Today is Monday, July 21, 2025. It’s late here owing to Elliot and I watching a wonderful film on Netflix, Sinners, from early 2025. We tried to watch it before, but had some trouble understanding the dialogue. We successfully watched the entire film tonight.

Set in rural Mississippi around 1932, the movie stars Michael B. Jordan in dual roles, as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to their southern town to open a juke joint, in their parlance, after trying to make it in Chicago as gangsters. They recruit their cousin Sammie (a breakout role for Miles Caton) who plays a mean guitar and sings the blues. Most of the early scenes reflect the brothers’ setting up a rundown mill and turning it into a money-making endeavor. They buy the property from a bigoted white man by warning him if he ever tries to bring the Ku Klux Klan there, they will shoot dead everyone who attempts to shatter their peace.

it’s not until much later that the film descends into a confrontation between those behind the doors of the juke joint and the vampires who are outside and trying to get in. This culminates in much gore, with plenty of stabbing and shooting and blood gushing.

Before the gore fest enthusiastically begins, the film makes a statement about music and how it connects generations of humans. A prologue tells the story of mythical figures throughout history with the ability to connect their ancestors and descendants – all the world, really – through music. In one of the movie’s best sequences, Sammie’s performance at the club transcends a singular musical moment to become a culmination of all that has come before and all that will be. You see dancers from ancient cultures in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere make their way through the 1930s crowd, while a modern man suddenly appears next to Sammie to bolster his blues with the buzz of an electric guitar. When you see this, you don’t wag your head in bewilderment because you realize the connection the director Ryan Coogler is making of the universality of music here.

Even the vampires appreciate music here as well, which is a rarity seen in any other vampire horror entry. In this film, the leader of the vampires is a white man called Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who galvanizes his growing horde with Irish music and dance, and his interest in Sammie comes from the perceived power of Sammie’s musical ability. He desires to not only take Sammie’s music for his own (“I want your music,” he growls at one point, “I want your stories”) but to use it to reunite with his own heritage, something he has been robbed of because of his vampiric nature.

Some people might think it takes a long time for the horror aspects of the story to break out, but when they do, they are immensely satisfactory to all horror fans. The film works as a melange of genres and it is very worthwhile to see on Netflix.

Today was an entirely ordinary day, given that Elliot and I will be leaving – once more – for Florida on Thursday to help celebrate my son’s imminent 40th birthday by taking him on a Disney cruise over the weekend of July 25th through the 28th, his actual birthday. No, he’s not regressing. The reason for this kind of excursion is that “Joshua’s” close friend and former boss has arranged this trip with me and he’s bringing his wife and two small children on the ship. This marks my first Disney cruise, so I’m sure this particular kind of cruise will have many darling amenities.

My last blog this week will be on Wednesday then.

And so it went!