Let's try this again
Why I'm writing a newsletter
In a strange way, starting a newsletter feels both like a very normal thing to do in 2026 and also like something I should probably apologize for in advance.
Welcome to Industry of Cool. Yes, it’s about movies, but it’s also going to dive into Hollywood, pop culture, and whatever else I can’t stop thinking about when I’m supposed to be doing something more productive with my time. I’m fascinated by the machinery behind the film industry today. The way things get made, the stars behind them, how we talk about them, and how they end up meaning something (or don’t) once they’re out in the world.
If you have somehow discovered this and don’t know me, I’m Michael Carvelli. I’m a writer and editor, a marketing strategist, and lifelong film obsessive. I’ve written about movies on and off in various corners of the Internet since 2020, particularly at Loud & Clear Reviews. Hopefully this will serve as me finally taking a real opportunity to consistently put some more time into this thing I’ve always ended up circling back to anyway — talking and writing about movies like they matter a little too much.
The name Industry of Cool is a callback to a line from my favorite actor of all-time in one of my favorite movies of all-time, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs in Almost Famous.
“They will ruin rock and roll, and strangle everything we love about it. Because they’re trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb ... And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day it ceases to be real, right? Then it just becomes an industry of cool.”
In a lot of ways this feels like the push and pull we’re seeing in the movie industry today. The battle between authenticity and commercialization. It’s a warning that, as things become more and more curated and optimized, they become less real. It becomes something centered more on market-tested aesthetics and image over substance. The more polished it gets, the more we continue to lose the things that make the industry what it was to begin with.
But still, things break through and show us the magic of movies.
It’s about finding beauty in those things that find a way to stand out and analyzing why those things work (or, sometimes more interestingly, why they don’t). For as easy as it is to watch movies now and fall into the trap of being doom-and-gloom about the state of the industry, there are still films being made that are brilliant, strange, emotional, frustrating, beautiful, and any other range of adjectives and emotions that art can bring out of you.
It’s true that things now exist inside of a system that has seen more consolidation and is as self-aware as it has ever been. And a system like that has a way of smoothing the edges over time and turning the risks that you used to see more often into carefully thought-out and sanitized corporate strategy.
That’s what I want to write about, and hopefully what you will want to read about.
You can expect to hear from me weekly with some reviews and thoughts on what I’ve been watching recently, some analysis of news around the industry, as well as things like lists and anything else I can think of. I want to dig into breaking news, give some reactions to trailers and casting news as it comes out, and more.
Mostly, it’s going to be my way of getting to think about this stuff more and put those thoughts out in public.
Thanks for being here at the beginning.