Bro seamlessness above, I thought to myself: but there is friction in a lot of these processes. It’s just the wrong friction.
It’s the friction of: half these products don’t work, the apps fail, they made the system worse, the enshittification tipping point has been reached, and anything I spend more than $500 on I expect to stop working within a half-decade due to a planned obsolescence strategy in a document somewhere, which is the kind of thing which really should be illegal.
My point is: there is plenty of friction in modern life. More and more by the minute, based on my heart rate. It just seems to be the kind of friction that is actively created to drive me insane. Perhaps you as well?
Returning to Maria’s piece, in which she asks: what parts of life are actually worth experiencing fully, even if they take longer? That’s the real trick, the real contemplation. I don’t want sand in the gears just for the sake of sand in the gears. But I wouldn’t mind a better, more dedicated sense of when it’s time to turn the machine off.
The Raven Scholar
I have had holds on Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar on and off for the better part of a year and I finally got all the way to the front of the queue without cancelling or postponing, and then I had to actually let myself read it — and boy am I glad I did.
“Let myself read it,” you say? Turns out queuing and task-listing the act of reading doesn’t always work out in my favour. It kind of acts against the pure enjoyment of the experience, in any event. I dribbled through three chapters of The Raven Scholar, judging on a page-by-page basis whether I wanted to commit to ploughing through its 670-page text in 3 weeks, before I finally noticed that I was loving it.
That turn happened at the end of the third chapter or the beginning of the fourth, I can’t quite remember, when someone who turns out to be our main character goes along with a simple act of evil — a “just following orders” type situation that is a routine part of her job — and that single decision goes on to become the first domino in a brilliantly designed narrative tumble from equilibrium to utter disarray.
I love a book that really makes me feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, writingwise. That’s neither a joke nor a fishing rod. Some folks have a mind for plot — Hodgson is certainly one — that I will never have. Or an ability — Hodgson again — to create secondary characters that perfectly fit within theme and intention while still being 100% legible, distinctive characters. (I was recently reminded that I definitely did not do this in a short script I just wrote; I have at least 2 secondary characters who are the way they are because they… just… are.) I guess this is the sort of thing that should bum me out or at least put me in my place but it does neither of those things, it just makes me marvel at how good some people are at doing the things that they (we) do.
Anyway, good book, will read it again.
Disclosure Day
Like the best of her writing, Angelica Jade Bastien’s multi-point examination of her experience with Spielberg’s latest is a moving, profoundly clear-headed work, one which starts as film criticism, becomes personal essay, and evolves beyond that. A must-read. (Substack)