popsublime

None of the five films that I’m including here as favorites from 2025 were movies that I ever thought that I’d be writing about for my year-end post, not even remotely, and three of them are contenders only because 2025 was the weakest year for cinema thus far in my 52-year lifetime. A couple of them I’ll be writing about only in part, one for its central performance, and another for its final twenty minutes or so. This was a year in which I saw Wicked: For Good twenty (yes, twenty) times in cinemas, a personal record that I doubt I’d ever have broken were 2025 not such an underwhelming year for cinema as art (vs. mere commerce). I’m championing these five films because in most cases they were ignored, not taken seriously, or even outright ridiculed. Audiences in general can’t be relied upon as any kind of critical barometer anymore at all, neither mainstream audiences nor critical audiences. Do the majority of people these days know cinema history and critical history well enough to do the actual work? No, they do not, which only makes me even more proud of how bizarre, eclectic, disparate, and surprising this list of my five favorite films of 2025 truly is.

Tonatiuh, who stunningly portrays Molina (and Molina’s imaginary, fictionalized counterpart) in Bill Condon’s spectacular musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, should rightly become a massive star, and I predict that he/they will. Tonatiuh acts, dances, emotes, and sings the hell out of this role, and the fact that this movie has been so unjustly overlooked is pure downright homophobia, y’all. Produced by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Diego Luna, this so-called remake is miles and miles ahead of its 1985 predecessor. (I mean, William Hurt got an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Molina? Get real, Academy! Give Tonatiuh EVERY DAMN THING, or I will simply lose my mind.) I’m totally convinced that the reason this movie has been cruelly and almost entirely ignored is because it’s a tender, moving, and somewhat unprecedented gay/trans love story. Watch it, and you’ll know exactly that I mean. This world has a lot of catching up to do.

Diego Luna’s performance as the Argentinian political prisoner Valentin is equally multifaceted and exact. He inhabits his role in a manner that’s both full of heart and replete with talent, in that he sings & dances expertly (while making it come across intentionally as semi-amateurish), menaces, becomes a heartthrob after first being a stubborn fool who cannot be loved but then finally is loved because he opens himself up to it. What a joy to watch the kind of character transformation that we so rarely see in cinema these days. Through to the film’s final image, Luna ably and fully carries the torch of understanding for both his own character AND Tonatiuh’s, to the extent that their relationship in the film bears the burden of real historical meaning, especially with regard to trans-identified individuals, their romantic and sexual desires, and their intimate relationships. It’s revealing that during their audition conversation via Zoom, Diego Luna told Tonatiuh (who’d prepared multiple elaborate scenarios for the occasion) simply to relax and have a conversation with him. That sort of humanity and mutual respect shines through both of their performances, ultimately, and buoys the movie in ways that very few films are successfully borne by their actors anymore. (And yes, Jennifer Lopez is excellent as the Spider Woman. Mindless detractors, please go away.)

Black Phone 2 is the film that I’m most perplexed ended up in this post. While I thought the first Black Phone installment (adapted from Stephen King’s son Joe Hill’s suspenseful yet sparkless story) was tolerable, it was kind of just an archetypal (yet intelligent enough) retread of the whole “abducted boy trapped in a disgusting basement dungeon who fights his way out and kills the killer” horror movie staple. Black Phone 2 is on another level entirely, and that’s largely due to its distinctive setting: a wintertime Christian camp on a frozen alpine lake in the depths of blizzard season. It’s an origin story on several levels (ho-hum), but no matter since the actors all get it and firmly lock in the narrative, especially the brilliant Mexican actor Demián Bichir as the longtime overseer of the camp’s employees and counselors.

Mason Thames reprises his role as Finney Blake a few years later, and it’s really his performance (played against the relentless menace of Ethan Hawke as the Grabber) that distinguishes Black Phone 2 from standard horror movies. (Horror was the ONLY film genre that actually grew in 2025 by the number of films released.) Whether Mason Thames was directed as such or made his own choice as an actor, it’s clear that there’s an atypical commentary on pedophilia threaded throughout Black Phone 2, from as early as a scene where Finney is smoking out on his front porch at night and imagines the masked Grabber, whom he murdered by strangulation at the climax of the first film’s finale, beckoning to him from beside some breeze-filled trees. Finney has a simultaneous flashback to an image of the Grabber gently stroking his fallen bangs from across his forehead, remembers what he said to defend himself, and quietly stares ahead into the distance as he takes a drag from his joint.

It’s as though the filmmakers are suggesting that teenage Finney is somehow, on some level, slightly now more at peace in himself with what transpired through the mundane abduction plot of the first film, or at least he now has a grasp of the Grabber’s carefully planned motives that younger boyhood Finney did not. The subdued tension brought about by that smoking-at-night-on-the-porch scene in particular feels uniquely innovative to me in the horror genre, and for me it tilted forward the entire balance of the movie in ways that I hadn’t anticipated whatsoever. Re-emphasizing that aspect of the film is the central plot device of three young boys whose ghosts are trapped under the thick sheet of ice atop the frozen alpine lake, who were killed by the younger version of the Grabber long ago (hence the ho-hum origin story), and whose unburied spirits are restlessly urging Finney and his sister to save them.

Ryan White’s profoundly moving documentary Come See Me in the Good Light should win this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary, full-stop. The film focuses on the final years in the life of the celebrated non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who died of complications from ovarian cancer in July of this year at age 49, just one month prior to what would have been their fiftieth birthday. Gibson’s brave partner Megan Falley is equally a part of the film, both as the foundational heart that keeps their relationship together through the very hardest of times, and often as an initiator of some much-needed humor to buoy them through things that young couples should never have to endure, though I’m sure that plenty of people do every day. I just want everybody to stream this film on Apple TV, so I won’t say much else except that 1) I cried about seven times while watching this film at the IFC Center in New York City, from like three minutes into the film until all the way through the heart-stopping closing credits song “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” by Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile (which should also receive an Oscar for Best Original Song, to be honest), and 2) I downloaded every single one of Andrea Gibson’s e-books the very moment I walked out of the cinema. Like their inspiration Mary Oliver, Gibson aimed to make their poetry a mission of redemption and a gift to other human beings, a way to try to help them through their lives and survive.

Jacob Elordi’s indelible physical and vocal performance as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein will stay with me probably for the rest of my life. By the end of the movie, I wanted to walk around every day in his character’s awesomely ragged, burnt-out, “I’ve survived every kind of catastrophe” shredded black ribbons streaming backwards in the arctic winds costume like some kind of gangly Gothic matinee idol. Jacob Elordi should be, will be, and is one exactly: a matinee idol for the ages, and this performance absolutely cements it. As much as I appreciate online commentaries by those in-the-know about the deep significance of the physically masterful elements that Elordi brings to his role (since the Creature begins as an infantile semi-being and advances through the gauntlet of every tragedy that the world can possibly throw at him in a nonstop onslaught of violently desperate bombardment), I was even more taken in by Elordi’s voice, a voice that learns as it goes, that philosophizes and grapples and soothes and eventually understands, or attempts to. Whoever marries this man someday will be a very, very lucky person. He’s the real deal: a reader, a scholar, a tall kind heart, and one hell of a phenomenal actor.

Finally, I loved the final twenty minutes or so of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, and I could probably watch Noah Jupe’s face as Hamlet in that scene at the Globe Theatre for most of 2026, to be honest. What makes the scene work is how it captures Shakespeare’s genius (in part via Paul Mescal’s performance as the Ghost and as Will himself). Rather than having the ghost of his dead son Hamnet appear in the play, which would have been the logical choice for any other playwright, of course William Shakespeare would write Hamlet’s father as the ghost, since grief in the wake of Hamnet’s death has made a ghost of Will as Hamnet’s own father (and obviously of Jessie Buckley’s often too over-performed character as Hamnet’s mother). Art abstracts the truth, a lesson that even Zhao’s film doesn’t quite learn, unfortunately, for the vast majority of it leading up to its final scene. And just as sadly, the vast majority of films released throughout 2025 didn’t learn that vital lesson either, and so on we go to 2026.

Monday, December 29, 2025

Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing, edited by Alden Jones (Blair, 2025)

I’m in London right now, as I’ve been for the past decade or so of Christmas seasons, because I’m an odd sort of traveler who travels solo and returns to places that allow me to repeat my daily routines in relative peace. I watch movies at cinemas in the daytime, and I go to theatre shows in the evenings. As I’m walking around between venues, I can appreciate how no place on this planet is better lit for Christmas and New Year’s than central London is. It’s totally decked out in fairy lights from street to street to street. Some friends have asked me why I always return to the same place for the winter holidays lately, rather than trying new places. Well, I won’t ever be disappointed if I know that it’s a place that I like. But moreover, as I’ve gotten a bit older, most places I visit just feel to me like other places where I’ve already been. While some might argue that people and cultures make the places, that simply isn’t true for me. I’m a poet, and a very solitary one, so I tend to find that I have a one-to-one relationship with the actual physical place itself. People and cultures, at least to me, feel somewhat incidental.

As a counter-argument to my particular stance, I enjoyed reading through the diversity of voices and places in Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing, an important new book which was beautifully edited by my friend Alden Jones. Alden and I taught together when I worked at Emerson College, where we also co-taught an Honors Seminar in the early aughts. Alden is an awesome and celebrated travel writer herself, one whose unique perspective on the world has altered and opened how I approach such things myself. At the close of her insightful introduction, Alden posits that the essays in the book are “meant to raise questions around the centering of one’s own culture” and to “undermine the idea of cultural centrality.” The fifteen essayists gathered here all do a consummate collective job of that as they criss-cross our country and the globe, while also exploring and blurring the various boundaries of their own sexual identities.

Andrew Ellis Evans’ “My Cohort,” which opens the anthology, is well-placed and remained my favorite piece after I’d finished reading the rest of the book. It’s wide-ranging, a kind of heartfelt survey of the many places the author has traveled with his Zimbabwean zoologist boyfriend Brian, whom one woman along the way refers to as Andrew’s “cohort,” being unsure what else to call him. One truth about queer lives abroad, still today, is that others aren’t quite sure how to regard us. Even in a city like London, my being alone at the theatre with my rainbow bracelets and my “Queer & Goth” button pinned to my scarf can draw some unusual, curious stares. The majority of the world surrounding us daily remains straight, unfortunately, and ongoingly uncertain of how to fit us into its picture. I could list the places where Andrew and Brian traveled together, but the more important aspect is the reality of their love in the world, and their trajectory through those places side-by-side through time: “I have loved a man all over the world. I have woken up next to him on all seven continents. He is my constant. He is my opposite pole. My dive buddy in dark seas. The man who holds my hand when the plane bumps too hard. The man who followed me across the ocean, around the world, across a lifetime.”

From there the book spelunks from Edmund White’s semi-historical overview of the remote queer artists’ enclave of Key West, to lesbian family dramas in Senegal and Cambodia, to Garrard Conley’s post-gay conversion therapy Peace Corps service tutoring a masculine hottie in Ukraine, to a search for queer utopia in contemporary Berlin in trans Jewish writer Calvin Gimpelevich’s “Future Past,” which finds the author by its end revelling at the Hello Daddy party: “I am in a dark room pressed with bodies, and we are dancing, dancing.” It’s one of many moments in the book where the oneness of individual identity gets blended into the people surrounding you, the same way the map of the world gets swirled together by the moving travelogue of an anthology such as this.

Closer to home, sometimes that effect occurs on a smaller scale. Sara Orozco’s “Lessons in Digging and Replanting,” for example, finds its author in a harrowing scenario of getting arrested and sentenced for drug possession, only to be assigned to do 200 hours of community service via hardcore landscaping (planting ferns!) at the Billy Graham Center in Asheville, North Carolina, where her evangelical host David proclaims to his queer mentee, “I believe that we are both children of God, Sara. That is enough. It has to be.” Religion darts in and out of these essays pretty much continuously, which annoys me to be honest (as a truth about the world, not about the essays themselves), but it’s sure a fucking statement on why queer people still struggle to gain traction in cultures around the planet, given what a stranglehold religion has on most of them. But I can read the book and then go right back to ignoring religion almost entirely.

The truth for me, my own truth, is that I don’t even really want to “visit” places at all. I want to drift through them and tunnel into them at once, by tunneling into my own mind while I’m drifting through them. As externalized as these essays present the world and the authors’ intimate relationships all around it, they also make a clear case for how much the internalized world matters for each of us. What we contemplate privately within the confines of our own public solitude is just as significant, ultimately, as the physical, worldly spaces that surround us at any given moment.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Wicked and Wicked: For Good (dir. Jon M. Chu, 2024 and 2025)

Wicked and Wicked: For Good are a once-in-a-generation cinematic experience. Moreover, these two films will have a dedicated global audience for at least two generations, probably for fifty years or more, not dissimilar to the long-range success of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. These two new movies amply honor that movie’s glorious (and serious) legacy, while also very generously augmenting and expanding it. If Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande don’t both receive Oscars for their indelible performances, I will be rioting. And why is the director, Jon M. Chu, receiving so little attention overall in the wake of these films? Perhaps he doesn’t need any. He made two perfect movies that are both consummate entertainment and deep, meaningful explorations of a wide variety of themes and dialectics: female friendships and rivalries, outsiderdom and insider-ism, secrecy and honesty, old and new orders, dreams and nightmares, humanity and animalism, and I’ll stop there since this list could clearly go on for quite a while.

I’m going to dispense with most of the typical movie review trappings for what I’ll write here, including plot, delving into the original source materials, and the (kind of obvious) political subtext. Instead, I’ll just call attention to what I saw and explore a bit why those details resonate with me, and also perhaps situate them into some sort of cultural and historical lineage. Have you ever heard the phrase “friends of Dorothy” in reference to gay men? There’s a reason why that phrase exists, which extends far beyond the stereotypical reverence gay men were known to have for Judy Garland (whose death jump-started Stonewall). In an era not so long ago, gay life was a life lived underground, both socially and in terms of individual gay men’s psyches. Our lives, historically, had to be sublimated due to entrenched social shame, which still persists today in most places around the world, even if it’s slightly less overt these days. In many cases, gay men’s real lives were secondary to their fantasy lives. The lives that they imagined for themselves as escapes from prejudice and persecution are the reasons why films like The Wizard of Oz, as well as Wicked and Wicked: For Good, 1) came into being in the first place, and 2) became reliably long-lasting cultural outlets and touchstones for gay men to enjoy their own collective mental space and claim a corner of existence for themselves. (Whew.)

Some of these things are so obvious that they’re barely worth saying, but alas. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion were all clearly coded as gay. Not even “coded.” Just GAY, full-stop. And not shy about it either. Back in 1939, that was a novelty, and a necessary one. Since you couldn’t live your life openly out in the wider world itself, you could do that up on the screen, while Dorothy and Toto led the way, because you couldn’t trust anybody else, but you could trust a wide-eyed Kansas farmgirl and her cute little dog, so you just follow them to get to where you need to go: over the rainbow, through a tornado, across sprawling fields of opium high-inducing poppies. (In Wicked and Wicked: For Good, those fields of poppies are broad stripes of rainbow colors. I mean, just go ahead and overdo it. We won’t mind at all.)

And the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion all re-appear here, though briefly, and in each case they’re the product of a type of twisted nightmare. And that’s where Wicked: For Good in particular gets really interesting. The Wizard of Oz is, in its entirety, both intra- and extradiagetically, a fever dream. So when Wicked: For Good tilts into the nightmare realm, which it does often and deliciously well for anybody who’s got even a slight goth sensibility, the effect is nearly overwhelming in the best possible way (especially with a pair of Real D glasses on, trust me…the two fangirls seated next to me were pretty much totally losing their minds during all of those scenes, as was I). Just like the characters in these films themselves, you are forcefully shoved right out of the theater and into an alternate virtual reality, perhaps the land of the Shifting Sands, as L. Frank Baum coined it, an endless pastel dunescape that surrounds the Land of Oz and protects it from outside intrusion (as well as keeping its citizens from ever leaving, or at least not without the penalty of death in the vast majority of cases).

As much as we love Elphaba and Glinda, who will now remain iconic in perpetuity as Wicked: For Good rolls out across the world, Fiyero for me is the most important figure in the second film, and his significance is tied to one brief scene, specifically, when the guards of Oz bind him to wooden poles out on the edge of the vast fields, to try to get him to reveal Elphaba’s whereabouts. I knew from the initial shouts of the men who surround him, even before we see the actual flash of the image of him bound to the fenceposts, that it was a direct reference to the death of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was bound to a roadside wooden fence and left there to die by two homophobic young men in Laramie, Wyoming, back in 1998. Time has now washed over that deeply tragic murder, and the film captures in this scene that sense of cultural forgetting, too. But more importantly, the film revives Matthew Shepard and lets him live again in the form of Fiyero’s Scarecrow. I have almost no doubt that this was intentional, particularly in the spirit of a revisionist text like the book by Gregory Maguire from which these films (and the musical before them) were adapted. I recalled some lines about Matthew Shepard’s death from Eileen Myles’ poem “Taxicabs”: “little scarecrow / with his / scarecrow / desire.” This vitally important connection to Fiyero’s redemptive character arc in Wicked: For Good is one that I feel certain most critics and audiences will otherwise miss, unfortunately. I was (and remain) really moved by it. It’s my very favorite aspect of the film, and if any of its creators happen to read this: I’m grateful.

What would the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum (who named Elphaba from the sounds of his three first initials), think of his own legacy? Would these films inspire him, move him, overwhelm him? I think he would probably be extremely pleased, and also quite surprised. His books about the Wizard of Oz were popular enough in his lifetime that his publisher wouldn’t let him abandon writing them, even when he wanted to move on. He was married to a woman in his own era, but who knows how else he might have identified more inwardly. He had a clear interest in outsiders, and social justice, and (way ahead of his own time) transgender-identified characters as well. I could say a lot more right here, some of which might border on mere conjecture or speculation or suspicion, so I won’t. All I will say is (and the finale of Wicked: For Good also makes this abundantly, gorgeously clear): the human heart is the desert dunescape of the Shifting Sands, whether we tread that beautifully treacherous terrain alone, or in the fortunate company of others.

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Three Films from NewFest37 (October 9th - 21st, 2025)

I watched all the virtual feature films and documentary offerings from NewFest37 over the past couple of weeks, along with several virtual programs of short films, and the annual festival of LGBTQ+ films in New York followed the pattern of cinema in 2025 for me: for every twenty-five or so movies that I watched, only one made me reflect deeply enough to comment. Therefore, that amounted to three films on NewFest’s virtual slate that inspired me to write this post. I’ve taught college courses for nearly thirty years now, and I think the causes of the problems that are plaguing the entire field of education right now, from bottom to top, are the exact same issues that are hindering worthwhile creative generativity across most cultures globally right now, too. I don’t have the energy to expound upon any of that at the current moment (even the various sorts of faux virtue-signaling in the visual content leading into the virtual NewFest films this year was driving me pretty crazy every time I watched another movie, to be honest), so I’ll just turn to my discussion of the three films themselves instead.

Jaclyn Bethany’s In Transit, written by and starring Alex Sarrigeorgiou, is set in wintertime where I currently reside in the state of Maine. Sarrigeorgiou’s lead character, Lucy, lives in small-town Maine with her man, Tom (Francois Arnaud). She bartends at a quaint and mostly quiet establishment that she and Tom are trying to buy from the owner, so that Lucy doesn’t lose her job if he sells it to somebody else. One night, in walks Ilse (Jennifer Ehle, in a memorable performance of great subtlety), a local painter who asks Lucy if she’d like to make some extra cash as a model. Hijinks eventually and very hesitantly unfold between the two women, though it takes nearly a full hour of this 80-minute film to get to that point. (I was reminded, of course, of Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 slow-burner High Art, which is definitely a better movie.)

A long time spent waiting for a spark to ignite doesn’t necessarily make for a bad film, if it’s handled in the right way. Unfortunately, that’s not quite the case in this instance. The character-building feels minor even if the performances feel mostly strong; still, they really need to be undergirded and driven by some kind of genuine dramatic engine. Yet In Transit is too hushed, literally and emotionally, for the drama to gain any overt traction, and so it remains almost completely internalized until it’s too late for the viewer to care very much. Hinging everything upon one moment, a sudden kiss that leads up a totally unseen hookup (with a few erratically blinking distress signals in the aftermath), gives us little sense of who these women actually are and what’s motivated them to be drawn to one another. The scene of the fallout between Lucy and Tom seems to be drawn directly from the same (far more confidently executed) confrontation scene of the lead character and her boyfriend in High Art after she sleeps with a character named (you guessed it) Lucy. At least this Lucy gets a surprise check for $50,000 from her painter fling at the end of the movie, instead of dying like the Lucy in High Art does.

And now I’ll get down to the point that I’d really like to make, aside from praising the austere cinematography and the clearly well-intentioned aims of the filmmakers. The spoken introduction that Jaclyn Bethany and Alex Sarrigeorgiou filmed for NewFest37's virtual screening of their movie really gave me pause. Sarrigeorgiou kind of makes a huge deal of pointing out that they wanted to avoid making a film in which queer characters die or undergo a “big coming out.” But this movie is both a WAY too muted coming out AND a narrative avoidance of what truly transpired between the two lead characters whom the filmmakers have created. In my view, the film sidesteps what should be its mission, and for all the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, the screenplay and performances are able to keep running on fumes, essentially, due to the commitment of the actors, especially Jennifer Ehle as the painter Ilse, who’s had more life experiences as the older of the two women. Ehle doesn’t just build a character despite the holes in the script; she also makes the connections to herself as a female artist of her own age evident in ways that very few actors could pull off, through the micro-moments of her expressions, tiny pivots and surrenders and ultimately usurpations, and those elements collectively make the film worth watching.

Two Black Boys in Paradise, a nine-minute animated short film directed by Baz Sells and adapted from a poem by the British poet Dean Atta (who was born to a Greek Cypriot mother and a Jamaican father), might well be one of the most beautifully rendered short films that I’ve ever seen. Atta’s poem was re-treated with a handful of judicious edits in the screenplay, and at least one key two-word addition: "They fuck," which allows the sweetly clever device of a curious onlooking peacock fanning its feathers to coincide with the two Black boys' shared orgasm. That bold maneuver earns the short its sexual racing stripes in a medium where sex between two men, even in our modern-day world, too often gets drained of its actual sexuality. The film's animation seems to be a hybrid of visually augmented stop-motion and perhaps Claymation, focusing as it does on the two Black boys of its title as a pair of slim yet muscular puppets. Every aspect of the two puppets and what surrounds them is gorgeously crafted, in order to thoroughly evoke the colorful paradise in which Atta’s poem skillfully places them.

Atta’s poem, which is featured on the Forward Arts Foundation’s website for anyone who’s curious to read it, makes stylistic and thematic nods to several formidable poetic predecessors: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Walt Whitman (particularly his poem “We Two Boys Together Clinging”). Nonetheless, the poem is utterly contemporary and functions on its own daring and dignified terms, which is further highlighted by the English musician and actor Jordan Stephens’ deeply moving narration; I doubt whether anybody else could have read the poem as perfectly as he does for this film. The short’s framework finds the two Black boys floating unclothed in a wooden rowboat on an idyllic lake, an idyll that they’re jolted out of by some disruptive police intervention back in the unidyllic everyday world that we all inhabit. Tying the alternating harshness of racism and homophobia into the dreamworld of the cartoon itself is just the right move, one that makes where the short goes in its final minutes all the more profound.

I was close to tears by end of the film but kind of too moved to even cry. Its authentic open-heartedness and equanimity in showing how far we’ve come as LGBTQ+ people in a homophobic society, and how far we still have left to go, is truly admirable (“Maybe it will be two Black girls in paradise next time. / Maybe they won’t have to be / boys or girls”). What really made the short work for me as an adaptation of a poem was how it set its own distinct pace with plenty of gaps and pauses and silences, all of which are filled with specific, precise visuals that let the film do what it needs to do, in order to bring the poem vividly and bracingly to life. The filmmakers generously have in mind every kind of viewer of every age and from every generation: “Maybe it will be you in paradise / with that person, / you know, that person you’re thinking of / right now.” I still get chills all over again just typing that barrier-spanning ending.