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How many years ago now was it, that I first became aware of the “spice bag?”

Probably at least two, but less than five. Google is a poor historian these days, but from what I remember, there was a video featuring a sort of bellicose-looking Irish lad (track suit, skin fade?) narrating his takeaway purchase (late night, from the looks of it), of a “spice bag.”

The dish, of which I’d never heard at that point in my life, seemed to consist entirely of one unbroken pile of beige things — fat, soggy french fries (aka chips) and possibly other fried stuff — all dumped from a wax paper bag gone translucent from the oil, and then gleefully doused in a gloopy sauce which was also a shade of beige. The sauce seemed to be some hybrid of gravy and curry (“coory”).

I wish I could locate the first of these videos that I saw, my gateway spice bag review, because I was instantly hooked. I sent the reel to a few group chats. Everyone on them probably sent it to a few more.

The appeal was obvious. Aside from the funny narrator, with a charming accent and every tenth word introducing exotic regional slang, the spice bag review genre contained a promise, the possibility that some other country out there might have even greasier, even more bastardized forms of pseudo-ethnic takeout food than even the good ol’ US and A. We’re Americans. We’re well aware that we’re the butt of jokes and we know that we deserve them, but nothing makes you feel a little better about being the butt of jokes than having someone else to crack on. The spice bag, a slovenly beige pile with a name that doesn’t even sound like food, seemed to offer that.

And so, when I went on a family vacation to Ireland this past week, predictably, one of the first questions someone back home asked was “So, you gonna try the spice bag?”

That text was from Pod Yourself producer Brent Flyberg for those in the know. And to state the obvious, yes, of course I was going to try the fucking spice bag.

Luckily for me, I was spoiled for choice. So far as I could tell, the spice bag is everywhere in Ireland now, eager to take dollars from novelty-seeking idiot tourists like me. I wasn’t exactly Ferdinand Magellan here. “Spice bag” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary last year, and according to the Irish Times, locals have been enjoying them for the better part of 20 years now:

While no one can pinpoint the exact date spice bags began to appear on menus, the consensus is that it was sometime between 2006 and 2010. In 2016, RTÉ reporter Liam Geraghty embarked on a quest to discover who invented Ireland’s most-ordered takeaway item, and his journey brought him to the Sunflower Chinese takeaway in Templeogue where it is said the spice bag was born when staff came up with a post-work fusion snack. Others argue that its roots may lie in Galway or Cork, but wherever it began, its spread was rapid.

By the time I got there this past week, I saw spice bags advertised everywhere, from Kebab/pizza shops to gentrified-looking food trucks to the kinds of tourist bars where you can get all the classics from the unofficial brochure — Guinness, Irish stew, cottage pies, probably something leprechaun-themed. (We did end up in one of those, but I ordered the stew there, I’m not a philistine).

I hadn’t known at the time that the spice bag originated from Templeogue, but I wanted to sample it in as close to its original form as I could. Which is to say, from an at least nominally Chinese place, preferably late at night. “Late night” turned out to be around 9 pm for washed over-40s with kids like us. Probably would’ve been even earlier if not for the jetlag, Spaniards we are not.

Our spice bag journey took us, rather organically, after a day of doing other touristy stuff like visiting the Guinness Store and taking pictures of our kids on bridges, to a place called Xi’an Street Food 2 in southeast inner Dublin. We ordered our spice bag alongside a few other entrees that were themselves essentially forms of spice bag: the Mongolian lamb served with chips, the kids chicken tenders. The latter of those was served in a non-spicy, peanutty sauce with lightly fried rice. It was like Thai chicken satay meets tempura-fried chicken tenders and it was delicious. I would’ve ordered it myself (and got to finish half of it as it was).

Clearly Xi’an Street Food is a step or two above your typical grody late night takeaway spot, and possibly inauthentic as a result. Acknowledging that, my first bite of genuine spice bag was enough to immediately dispel any notion of them as objects of ridicule.

It had chips and fried chicken pieces, wok-fried with a piquant spice blend that tasted like salt, pepper, sugar, MSG, and curry blend, with some sauteed chilis and Chinese aromatics on top — scallions, julienned ginger. It wasn’t crazy spicy, by my standards (certainly milder than your average Mexican or Thai food), but still just spicy enough to have me taking three dumps before 10 am the next day. Worth it. If I lived in Dublin I’d probably order one of these two or three times a week and have to double my blood pressure medication.

When I worked in the kitchen of a Chinese place in San Diego during my first restaurant job in college (no longer there, but it was in Hillcrest, just down the street from Khyber Pass, an Afghani restaurant that was one of my all-time favorite places to eat) my favorite dish to watch the old guy cook was called “Firecracker Calamari.”

To prep it, he would take the body meat of medium-sized squids and cut it into medium-sized rectangles, then score the outsides in a little cross-hatch pattern. Those squid pieces would then get lightly dusted in dry corn starch. Then he would heat a big wok full of oil on the big industrial wok burner (we had deep fryers too, of course, but they weren’t powerful enough for this) until the oil was almost smoking. Then he’d drop the calamari pieces in, but only for about 30 seconds. After this flash fry, he’d scoop them out with the wire skimmer.

The calamari rectangles would curl up with the cross-hatch scoring facing outwards, looking like a tiny version of the hard foam roller I use to stretch out my back. From there he’d let the oil heat back up again, and then drop the calamari back in another time. He did this two our three times, then dumped the oil. Then he’d sauté ginger, garlic, scallions, and sliced jalapeños in the super-hot wok before adding the twice or thrice-fried calamari back in, and dusting it all with salt, white pepper, and MSG. A few shakes in the wok and it went on the plate. It was as fun to eat as it was to watch him make, I never got tired of it.

I mention it partly because it’s fun to remember, but also because the spice bag mostly struck me as a potatoes-and-chicken riff on that firecracker calamari, albeit with a curry powder addition and curry-gravy accompaniment. In person, the spice bag didn’t strike me as inauthentic (whatever that even means). It struck me as the usual story of immigrants applying their standard cooking techniques to locally-abundant ingredients, while adding a few minor tweaks to pander to the local palate. Basically, what all fast casual ethnic cuisines do.

What is a spice bag, after all, if not a Chinese-Irish take on “carne asada fries,” the SoCal Mex hybrid I ate a lot of in college? Technically I preferred the carne asada chips, shout out to Roberto’s in Miramar — but you can still either in some of Fresno’s most beloved taco joints, and probably half of American Mexican places everywhere.

Is there anything as casually inventive and naturally culturally inclusive as fast-casual takeout food? It’s one of the few things in the world that consistently makes me feel optimistic about humanity. Short order cooks are the glue that holds societies together. And has anything in the world improved as much in the last 20 years as food? Technology sucks, I dread every computer or iPhone update like a root canal; politics are terrible, every person in power seems to more resemble our worst national caricature; movies were inarguably better in the aughts, the 90s, the 70s; every new business feels like a half-baked grift. But food? Food has come a long way, baby.

When I was growing up, I don’t think my parents even knew there were other ways to prepare vegetables besides steaming, which was standard then in American food writ-large. I still have nightmares about their crunchy, stinky broccoli. They would broil their salmon beyond recognition and stink up the entire house, I’ve only just started to be able to eat salmon again in the last ten years.

Optimism aside, what is the world coming to if you can’t even crack on the Irish for “spice bags?” Next you’ll tell me that the English don’t have bad teeth, or that Spaniards aren’t lazy. Great for tastebuds, terrible for jokes.

On our way out of the country, we stayed in a modestly-priced hotel in a distinctly down-market area of Limerick (otherwise a great, charming town, as all the towns in Ireland we visited were). After so many days traveling we were all out of clean laundry, so I took a big bag down to the Circle K down the street, which had an outdoor laundry station attached to it (would the exotic wonders ever cease??). Next to that was a much smaller, far less urbane Chinese takeaway selling what was probably closer to the “standard” spice bag I’d originally been inclined to ridicule. There, they offered spice bags (“spicy bags,” technically) with the option to order with “chicken balls” (five or ten).

If I can no longer laugh at “spice bags,” at least they still had “chicken balls.” “Chicken balls?!” Absurd. It sounds dumb and terrible and we’re all good and sophisticated for laughing at them.

I didn’t order anything there. It was probably delicious.

Bonus Review “The Full Irish Breakfast”

While “the full Irish breakfast” sounds like a euphemism for your mother’s nether regions, it’s actually a perfectly cromulent food term. Much like “the full English” and American breakfast (I guess we don’t actually have a specific term for this, but we all know what it is), “Full Irish Breakfast” denotes a pretty specific thing.

From my cursory research of being a person on the internet, I’ve gleaned that that specific thing includes: two rashers (Irish back bacon, sadly I’ve already made a your mom joke above), two sausages, two fried eggs, white pudding, black pudding, a hash brown, fried mushrooms, and some coarse Irish bread. Sometimes, but not always, it includes grilled tomatoes (toe-mah-toes) — as English and Australian breakfasts do — as well as the classic English baked beans. Although Irish internet person Garron Noone claims beans are a Protestant imposition, and I trust him because he’s funny.

@garron_music @garron_music ♬ original sound - Garron Noone

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The English, Irish, and Americans all take great pride in our breakfasts. All beige-colored-food-based cultures do, and why not? It’s what we do best.

And so I thought I would add my own take here on a genuine full Irish breakfast as a USA-based person. There’s nothing more hack than arguing about your preferred form of bacon or potatoes on the internet, but I’m also nothing if not a hack, so I say let’s do it.

Here’s a nice, fairly representative Full Irish that I had at the Buttery in Limerick. I believe it was my third Irish Breakfast I had on the trip. Don’t judge me, how dare you.

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[Editor’s Note: Obviously I meant to get this review up before I went on vacation, but I didn’t. Anyway, I’m back now, and regular posting shall resume.]

When I sat down to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day on opening day, I didn’t entirely know why I was doing it. It was certainly more out of a kind of inertia — I write about movies, this was the big new movie; I’ve sat through almost every other Marvel movie in the past, I might as well sit through this one — than out of any genuine enthusiasm for the product. Which is to say, a new installment of the Spider-Man and/or Marvel (and/or X-Men) universes. I do genuinely love the second Raimi Spider-Man movie, made back when superhero movies used to be both much simpler and much weirder, but beyond that, I’d mostly rate the three previous Tom Holland Spider-Man movies a collective “meh plus.”

Does it still make sense to treat every new Marvel movie as a watercooler event for general cinephiles? Or have comic book movies been downgraded back to niche offerings for self-selecting nerd completists?

It’s starting to feel more like the latter, though you wouldn’t know it from the box office, where Spider-Man: Brand New Day managed the biggest North American opening weekend ever ($360m), and earned almost a billion dollars worldwide in a single weekend. I don’t think that means Marvel can pretend it’s 2017 again and just start releasing any superhero movie, but “event movies” seem to be back. And a new Spider-Man is still more plausibly an “event” than, say, Supergirl.

A win for the category, certainly, but whether that actually makes Brand New Day a better movie is tougher to answer. My main takeaway from this latest installment was the sense of a lot of genuinely talented people doing their best to enliven a thing that, narratively speaking, once again only seems to exist in order to tie in universes.

There’s a great quote that’s been going around, from a profile that GQ did about Christopher Nolan and Tom Holland, who is in both Nolan’s The Odyssey and Spider-Man, where Holland apparently experience what making a good movie felt like and came back to Sony with some new ideas:

During The Odyssey’s production, Holland’s collaborators on Spider-Man got used to hearing about Christopher Nolan. “I was really able to lay down the law and say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out,’ ” Holland said. “ ‘We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s Spider-Man 4 and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’ And Destin was super instrumental in that, but it was just really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.’ ”

That sense, of Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Short Term 12) actually aspiring to make a real movie pervades Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But it does so mostly on a textural level, where there was evidently real care taken to create interesting shots and capture genuine emotions, even as the whole thing is still hamstrung by its essential nature as a superhero tie-in delivery device.

The press release would boast that this one has X-Men people, Avengers people, Fantastic Four people, and Spider-Man people — unheard of in the days before Marvel subsumed the Sony (Spider-Man) and Fox (X-Men) Marvel superhero universes. Hooray? We love corporate consolidation, don’t we, folks? Probably the last thing any of these movies needed was even more characters to squeeze in, and meanwhile, the one thing this one doesn’t have is a genuine villain. Or maybe the real villain was Peter Parker’s work-life balance. Or is it loneliness?

Real issues, I suppose, and admirable, that, but also not that fun. Scrape away all the tie-ins (supposedly it was considered “spoiler” territory to acknowledge that Sadie Sink plays Jean Grey) and Spider-Man: Brand New Day is sort of a slightly above-average teenage melodrama with some superheroes in it.

Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe middle-aged film critics were never meant to care about superhero movies for tweens and teens, and true to demographics, I didn’t really care about this one. It’s fine though? The stakes seem lower now (no portals, no time or inter dimensional travel), which is nice, but the demands of tying in and reintroducing mostly superfluous characters means that even when Brand New Day admirably drags things back down to human scale, it still can’t quite land the plane. I kept waiting for it to resolve the story about Spider-Man being a lonely bachelor but mostly it just got bogged down in an utterly forgettable and nearly impenetrable drama about Jean Grey and her sister.

If anyone suffers from the commercial demands of maintaining an absurdly sprawling superhero universe, it’s Tom Holland, who, despite it all, does some of the best acting of the whole franchise and maybe of his career. Previously it was only really the villains and side characters who could shine, like Willem Dafoe as Green Goblin and Alfred Molina as Doctor Otto Octavious, and JK Simmons as J Jonah Jameson (all in the Raimi trilogy). A Spider-Man movie with Holland as Peter Parker and the tone of one of the Raimi Spider-Mans could’ve been a real hoot.

Holland’s Parker now has to suffer through his girlfriend and best friend (Zendaya’s Mary Jane and Jacob Batalon’s Ned) not knowing who is, having made them forget him in order to save the world in the last movie. That means that they get to live out Peter’s dream of attending MIT alongside their high school pals, while Peter is left anonymously fighting crime from his sad bachelor hovel. (Side note: remember when Mary Jane was an actress and Peter a photographer? It sucks that every superhero movie is STEM propaganda now.) Meanwhile, Peter keeps tabs on Zendaya and Ned via social media and composes heartfelt love letters to Mary Jane that his personal sense of duty won’t allow him to deliver.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Peter is also going through some kind of Spider puberty. He’s producing too much web goo for his suit to handle and his Spidey sense is always on overdrive. This is actually a pretty clever conceit for making your movie starring married 30-year-olds still feel like a teen drama (Holland also famously said recently that The Odyssey was his last run at playing a boy).

Anyway, decent set up. Meanwhile, there’s a villain on the loose in the city whose shtick is being able to possess different people and jump from body to body. How do you fight a supernatural entity that seems to lack corporeal form, even when you can control your spider goo?

The villain, unfortunately, turns out not to be a villain at all, but a complicated confluence of Jean Grey, government experiments conducted by a shady functionary played by Tramell Tillman, and various Spider-Man frenemies, from Frank Castle the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), to Black Widow (Florence Pew-Pew), to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruff dog), to the Puerto Rican lady from The Bear (Liza Colón-Zayas, playing a friendly cop). This casting is so excellent, and still the whole thing ends up feeling like ten pounds of shit stuffed into a five-pound bag.

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At first I was going to tack this mini-review onto my review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but I discovered I was more interested in this one and decided to make it its own post.

Hotel Coolgardie (2016), currently free on Amazon Prime.

I think I heard about this through a random Instagram recommendation fed to me by the algorithm, but it was a rare W for the algorithm, because I was transfixed.

Hotel Coolgardie is a refreshingly low-key, straightforward documentary that doesn’t rely on any famous characters or a murder mystery. There’s no montage of local news anchors and social media headlines at the beginning to set the scene, thank God (these days, a meme montage is a tell-tale sign that you’re watching a bad film). It’s as much travelogue as it is documentary, albeit a thoroughly tragicomic, periodically nightmarish one.

It follows two Finnish backpacker women, Steph and Lina, who have had their things stolen and depleted their savings in Bali, and, in order to slowly earn their way back home, have signed on to work a three-month stint as bartenders in a remote Australian mining town — Coolgardie, a small town outside of Kalgoorlie, which is itself a small town about a six hours drive from Perth, which is in turn the most isolated big city in the world. Which is to say: it’s way out there, there’s absolutely nothing to do besides drink, and it’s extremely hot, flat, and dry and absolutely infested with the obnoxious, aggressive flies that are the hallmark of inland Australia (they’re why these hats exist).

The whole “friendly little town full of colorful kooks” that Coolgardie seems to be takes on an ominous edge before their first shift is even over, when the jolly, Wilford Brimley-esque manager turns suddenly authoritarian, and they’re still stuck there for another 12 weeks. And then there are the customers. They meet rough men, sad men, rough-sad men, and occasionally a woman who seems somehow even rougher and sadder than all the men (there’s one scene in particular involving Coolgardie women that could be an entire documentary of its own).

Through it all, Steph and Lina manage to maintain a facade of presumably terrified aloofness the entire time. The Australian way of trying to build rapport through cheeky naughtiness seems lost on the Finns, backfiring worse and worse throughout the movie — less a generalization about the respective cultures (my best Australian friend is actually married to a Finn) than about the social clunkiness and rampant alcoholism of wildly isolated mining communities. Hotel Coolgardie embodies every place that I would never go but will eagerly devour every story about.

What if you were stuck in an uncomfortable, back-away-through-the-hedge-row situation, but you had to endure it for three months? Fascinating, terrifying, and even though there’s no big mystery to solve or big twist at the end, it still manages to end on a fairly shocking note.

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For many long-time Content Report-heads (and ex-FilmDrunkards), This Week In Posters has been a signature feature. I haven’t done one in a bit, largely because I have five or six jobs now, Top Chef stuff takes up a ton of time during Top Chef season (and is easily the biggest driver of paid subscriptions that I have), and in general, this tends to be the feature I put off doing whenever I get busy. Writing one or two lines of dopey jokes underneath movie posters just feels less “important” than a heartfelt personal essay, an attempt at a definitive movie review that I sweat over, some other dumb thing I probably thought was super important at the time that you probably didn’t read.

Obviously we’re not curing cancer around here, so I should probably stop being so precious. Long story short, I’m trying to bring This Week In Posters back on a more consistent basis. Probably it’s good for both of us to give the essays and reviews a break from time to time and simply let the mom jokes flow through me. (I look like Raiden from Mortal Kombat when I’m thinking up a really good one).

I get to make the dumbest jokes I can think up, and you get to hear about a few upcoming movies in the process. It’s a win-win! Bring back the internet being fun!

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James Wan produced Backrooms? I missed that. Anyway, I saw this trailer before The Odyssey the other week and it looked… uh… fine? The premise seems to go something like “what if a demon could possess your mom?”

At the very least, it looks to be a great vehicle for Jessica Chastain making weird faces. She doesn’t get enough credit for that talent.

I remember around the time that Zero Dark Thirty came out, they released a bunch of character posters and that whole scene where Jessica Chastain’s character flips out on Kyle Chandler right around the same time (the “mullah crackadullah” scene, for the real heads). She was really making some good faces in that, so I took a few screencaps of her angriest ones and made parodies of the character posters or something like that with a bunch of her freak-out faces. I don’t remember it with 100% accuracy, but rest assured it was really dumb.

(I think it was this scene, which is unfortunately not easily embeddable here).

Long story short, I got in SO MUCH TROUBLE for that. I don’t know if Chastain’s team was furious at the marketing team for releasing the scene out of context, if it was leaked through non-official channels, if someone just didn’t like the joke, or if someone saw the screencaps of goofy faces and hated it (possibly crapping on an FYC campaign in the process?) but I remember having at least five phone calls of people telling me everyone was mad and thinking I might get fired for a few days. I think I came very close. Ah, blogging.

Anyway, all of this is to say, it’s hard for me to see the trailer for Jessica Chastain in Other Mommy and not think, “Well well well, look who’s proud of her ability to make weird faces all of a sudden?”

Sidenote: Zero Dark Thirty was horseshit propaganda and I’m pretty sure (at least in that particular scene) the Kyle Chandler character was right all along.

That says “It Ends” and the design looks like… a digestive tract? Hey, is this a poster for “It Ends” or “Rear Ends,” am I right?

Friends on a late-night food run become trapped on an infinite highway with otherworldly terrors lurking beyond. Confined in their Jeep Cherokee, they must decide whether to accept their fate or attempt escape. [IMDB]

Hmm, I don’t see any thing about digestion or buttholes. Maybe the design is supposed to be a road? Looks like a road from the mouth to the ass, if you ask me.

American Doctor! …stay away from me.
American Doctor! …mama let me beee-hee
Don’t come-a chargin’ your copay fee
I don’t want a visit to bankrupt me…

Sorry, sometimes my brain goes into parody song mode and it has nothing to do with the actual movie. (It also only just now dawned on me that “American Woman” was written by Canadians. Probably older already people knew this?)

Actual synopsis:

When three American doctors-Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian-enter Gaza to save lives, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth. [IMDB]

Sounds a lot more interesting than the “American _____” naming convention would suggest. Can we stop doing that now?

That being said, the bomb-flag design is pretty cool.

Angry Birds 3! Three feature-length movies from a video game where you shoot birds like a slingshot to try to kill some stationary pigs. Very impressive. I’ll probably see this with my kid, but I’m waiting for video.

iN tHiS HOusE, wE bELieVe iN aLTeRiNg tHE sIzE oF oUR fONts.

Okay, fine, maybe the font variation isn’t *that* weird. David Robert Mitchell plus dinosaurs? Count me in. It Follows is great, yes, but Under the Silver Lake is an underappreciated masterpiece, in my opinion. Certainly weird and not as user-friendly as, say, the Coen brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson (the other bards of SoCal), but Under the Silver Lake belongs to the pantheon of all-time great movies about LA.

Oh, you want to know what it’s actually *about*? Ugh, philistines:

The Platt family bands together to navigate their new surroundings after a cosmic event transports their suburban neighborhood to someplace unknown. [IMDB]

Are you happy now? I’m not, the poster was better.

You may have missed all the news stories about it this past week, but Lionsgate finally fixed Ryan Gosling’s “flat hand.”

Back in 2024, Gosling told The Wall Street Journal Magazine about a “moment” in the Oscar-winning hit that still haunts him years later: “We’re dancing, Emma and I, and I didn’t know this would become the poster for the movie. We were supposed to have our hands up, and I thought it would be cool to put my hand [more flat] even though everyone told me it wasn’t cool. I was sure it was cooler.”

“Now when I look at it, and I have to see it all the time, you know what would’ve been cooler… [the intended pose],” Gosling added. “It just killed the energy that way. I call it La La Hand.”

Here’s the old one:

I hate to say it about something so who cares, but I think Baby Goose is right. Flat hand was weird.

A biopic about the founder of Hershey from the studio that brought us The Sound of Freedom? Oh yes, we’re getting that. His name is “Milton Hershey,” by the way. I like the idea of a movie about a “young Milton Hershey who fucks,” but I doubt that would be the take from Angel Studios. And anyway, if that was what they were going for, they probably would’ve called it “Milton.” Oh well, at least they lined up the faces with the names.

Hershey’s chocolate sucks, by the way. Did it always, or is that a new development? Maybe the movie answers this.

Whoa, this movie poster is totally in my face! I’d love to tell you whether the faces and the names are lined up on this one but I have no idea who any of these people are. Which one is Cool Shirtman and which is Chris Del Chris? What of CHHHHAAAAAD?

“The hits keep on killing.”

Hmm, I can see what they were going for if I squint, but I think that play on words needed a little longer in the oven.

Chris Rock is directing a movie for A24?? This will be his first directorial effort since Top Five, in 2014. I didn’t see that one, but my chances of seeing this one are much greater as Chris Rock doesn’t seem to be one of the main actors in it.

I approve of the subtle side boob. More posters should show more parts of the boob, in my opinion.

“By NWR.”

You have to be really cool* to know that NWR refers to Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives). Who wants to bet me that the official synopsis includes the word “psychological?”

A hypnotic, unhinged thriller with an original story promising plenty of glamour, sex, and violence.

Damn, “hypnotic,” I was close.

*Borderline insufferable.

Shoot, this came out like a month ago and I never saw it. Any good? I’m guessing not. They made five Scary Movieses and then 13 years later the same guys made another one and they just called it “Scary Movie.” I don’t think that should be allowed.

“Before he was Scrooge, he was… Ebenezer.”

What was I just saying about the naming conventions for “young ____ who fucks” origin stories? Case in point.

This poster for Ebenezer has such palpable “fake movie in a 30 Rock episode” energy that you probably already saw people having a go at it on social media.

The crazy part? Ti West apparently directed this! That’s right, multiple-time Frotcast guest Ti West! Maybe it’s more tongue-in-cheek than it appears? No idea at this stage, but maybe he’ll come back and explain it. Maybe his life’s dream was always to make a movie about a young Ebenezer Scrooge who fucks, starring not-young Johnny Depp. This sounds so weird that I think I have to see it.

Here’s the teaser poster for Avengers: Doomsday. Nerds, this is your time to shine, because I have no idea if this tapestry is supposed to reference something that I’m supposed to be aware of. That character is played by Robert Downey Jr. though, I know that.

Gal Gadot is running! Even the font on her name looks like it’s running! And look, it’s a “Prime Original!” That means I’ll be “running” for the remote if this ever comes on by accident when I fall asleep watching something else.

Camp Rock 3, eh? Will I be lost if I never saw the first two? Which one is Cool Shirtman and which one is Chris Del Chris? I know I already used that joke, but it might be even more applicable here.

“From executive producers Joe Jonas, Nick Jonas, Kevin Jonas & Demi Lovato” is this week’s funniest tagline.

By the way, is that kid on the back right wearing a Zoot Suit with a camouflage t-shirt underneath? Mysteries abound.

And this brings us to this week’s best poster, this one for Mutiny, starring Jason Statham. If you didn’t get the reference, that uncanny quality you’re probably feeling is that this one is a riff on a famous poster for Die Hard:

“Die Hard on a ____” used to be the most common kind of movie math — Passenger 57 and Air Force One were Die Hard on a plane, Speed was Die Hard on a bus, Paul Blart was Die Hard in a mall, and so forth. They even sort of already did Die Hard on a boat, in Speed 2 and Under Siege. I guess technically Speed 2 was Die Hard on a cruise ship, Under Siege was Die Hard on a battleship, and this one is Die Hard on a container ship. They got all kinds of boats now, I always say. Whatever floats your boat.

Still, as we get collectively dumber, the parallels and puns have to get even clearer for anyone to pick up on them — as parodied perfectly in the Idiocracy time-lapse sequence where Fuddrucker’s eventually just becomes Buttfucker’s. I honestly can’t really fault the logic: “it’s Die Hard on a boat. Why don’t we just lead with that?”

I’m obviously hyped for this one, as I would be with any new Statham project. Only, it wasn’t Die Hard that I was picturing. I actually thought this should be a sequel to Gerard Butler’s Plane. Mutiny is a perfectly fine title, I suppose, but I think “Plane 2: Boat” better captures its essence.

You can’t put that many sparks on a poster that says “September 11th” on it! Too soon, man, too soon!

I kid. As we’ve discussed, sparks are a dad-movie poster staple. They convey “lots of action!”

Seriously though, I thought Liam Neeson was supposed to be retired from action movies. I thought he was going to marry Pamela Anderson and retire to Malta or something (I still want that for them).

And yet, this one looks distinctly Taken-y. In fact, IMDB tells me that the director’s name is “Guy Moshe,” which is the perfect name for a vaguely Eurotrash or possibly Israeli action movie director who directs a bad riff on Taken. (I’m not even going to look up where he’s from or if that’s the name he was born with, I want to be surprised.)

Let’s do some additional research…

Moshe wrote the script with Mark Bacci (Prisoner’s Daughter), from an original idea by Bazzel Baz (The Blacklist), a former CIA special operations group officer. Kerry Barden and Paul Schnee (Spotlight) are handling casting. [Deadline]

Excuse me, former CIA special operations group officer “Bazzel Baz?” That’s somehow an even more on-the-nose shitty action movie producer name than Guy Moshe. Plus, Paul Schnee! We are the Schnights who say Schnee! That was my favorite Monty Python bit.

This one apparently used to be called “Hotel Tehran.” Wonder why they changed it?

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As pretty much any anecdotal analysis would’ve told you, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was the big winner at the box office over the weekend. Me even saying “Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey” feels a little redundant here. Almost as redundant as the title card at the end of the film saying “based on the epic poem by Homer.” As if Homer is out there, somewhere, feeling super pleased at the shoutout (finally, some recognition!). Makes me really wish they’d done a “from the mind of Homer…” before the trailer, M. Night Shyamalan style. (Ooh, a new Homer joint! I LOVE this guy.)

Anyway, The Odyssey grossed $124.5 million over the weekend, domestically, and $264.1 million worldwide. That was good enough for the third-biggest opening of the year, behind Toy Story 5 and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Which of course makes it also the first-biggest non-sequel, non-animated opening of the year (which was rated R to boot).

Meanwhile, mostly everyone loved it, myself included (A Cinemascore, 95% on RottenTomatoes, if you’re into the whole quantifying intangibles “thing”). It cost $250 to produce, which seems like a lot, but then again The Rock’s Christmas movie cost that much and I’m not even sure the movie’s editor saw that one all the way through. Either way, it seems clear, The Odyssey gamble has paid off.

Why so successful, as the Heath Ledger Joker might put it? (Another Christopher Nolan movie, btw). I would submit that the major factors here were: 1. it felt like a big deal, 2. lack, of competition, and 3. all the word of mouth suggested that it didn’t suck. And the big news was that The Odyssey was the first-ever movie shot entirely on IMAX cameras, which added to the urgency of seeing it in a theater and not just waiting for streaming (and seeing it in the most expensive format, no less). In retrospect, Christopher Nolan was pretty smart, in that regard, to bet it all on making his brand synonymous with “big theatrical experience.” It seems obvious now, but most of the big filmmakers were doing the opposite at the time, trying to make nice-nice with the big streamers trying to pretend there wasn’t a difference.

The last time the movies were broadly declared “back” a few months ago, it was a pair of 20-something YouTubers sticking it to the old guard widely cited as being the cause. Well, Christopher Nolan is 55, and he’s been making movies for close to 30 years now. Given that, doesn’t this installment of “movies are so back” negate the last?

In terms of “we should let all the 20-somethings make everything now,” maybe it does — some — but I would submit that the broad strokes are the same: audiences being tired of lazy IP stuff and expanded universes (with kids movies being a notable exception to this rule, since little kids don’t have long enough memories to be sick of that shit yet). Lately, audiences tend to gravitate to anything that feels like not that. Christopher Nolan is a known quantity, but a massive-budget adaptation of possibly the oldest story in the western canon is the kind of risk that makes people say “let’s go see if the crazy bastard can pull this one off.”

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Boy, that Homer sure could write his ass off, couldn’t he? Or perhaps bard his ass off, as it were. Helluva storyteller, anyway.

Whatever the case, it’s hard to think of a director better suited than Christopher Nolan to deliver an ancient Greek epic of love and vengeance in its grandest, most immediately-parseible-to-modern-sensibilities form. Denis Villeneuve could probably capture the scale, James Cameron could shoot better action, and Spielberg could compose equally pretty camera moves, but Nolan’s extra dash of logic-based groping towards full metaphysical enlightenment nudges The Odyssey towards the truly transcendent. Will Nolan, 300-pound IMAX cameras in hand, single-handedly bring back the sword-and-sandals epic? I don’t know, but it’s fun to dream. Classical myth making is Nolan’s religion and The Odyssey is one of his greatest sermons.

Nolan manages to make The Odyssey feel both relevant without overdoing its metaphorical value, and classical in a way that feels like little was lost in translation. It’s quite possible that I’m just a movies moron at heart, but in the same way that I didn’t feel like I truly appreciated Hamlet before The Northman, I came out of The Odyssey feeling like I hadn’t truly appreciated Homer before Nolan rendered it all mega-format trailer-line glory.

So, what is The Odyssey? On its most surface level, it’s possibly human history’s beau ideal of “a good story, well told.” It’s a crowd-pleaser, a cracking good yarn, a tale that truly lends itself to being barded.

I’ve often understood “Chekhov’s Gun” as an age-old storytelling mandate to deliver on the things one foreshadows. Coming out of The Odyssey, I felt like maybe I had misunderstood it slightly; that maybe what it’s actually about is how much more satisfying is the promise of violence than the delivery of it. Chekhov’s gun eventually has to fire, sure, but that gun sitting there on the wall is infinitely more powerful than the one belching flames. If you make a big enough promise, early enough, an audience will follow you virtually anywhere.

The big promise? Well, Odysseus (Matt Damon) went off and won the Trojan War, basically single-handedly (he was the one who came up with the whole hide-some-dudes-inside-a-giant-horse trick that no one will ever fall for again), but he got sidetracked on the way home, and now his beautiful villa is filled with a bunch of assholes trying to fuck his wife and kill his son. Not only that, they insult his free wine and disparage the unearned hospitality. They’re cruel to his undyingly loyal blind servant, Eumaeus (played by the always brilliant John Leguizamo), and even kick his dog, the 20-year-old retired hunting pooch, Argos, who has reached such a ripe old age only out of a desire to see his master one last time before ascends to doggie heaven. Even thinking about a fictional boy this impossibly good for the purposes of trying to type this requires me to hold back tears. Can you imagine a boy this good? And then someone having the sheer audacity to mistreat him?? They kick his dog?? FUCK ‘EM UP, ODYSSEUS! KILL ‘EM ALL TWICE!

This storytelling conceit creates such a visceral desire for explicit bloody revenge that the listener will weather all manner of preachy digressions and spooky asides so long as it maintains this tacit promise of a gory denoument. Beyond that, the story is also all about the limits of revenge; which we the audience will come to know right alongside the protagonist. How badly do you want that revenge? What are you willing to lose in order to achieve it?

Those are the basic bones of The Odyssey, and why it works. Though it’s also so much more. Part of the reason that the story has endured, I imagine, is that it’s such an effective framework for improvisation. Proof that if you start with a great wrong, and end with a great revenge, you can squeeze almost anything into the middle section, like a Bronze Age The Aristocrats. It even feels like a story that all the best bards added their own embellishments to over successive tellings. And so in the end, it becomes a revenge story, a shaggy dog tale, a meditation on difficult choices and the difficulty of hearing your better angels, a parable about norms (especially in Nolan’s hands), and the ultimate overwrought excuse dreamed up by every man who ever stayed out a little too late and now has to try to explain it all to his wife. Hey, yeah, sorry babe, this witch turned all my men into pigs, I had to murder a Cyclops, and some clever nymph fed me narcotic flowers that made me forget I had a family. I was thinking about you the entire time, I swear! The nymph wasn’t even that hot!

Admittedly my memory of reading The Odyssey in high school is a little hazy, but my sense is that one of Nolan’s biggest bits of dramatic license is to turn the story into one about social bonds and societal norms, and what happens when you shatter those for personal gain. The overarching theme is of pandora’s boxes, of cans of worms you can’t close, decisions you can’t take back — things of this nature. Triremes against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Can you ever, really, go home again?

The decisions Odysseus can’t take back are many. He blinds the Cyclops, unnecessarily, angering Poseidon, dooming his men and cursing himself to endlessly wander. Philistine that I am, I was a little disappointed that the Cyclops didn’t have a big ol’ floppy Cyclops cock flapping around while he tried to find the Greeks disguised as his sheep. Once that die has been cast, Odysseus is left with a series of lose-lose choices: let everyone die in the whirlpool of Charybdis or allow the many-headed serpent Scylla to eat only some of his men? It’s all well and good to listen to the gods, but what happens when they want you dead? (That the goddess Athena appears to Odysseus in human form, played by Zendaya, has a big, clever payoff in the end).

Odysseus is on a long, spooky sojourn, and meanwhile, his wife, Penelope (played beautifully by all-time movie crush hall of famer Anne Hathaway) and son, Telemachus (30-year-old Tom Holland, only 13 years younger than his movie mom, stretching the bounds of the timeline) face some impossible choices of their own. Do they kill the ravenous suitors (led by the craven Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson in full English slime) but in the process risk exile, by breaking “Zeus’s Law” of hospitality? Or simply continue letting them bleed their Ithaca estate dry until there’s nothing left to rule? Can Telemachus rule in his father’s place, or will the suitors just murder him? There’s a beautiful exploration into the nature of grief baked into the way Odysseus’s absence is felt, not just as a lack, but as an ever-present burden — a flood of still more impossible choices. How do you, ultimately, honor the departed?

I was certainly bringing my own baggage to the proceedings, watching The Odyssey just weeks removed from the death of my own father, but watching Telemachus finally come face to face with his pops, seeing the mix of pride and regret in the old man’s eyes after 20 years away, was more than enough to leave me ugly crying in the theater. Fuckin’ A, what a story.

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Apologies for the slightly slow posting lately, folks. I had some “family stuff,” plus a petite cold (probably brought on by the family stuff, a cold is a hell of a thing to get when it’s 106 degrees outside) that kept me from posting all the things I wanted to this past week. Nonetheless, there are a few action items on the agenda going forward, including bringing back This Week in Posters on a more consistent basis, so… uh, stay tuned.

In any case, Death has certainly had a real up-and-down few weeks here. Just when we were all assuming that 84-year-old Mitch McConnell had died, or was presently occupying some liminal space between decrepitude and Turtle Valhalla, Death threw us a big ol’ curveball and took 71-year-old Lindsey Graham’s freckled ass instead.

Graham was recently seen living his best life, having finally gotten that Iran war he always wanted, looking more spry, energetic, and fabulous than half our working politicians — until, oops, dissected aorta! It always shows up when least expected, the Spanish Inquisition of maladies. Or, as Trump described it, “part of his body literally blew up.” (Say what you will about Trump, I’ve never found another person so simultaneously loathsome and consistently hilarious, it’s an unprecedented combination).

What a nice lil surprise. In the days since, Graham’s younger sister, whom he adopted as a teenager, has been appointed to serve out his term in the Senate, despite not having a Wikipedia page before that day. To sum up, as I put it on the Frotcast, our gayest senator has been replaced by his sister-daughter. The Republic is doing fine, folks. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell’s staff have since released a proof-of-life photo, but no one’s really buying it. And anyway, McConnell being alive or dead is kind of immaterial in his current state — freezing like bad Zoom connection, taking spills on flat ground so bad that he has to go to the hospital for ten days, etc.

In any case, Lindsey Graham biting it was about as fun as the deaths of public figures get. But then ol’ Death had to really go and fuck it up by taking Sam Neill barely two days later. Can’t you leave well enough alone???

As so many before me have probably put it by now, Sam Neill, by all appearances, was basically the opposite of Lindsey Graham. Which is to say, a guy who was basically universally beloved, and not just because he was hyper-competent character actor who made every project he was part of a little better, but also because he seemed like such a genuinely decent person.

Until he left Twitter shortly after the Elon Musk takeover, Neill had one of the most charming social media presences of any actor (probably only Henry Winkler comes close) — posting pretty much nothing but heartfelt support for his collaborators and winningly dorky animal content from his New Zealand farm. I didn’t know Sam Neill personally, but his feed was filled with chickens, pigs, dogs, and wine, and that made me love him. No, it doesn’t take much, and that’s okay.

I don’t have any personal anecdotes with which to honor Sam Neill’s passing, as do so many of my fellow film critics. This is especially painful as I feel like I came so close. I was one of the “only” 33,000 accounts Neill followed on Twitter, and I even did the press tour for one of his movies — The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, in 2016. Sadly, the interview I got was with Taika Waititi, and not Sam (I did find Taika quite charming back then).

Anyway, I’m not going to do a list of the ten best Sam Neill movies. The man was in far too many great films for that, and did great work in even more mediocre ones. And honestly, you don’t need me to tell you about Jurassic Park (though it should be noted, I saw this film three times in the theater, a childhood record).

Instead I’m simply to recommend just a handful of great Sam Neill projects, ranging from super obscure to slightly-under-the-radar, for better remembering one of cinema’s most effective and hardest-working “that guys.” Sam Neill had a Tom Hanksian everyman quality to him, with a similarly broad range, but also a natural dignity, which allowed him to play all manner of conscientious objectors and authority figures. This also made him pretty fun at playing a piece of shit when cast against type. Like Hanks, Niell was also very funny, though interestingly, in his case that seemed much more manifest in his personal life and in interviews than in his actual roles.

In any case, RIP to a great one. Hopefully he stands as an abiding example that you can live a pretty good life being a decent person.

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With two features under her belt before this one, it used to be hard to pinpoint Olivia Wilde’s brand as a director. She’d debuted with Booksmart (2019), a critically-acclaimed pseudo-teen comedy that probably stands as the high water mark of late 20-teens girlboss neoliberalism (just remember Beanie Feldstein saying “Malala” and try not to cringe). Wilde followed that up with Don’t Worry Darling, a failed period piece psychological thriller about gaslighting, remembered more for Wilde’s affair with her star, Harry Styles, than for the content of the film. (Shame it didn’t last, they could’ve become the world’s most fakest-soundingly named power couple).

It’s perhaps a little unfair, then, to open a discussion of The Invite, Wilde’s latest, wildly successful directorial effort by contextualizing it with her personal life — the Styles affair, Wilde getting served divorce papers while onstage at CinemaCon, and from Ted Lasso no less.

Unfortunately it’s also inevitable, essentially impossible not to bring up a director’s high-profile divorce in the context of a film that is, in large part, a divorce movie. (To her credit, Wilde seems to know this, and hasn’t shied away from acknowledging the parallels to her personal life during the press tour). The Invite is also a pretty great one; mature, sharply-written, consistently hilarious, and, dare I say it, sweet.

There are a million attempts at “sophisticated relationship dramedy for adults” that feel like plays, and most of them leave me grumbling “ugh, this feels like a play.”

That’s not to disparage the theater, it’s just that relationship movies that feel like plays usually manage to capture all of a play’s limitations with few of its competitive advantages — you normally get all of the stage’s limited scenery, and none of its manic energy or the magic of actors interacting live in front of a live audience. The Invite, which Wilde noted at the post-film Q&A was shot sequentially (very rare for a film of this scale, where you usually shoot all the scenes that happen in a particular location, then switch locations, regardless of the order of the story) crackles with live theater energy. Hard to say whether that’s a function of the sharp script, by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, the deft performances, the sequential shooting, or Wilde’s compositions, but the bigger point is that they’re all working together, creating something that feels like more than the sum of its parts. Smart adult comedies are notoriously hard, but The Invite makes them feel easy.

If there’s a “trick” to The Invite, it’s that it’s a break-up comedy masquerading as a sex comedy. Sexual tension is most of what makes relationships interesting (the lack thereof is why virtually every storyline about pre-pubescent children in love, from Moonrise Kingdom to Jojo Rabbit, bores me to tears). Generally what makes The Invite work so well is that it creates the imminent sense that the characters might be about to fuck, and then maintains that energy for basically the whole film. You could do a lot worse.

Everything about The Invite, from the title to the trailer on down (actually a remake of The People Upstairs, a 2020 Spanish film by Cesc Gay, based on his own play) telegraphs that it’s a film about swinging. It’s mostly not, but it’s the illusion that’s important.

We open with an Oscar Wilde quote, “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."

It’s a good quote, and the real heads among us already knew that Oscar Wilde is the person from whom Olivia Wilde, neé Olivia Jane Cockburn, took her surname (she is descended from a family of writers with a porny-sounding names, just not the Wildes).

In any case, San Francisco yuppies Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) are trapped in a bickering marriage — he a musician-turned-depressed-music teacher, she an art student-turned hovering homemaker — that becomes extra fractious thanks to an impending dinner party with their upstairs neighbors, Pina and Hawk, played by Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton. Pina and Hawk have been doing loud construction and louder sex, much to the annoyance of Joe, and the not-so-secret envy of Angela, who can only dream that schlumpy Joe might one day dick her down as good as silver fox Hawk dicks down spicy Pina.

And so Angela is doing everything she can to make sure her dinner party is perfect, while Joe, with a bad back and exhausted from biking home from work (hey! I used to live on that street!) wants nothing to do with the whole charade, and is further convinced that his wife never even told him about it. (Sometimes it do be like that tho).

Where there’s already the tension of Angela putting on a show while Joe does everything he can to sabotage her yuppie dinner party (arguments over wine, jamón, etc.), The Invite amps things up even further by turning it into a “hey we saw you from the across the hall and decided we really like your vibe” situation. That’s right, I think you all know what I’m talm bout. Group sex! Throuples! Polyamory! Will the urban elder millennials succeed in bringing back key parties?

One thing The Invite does particularly well (beyond the built-in sexual tension, which is really its fastball), is to make Joe and Angela about equally at fault for their failing relationship without making them entirely insufferable. They aren’t relatable, exactly — Joe is a depressive, negative stoner who pisses and moans about everything; Angela is a pompous tryhard — but at least they don’t feel like some annoying screenwriter’s idealized notion of sophisticated intellectuals (cough Marriage Story! cough cough).

It sounds weird to say, but break-up comedies are a form of wish-fulfillment. The characters shout the kinds of things at each other that most people in relationships have occasionally wanted to shout at their partners, but don’t, because in real life it would mean instantaneous divorce. There’s a catharsis in hearing characters just say all the things we normally withhold. That seems easy enough for a script to accomplish on the face of it, but there’s also a peacocking tendency among so many (usually older male) screenwriters that often leads them to render these interactions in hopelessly flowery and/or groaningly over-intellectualized terms (“let’s not get into another turgid discussion of categorical imperatives” is a terrible line from Vicky Cristina Barcelona that echoes around my head from time to time). There’s also the Aaron Sorkin version, where a hyper-competent male character spends most of a film successfully mansplaining to all the ignorant chicks around him (as my old podcast co-host Bret used to say, in the first draft of an Aaron Sorkin script, the female lead is just named “My Ex-Wife”).

That McCormack/Jones/Wilde are able to successfully avoid these common pitfalls is a big part of what makes The Invite such a rare treat.

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In the past few weeks, Citizen Vigilante has grown from the relative obscurity of a direct-to-streaming release starring previously canceled actor Armie Hammer to some status as a cult darling. After being banned in Germany, it recorded one of the five highest audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes of the year, trailing only three regular films and the top spot, Michael, the bowdlerized hagiography of a famous pedophile. Determining what percentage of this has been driven by genuine grass-roots sentiment and what by some sort of astroturfing campaign is impossible to divine, but the method for how we got here is easy enough to explain: Elon Musk personally posted Citizen Vigilante on X, where it was available for free for 48 hours. “This is what people want to see,” he wrote.

Why would people want to see Citizen Vigilante, one might ask? Throwing out “because it’s an Uwe Boll movie” (Boll being the German filmmaker who made a series of videogame adaptations in the aughts so bad that he ended up challenging some of his fiercest online critics to a boxing match, as depicted in the documentary Raging Boll) and “because it’s Armie Hammer’s comeback film,” the only medium-convincing answer is “because it’s fascist propaganda.”

Fascist propaganda is about all that Citizen Vigilante is, and yet to call it that seems, if anything, too kind.

“Propaganda” generally describes the process of taking a political ideology and dressing it up with a good story, of taking a general philosophy and justifying it with a compelling anecdote; essentially, catchy marketing. Citizen Vigilante certainly isn’t that. It’s more like ideology a la carte, a series of talking points delivered directly to camera in fits and starts by an actor who mostly seems bored — penned by a screenwriter whose heart clearly wasn’t in it. Say what you will about the ethics of Leni Reifanstahl dude, at least she seemed like she cared.

Triumph of the Will, The Birth of a Nation — those had equally toxic politics, but they still aspired to art. Citizen Vigilante is a barely coherent montage of half-hearted provocations, derivative, non-committal, slapdash, and above all, excruciatingly dull. Is Uwe Boll a genuine fascist, or just a clever opportunist, who correctly identified Magachud infamy as his final remaining path to prominence? And all he had to do was make a lazy ripoff of Death Wish, with anti-migrant characteristics? I honestly don’t know, and as ever, the amount of daylight between “committed fascism” and “nihilistic grifting” is debatable.

One thing is for certain: Uwe Boll remains, above all, a terrible filmmaker (put up your dukes, you gap-toothed cock knocker).

Content aside, he has one peculiar quirk as a filmmaker, which is that he seems to shoot every scene from 3-4 different camera angles, and then cuts between them in an attempt to create a sense of forward momentum. Only, he constantly cuts from one angle back to another, and then back again, with almost nothing changed from the previous version of the same shot, such that he communicates no new information and leaves you wondering whether he’s just reusing shots. He does this over and over again throughout a scene until you feel like you’re hallucinating. It’s sort of like the Monty Python guys running up that hill, only not comedic and not on purpose. It’s not kinetic, just tedious, offering the same sense of rolling deja vu as consuming too many edibles. Oh my God, is the SWAT team still just walking up stairs? Time is going by really, really, really slow.

Only three or four things happen in this entire film and they mostly lack any internal logic. We open with the title card “EUROPE” (one of the few so-bad-it’s-funny moments in the movie), where a Germanic woman (speaking English) is buying her large son some chocolates. They’re having a Kinder-package good time until they walk out the store and a dark-skinned man stabs the mom in the neck, where she dies spurting blood (shooting gratuitous gore is the only time you get the sense that Boll is enjoying himself). For his part, the attacker just runs off.

Who is this woman? The wife, sister, mother, of the protagonist? And who, the assailant? Some illegal migrant escaped criminal, wilding in Teuto-Slavic Europa thanks to the lax policies of a woke judge?? Nah. Connecting any of these strands would be too much work. They’re just some people. We never find out who, and we never see them again. They’re simply prologue for a television news reporter lady to tell us that there is some sort of vigilante on the loose, targeting migrants, and that he’s starting to become very popular with the people. This is illustrated with a meme montage (the now go-to exposition device for our laziest filmmakers) in which an American woman says “The Citizen Vigilante, I think he’s great. I think we could use him here in America!”

Migrants are doing crime, but there’s a vigilante killing migrants. This is the setup, communicated in the most disconnected broad strokes possible, with zero emotions evoked or stakes of any kind. The whole movie feels vibe-coded in this manner, where you sort of get the gist of what it’s attempting, but no single detail enhances the general concept. Part of me wonders whether Elon Musk was pushing Citizen Vigilante so hard because it was secretly written by Grok. It feels like it was. Though if so, someone should have cranked back up the Mechahitler dial because this is boring as hell.

Following the meme montage, we get more montage, this time of the titular Citizen Vigilante — a title which would be redundant (isn’t the “citizen” part of “vigilante” implied?), except that Armie Hammer’s character is not actually a citizen. In fact that’s one of the very few things that the movie actually manages to convey about him. He’s an American. Not a citizen (of “Europe”). He’s been in the Army. …That’s about it.

Is he ex-special forces? Does he have a “particular set of skills?” Not in any way that the movie conveys. He’s mostly a guy who wears black and gives boring lectures about the people having to step in when the government is incapable of providing justice and whatnot. He wears monochromatic black clothes, like a black baseball hat, a black turtleneck, black trenchcoat. Whereas sleek, sinewy Michael F. Assbender actually looked cool and good in these kinds of outfits in The Killer, Armie Hammer can’t ever really escape looking like an Ivy League rower. (For a guy who’s half Eastern European Jewish, he looks very Mormon). He’s far too meaty and conspicuous for this wardrobe to work, and so he just looks like giant kid playing dress up, or some poisonous new variant of “Fedora Guy” (turtleneck guy?).

Death Wish was arguably no less fascistic than Citizen Vigilante, but it had a few basic things going for it. Like Charles Bronson as the stary, who, again, looked cool. He was a tough guy who didn’t waste a lot of time yakking. He also had a recognizable character arc, going from mild-mannered architect (a good liberal, a conscientious objector during the war!) to ruthless vigilante after some thugs rape and murder his wife and daughter. Bronson’s character had skin in the game, and a preternatural skill for offing punks; all he had to do was let go of his liberal hangups. Armie Hammer’s character here has no skin in the game, and spends 85% of his screen time bloviating. He’s basically a rationalist forum poster let loose in real life. In a genuinely rousing movie, he would be the one getting murdered, preferably mid-boring monologue.

We don’t even get to see the punks he offs acting particularly thuggish. I texted my podcast co-host Brendan that Citizen Vigilante is basically Marine Todd: Landlord. He responded, “Marine: Todd Landlord,” which is better and more accurate. Armie Hammer looks exactly like the human embodiment of “Todd Landlord.”

In fact, whereas the movie doesn’t do much to explore Hammer’s character’s backstory, his Americanness, his military service, or his violent tendencies, it does go weirdly overboard underlining the apparently essential point that he is a landlord.

In one of the film’s weirdest sequences (and the film consists entirely of weird sequences), Todd Landlord visits a house of prostitution. Boll sets the scene with a tracking shot through a long hallway, which, in typical Boll fashion, makes the hallway feel approximately seven miles long. Todd Landlord eyes prostitute. Shot of prostitute’s breasts. Shot of prostitute’s crotch. Todd Landlord. Different prostitute. Eyes. More disembodied breasts, faces, crotches, butts. This goes on for a while. We absolutely must know that Todd Landlord is surveying the goods. At long last (SO long) he chooses a clearly long-suffering prostitute and goes into a room to have relations with her. They engage in what my wife described as “the least sexy sex scene I’ve ever seen,” which Todd Landlord pauses halfway through, in order to point out, and I’m not exaggerating here, that the room has black mold along the wall.

“When you have clients shower in here, do you open a window?” he asks.

“Uh, not always,” she says, confused.

“When your clients shower, you need to open a window,” he lectures. “The moisture from the shower is causing mold to grow on the wall.”

Why do you care, she wants to know? Because I own the building, says Todd Landlord. “What, you didn’t think your pimps owned it, did you?” he sneers with infinite smugness, like this was written by a vape store Aaron Sorkin.

There are so many ways that this scene could’ve gone, and I’ll admit that this was the last one I expected (points for unpredictability?). Todd Landlord is, after all, a ruthless vigilante whose stated goal is protecting white Europeans from foreign rapists and murderers (he says as much in all the meme montage scenes). Given that framing, one would imagine that the protagonist walking through the hallway at a dingy whorehouse might be a setup for a sex trafficking plotline. It’s not just years of Taken movies — hell, even Clarence Worley killing Alabama’s pimp in True Romance — conditioning us to expect such things. With so many houses of prostitution run by foreign gangs, and the prostitutes working there at varying levels of coercion (not to mention ages of consent), it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to depict this place as a house of rape and white slavery run by swarthy foreigners. The blue-eyed boy protagonist could then easily turn the place into gratuitous grindhouse carnage, thus defending the honor of good white women everywhere. The scene where Robocop shoots a rapist in the dick is everything Citizen Vigilante wants to be, and it accomplishes more in 60 seconds than Citizen Vigilante does in 90 minutes.

But Citizen Vigilante doesn’t go that direction. That might actually have been exciting, which Boll avoids like kryptonite. Boll never bothers making too strong a case against rape, too concerned as he is with defending prostitution as legitimate institution. (Which I have no problem with ideologically, beyond it being dreadfully dull and hilariously inconsistent here). The scene clearly isn’t there for titillation (as I said, the sex is rote and kind of gross), and it exists completely apart from Todd Landlord’s vigilantism. He gets no information from the prostitute, learns nothing that might help him on his migrant-murdering mission. The scene is seemingly there solely to convey that the protagonist is a landlord (which is funny, because… it kind of implicates him as a foreign sex trafficker himself?). And in the process, gives him the opportunity to use that as a cool dunk on poor foreigners and stupid women (“You didn’t think your pimps owned it, did you?”).

Is this a B-movie for people who don’t like B-movie action? Is it for people who enjoy prostitution (but hate women) and respect landlords? This movie was designed for Elon Musk and no one else.

(Read on to learn all about “Neb Chupin” and a character named “Judge Reinhold”).

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Paul Fischer’s new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema, came out in February, but the number of separate stories that have combined to make it uniquely relevant in the months since are almost… eerie.

The book depicts a period, roughly spanning the decade of the seventies, when the older executives who ran Hollywood had begun to realize that they were suddenly struggling to turn a profit on projects that had once seemed like lay ups: screwball comedies, westerns, song-and-dance vehicles for aging musical stars.

At the same time as this was happening, there was a crop of younger filmmakers, many of whom had come up through film school programs – which were then very new and widely viewed as the frivolous pursuit of dilettantes (in Fischer’s words, “finishing schools for nepo babies”). Instead, many of these “movie brats” were making their own movies on the cheap, and in many cases, finding new audiences, and making the old Hollywood product seem out-of-touch and corny at the same time.

Sound familiar?

Back here in 2026, The Mandalorian and Grogu, presumably the lay up of all lay ups, landed to widespread indifference in May. This past weekend, Supergirl debuted to $38 million on a reported $170 million budget. (Which is actually worse than the infamous Jared Leto flop, Morbius).

Meanwhile, two of the yea’rs biggest hits have been out-of-left field, low-budget horror movies directed by 20-something YouTubers – Obsession and Backrooms. It’d be premature at this stage to call the YouTuber generation future Spielbergs, but the way that they made an entire system of assumptions about what makes good movie business suddenly seem both corny and misguided feels very much like an echo of the movie brats.

For many of us who’ve been writing about movies for 10, 15, 20 years, the last few years have made movies as a whole feel as culturally irrelevant as they’ve ever been (the handful of legit great movies still managing to get made notwithstanding).

One of the most uplifting aspects of The Last Kings of Hollywood is realizing that the 2020s isn’t the first time that this has happened, and that it’s also potentially reversible.

A few weeks after Obsession and Backrooms became the Zoomer horror Barbenheimer came Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s conscious attempt to bring back “movie magic” and bookend the alien trilogy he started with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET (1982).

Aside from the background on Spielberg, one of the most compelling portraits Fischer paints in The Last Kings of Hollywood is of Melissa Mathison. Mathison’s connection to the Coppola-Lucas-Spielberg scene was initially through a friend of Coppola’s, for whom Mathison babysat as a teenager. There’s a gross, typically problematic 1970s scene in which the friend gets Mathison to dress up in a maid’s costume for a dinner party at which Coppola is a guest, knowing it will get him riled up. Mathison eventually becomes Coppola’s mistress, arguably less important as a scandal than it is as her eventual connection to this group of filmmakers. She goes onto write ET and win an Academy Award (as well as marry Harrison Ford, generally acknowledged as the coolest, handsomest man alive in the mid 1970s).

If you watch Spielberg’s alien trilogy, it’s hard not to conclude that ET stands head and shoulders above the other two. And harder, in turn, not to conclude that the reason for that was Mathison. She had a rare talent for writing complicated children, which adds a distinctly human touch to ET that the others, impressive displays of Spielberg’s virtuosic command of the cinematic language though they are, arguably lack. (The kids in Close Encounters are all basically insufferable brats, making Richard Dreyfuss’s decision to just fuck off to space at the end feel almost justified). There are a handful of other great movie books covering some of the same period – memoirs by William Friedkin, Julia Phillips, and Griffin Dunne, to name just a few – but The Last Kings of Hollywood is the first to really give Mathison her due.

Fischer’s book also does a similar thing for Marcia Lucas, who died May 27th of this year. George Lucas’s first wife and collaborator, she edited THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars (receiving an Oscar nomination for Graffiti and a win for Star Wars), as well as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese. While there have been some assorted hot takes about Marcia Lucas being the true reason for George Lucas’s success, or the only reason George Lucas did anything at all, Fischer paints a fuller picture – of a budding filmmaker who loved designing worlds and fiddling with gadgets, and his wife-collaborator who was often his better angel, pushing for more heart and humanity in his work.

I spoke with Fischer this past week. You can listen above, or read the condensed version below.

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So the story that I’m sort of used to hearing about the ‘70s Hollywood is that Bonnie and Clyde came out and then the youth movement changed everything. You’re going a little later than that, and I think making an interesting case for the Movie Brats Generation as the true inflection point.

Kind of, yeah. You’re right that the ‘70s tends to be Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate. And so when you frame it that way, the idea is like, oh, these East Coast, younger film school, kind of edgier, darker, bleaker, depraved, whatever filmmakers come in and they make these films that are more violent and more dark.

There’s that great Pictures at a Revolution book that Mark Harris wrote that contrasts this idea of, there’s one Hollywood that’s The Sound of Music and Dr. Doolittle, and then there’s a new Hollywood that’s Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and all that kind of stuff. So these guys come in and they make those films and then it gets out of control and it’s the sex and drugs kind of generation and the budgets get bigger and you end up with stuff like Apocalypse Now, New York, New York, and Heaven’s Gate, where these filmmakers are blowing budgets, nearly sinking studios and then have to be reigned in.

And it’s not that that framing is false necessarily, but I remember reading all these books and watching all these films and thinking that it feels like it’s missing something. I was a kid in the ‘80s, and the filmmakers that were the most influential of that group were Spielberg and Lucas and Coppola and Scorsese, to some degree. And if you set Scorsese aside, you’ve got three guys there who, they’re in the sex-and-drugs kind of generation, but they don’t do drugs and they’re kind of sexless (Coppola excepted). They didn’t feel like guys who were out of control in their budgets and stuff, but more guys who actually had a very clear idea of how financial freedom and creative freedom and the way the industry was built were related. And so this book started with this idea of, oh, maybe there’s a different framework there. Which is, it’s not Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate, it’s maybe George and Francis meeting, up to Return of the Jedi.

When I think about the cultural forces that we’re still living with and that the movie industry as a whole has been shaped by, I’m not really thinking about Bonnie and Clyde. I’m definitely thinking about this sort of crop starting with Lucas and Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese.

Yeah. And every HBO show has the DNA of The Godfather and Scorsese movies and every kind of Marvel franchise blockbuster tentpole thing. The DNA is Star Wars and Indiana Jones and all these things. Even that idea of, how do I come into an industry that feels kind of closed and there’s technological tools that could be the thing that give me freedom to make my films or it could be my downfall because money controls them. That’s what people are dealing with now if you want to be a filmmaker, and that’s exactly what they dealt with in 1968. And so their kind of arc felt like it had more to say about the long tail of what happened to the film industry and our film culture.

There’s an irony to this story, where, when I and most people my age think about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, we probably think, oh, these are the two most commercial filmmakers alive. But when they started out, it seemed like their goals were, we want to create our own industry that’s basically completely separate from the studio system.

It’s one of the things I loved from a storytelling standpoint. We have this idea of Coppola, he’s the guy who will gamble everything, loses money, makes films his way. He’s like, the filmmaker’s filmmaker. But in 1968, when the book starts, people think of him as a sellout. He’s got a Porsche, he’s got a gold watch, he’s a screenwriter on assignment, he works for the studio writing and churning out whatever they want him to do. And then on the flip side, Lucas, who we think of as the guy who makes films to sell toys, in the late ‘60s, he’s actually like, I hate capitalism, I hate the studios, I hate working for anybody else, I hate narrative, I hate emotions. I just want to make abstract mood poems and be experimental. And Spielberg, who we think of as this almost idiot savant who understands the camera and can plug into childlike emotions, in the ‘60s he’s actually both kind of a dark kid who’s experienced Anti-Semitism and feeling unloved but also, and I don’t mean this in a bad way necessarily, very calculated.

Spielberg seems like he has a desire to be accepted in a way that some of the other filmmakers that you profile maybe don’t.

Fully. I think Lucas and Coppola – you don’t want to be a pop psychologist, but they’re those artists who are kind of like, “I have something to say. I am brilliant. I’m going to impose it upon you and you will all see that it is brilliant.” And Spielberg on the flip side is the guy who’s kind of like, “I want you to accept me because I’m like you.”

So shifting gears to another character, there’s a lot of strands of this story that I’ve heard before, whereas I think the Melissa Mathison story in particular, that was very new and sort of a revelation for me.

Melissa Mathison, so she co-wrote E.T., co-wrote The Black Stallion, wrote Indian in the Cupboard, married Harrison Ford, died quite young, tragically. So she’s clearly important to the story, but giving a sense of Melissa Mathison as a person also meant addressing this sort of open secret, which was very challenging from a storytelling standpoint. Peter Biskind had named her once in a Vanity Fair article, but basically she was involved romantically with Francis Coppola for a decade before writing those films.

She was his babysitter, originally, or his friend’s babysitter?

This sounds so bad and it should sound bad. She was his friend’s babysitter. She was still in high school. And one New Year’s Eve dinner party, that friend went, “Hey, Missy, Melissa, you and your friend dress up as French maids, and come and serve dinner for Francis.”

And Coppola, who’s already married with children, starts a relationship with this 18-year-old. So there’s no way to really dress it up in a way that sounds good. And then the relationship essentially is for 10 years, as Coppola grows in stature and in power and he encounters tensions with Eleanor, his wife. The relationship became more and more in plain sight. A lot of what falls apart in Apocalypse Now and a lot of what happens in Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes documentary thing – it’s not just that the film’s going badly and there’s a typhoon and they’re losing money and Martin Sheen has a heart attack. All this stuff is happening, that’s true, but also Francis has brought Melissa to the Philippines with him and this is when his wife finds out that he’s been having this long affair. And then after Apocalypse Now, when he’s had to break it off with Melissa Mathison, his kind of goodbye gift is, “I’ve been telling you, you should be writing, you should be a writer. Can you go to the set of this film I’m producing called The Black Stallion and help them write this? “

And so in a way he gives her this career. I think Melissa Madison is a very private person and was very happy with no one talking about any of this stuff, but I encountered this kind of scenario writing this book where it’s like, okay, if I write about Apocalypse Now without writing about that bit, then I’m not telling the full story. I’m erasing her.

If I’m writing about this ecosystem, Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg and DePalma and all these people, a big part of how they connect to one another and have the stamina, a big part of the emotional ecosystem of how they do that is Francis has got Eleanor Coppola and Melissa Mathison. George works with his wife, Marcia, who’s his editor. Steven’s perpetually looking for a kind of mother figure and DePalma is writing films for Margot Kidder, who’s his girlfriend who has this house where they all gather that they’re all horny for Margo and Martin Scorsese can’t help falling in love with every person who stars in his films. And so you kind of go, okay, well, I can’t talk about these guys without talking about the women who are emotionally propping them up.

No, you gave her her due instead, which really complemented watching Disclosure Day. Watching Spielberg’s alien trilogy, I do think ET stands above the other two specifically because it has a way of writing children with empathy, and I have to think that comes down to Melissa Mathison.

For sure, and even Spielberg, to his credit will say no, that’s her screenplay. You can tell, “Oh, this is a woman who understands insecure little boys.”

And whether that insecure little boy is Elliot or Francis Coppola or whoever, that was kind of her thing, being very good at being empathetic. And being such a sounding board, that it was almost like “okay, I’ll take this stuff that’s in your head and write something that is so you that people will assume forever that you’ve come up with every part of this, that this is about your childhood.” And the reality is that she was often just quoting kids that she had babysat.

There’s a similar thing with Marcia Lucas, which is another unfortunately very timely thing that she just died, but you have her in there being the person who pushes George Lucas to be a little more humanistic and give people actual emotions and interpersonal reactions, which he doesn’t want to do, it seems like.

We were talking about narratives earlier, and you had this whole weird period where the perception is that Star Wars came out of George’s head, like Athena out of Zeus’s skull. But then later, the prequels come out and the pendulum swings in the other direction where there was this weird overreaction of like, “no, actually, Star Wars would be shit without Marcia, she was actually the one who made it all work.”

And so I got to delve back into this thing where, actually, it’s a soup of a bunch of different people. She contributed, he contributed, stuff worked, maybe she was right about this, he was right about that. It’s also just about the difficulty of living with the people you work with. I find it very touching and it’s only slightly in the book because the book kind of ends at that period, but there’s also a framing where, these are two people making these films for kids, who don’t have a family of their own the way that they want to have it, really.

There’s also this aspect where George Lucas seems like a guy who at a basic level hates the act of directing. He doesn’t seem to enjoy that part of it. And then when I watch a Spielberg movie, I feel like I can imagine him running around with a bullhorn and telling people where to go and what to do and moving the pieces around and he’s just living his best life in that moment.

It’s totally that. It’s kind of like, if you’re John Milius, you’d say, “You’ve got to be a general and run your army.” And if you’re Coppola, you’d say, “Well, it’s a dinner party and you got to entertain everybody.” And I think Lucas would’ve been like, “Well, I don’t want to lead anybody and I don’t want to have a dinner party, just leave me alone with the editing machine.”

When I’ve been on film sets, it’s like you’re making 8,000 decisions every day and any one of them could be the one where everything kind of falls apart. I really related to that stuff [Lucas] talks about, of shooting Star Wars in England where he’s like, “The food was shit, my house was shit, the weather was shit.”

People think, “Oh, you’re a filmmaker. You’re going to turn up every day and it’s the same,” but he’s actually like “It’s drafty. I’m cold. I haven’t had a burger in ages. Can’t get a good cup of coffee. There’s nothing on the TV.”

It’s all the stuff that people don’t think about, that’s the stuff that makes you miserable.

Has it struck you that executives today seem out of touch in a lot of the exact same ways as they did in the period you were writing about?

When I spoke to DePalma, he had this really interesting point where he said, the thing that set us apart as a group was that the work was the only thing that mattered. We only had one allegiance. Whereas you go to an executive and he’s worried about what his peers think, what his wife thinks, if he’s going to keep his job, if he’s going to get a raise, what Variety’s going to say, what the Hollywood Reporter is going to say, what the shareholders are going to say, and all that stuff is the enemy of creativity. Whereas [De Palma was saying], we made good shit because we stuck to our guns, because there was only one thing we had to be loyal to and it was making the film we had in mind the best way we can make it.

Maybe the best part of the book was knowing that that has happened before, where people thought movies were no longer important or a major part of culture, and then some people with passion got their shot and they were able to change things.

I think part of the reason we can’t see the horizon is we’ve got a bunch of 40-year-old columnists asking 60-year-old film executives what the future is going to be and we’re just having the wrong people ask the wrong questions to the wrong people.

I think in a weird way, the systems made the culture so impoverished that we’re back to craving and valuing that stuff the way we used to. That’s where I kind of am with the book. There was that period between the late 40s and the late 60s, there was a dark ages where stuff didn’t work. People were like, “Is the film industry dead?” And I think that’s where we’re at now.

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Much like the Levity Test for awards hopefuls, there’s a similar test I have for action movies and sci-fi blockbusters — not a test, per se, but more like a common marker of baseline competence. I call it the “who is doing what and where” test.

That’s not a demand for more exposition, or that filmmakers pre-fill every “plot hole” and explain away all the movie magic. It’s simply a plea for coherent visual design. I tend to be invested in the action of an action-based movie when I can tell who is doing what and where. Without that, it turns into a montage of blurs and reaction shots that kills all suspense. Rather than being on the ride, I’m simply biding time between outcomes. Remember when filmmakers could convey a basic sense of spatial awareness? We used to be a proper country.

Take the Harrier Jet sequence in True Lies. The whole thing is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. It’s goofy, to the point that you wonder how much is even meant to be taken “seriously,” and some of the effects even look kind of chintzy to modern eyes. But there isn’t a single second of it that leaves you wondering who is doing what and where. Whatever you think of the ride, you’re on it. James Cameron builds suspense and wonder through carefully constructed frames, allowing this big, sort of idiotic cat-and-mouse game played with hovering fighter jet to work as both drama and slapstick. “Believable?” Maybe. But really who cares, it’s gorgeous.

Supergirl, by contrast, is a movie that asks: why bother with all of that? It has plot to deliver, the action scenes are just the stuff they have to do in between.

It’s a bit of a shame, because Supergirl does have a lot of things going for it. It has plenty of problems too, but by far its biggest issue is that there are supposedly climactic sequences in which it fails at a basic level to convey who is doing what and where. I don’t have to care that much about Kara Zor-El to enjoy her going pew and pow, but I can’t enjoy the pewing and powing when all I see is a montage of blurs, with cameras hurtling us through various debris clouds, both CG and practical.

I’m largely unfamiliar with the Supergirl comics lore (and if you try to explain it to me I will call the police), but in director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya; Cruella) and writer Ana Nogueira’s hands, Supergirl is a lot like Popeye. The backstory is that Supergirl, aka Kara, is Kal-El/Clark Kent’s cousin. Where Clark was sent away from the dying Krypton on an escape pod as a babe, Kara survived on a snowglobe shard of Krypton called Argo City into early adulthood, when she was belated sent over to Earth in an escape pod of her own alongside her dog, Krypto. Fast forward a few years to the setting of Supergirl. It’s Kara’s 23rd birthday week, and she’s spending it on a one-woman interplanetary pub crawl of planets with red suns. Being Kryptonian, she derives her powers from a yellow sun, and thus planets with a red sun are the only places where she can get white girl drunk.

Kara is played by squinty Milly Alcock, one of the most obviously Australian-looking humans on Earth (the other being Austin Butler, who is strangely not actually Australian). In fact just imagining Kara Zor-El as Australian sort of fits the character. She’s not entirely dissimilar from the Australian woman one of the Flight of the Conchord boys dates in an episode of their HBO show (the Australian girlfriend’s name is “Keitha,” known for leaving out bowls of half-eaten cereal and trying to barbecue indoors).

Anyway, the basic format of Supergirl’s plot is that some bad guys will come in and start ruining Kara’s day, or picking on those who can’t defend themselves, and Kara will have to get herself in a position to receive the rays of a yellow sun so that she can start womping on everyone. The yellow sun basically is to Supergirl what spinach is to Popeye. The appeal is all in the waiting for that moment, when the music kicks in, Popeye gulps down some green and rolls up his sleeves, and the world’s dickheads finally get what’s coming to them. It’s a fun format, or at least it played well to me (as a child, my older cousins would famously feed me invisible cans of spinach and goad me to tear apart the house — TMI?). It’s hard not to appreciate DC’s willingness to take goofy swings in the James Gunn era, even if doesn’t always work and can lean dweeby.

The basic trouble with Supergirl is… well, you don’t really get to see Supergirl womping dickheads. Instead you get a bunch of blurry, swoopy crap, and action that’s constantly failing the “who is doing what and where” test. If cartoons made during the great depression could make all this dickhead-womping feel exciting, surely a $170 million blockbuster should be able to too. The only reason for it not to is failure of imagination. The moments when Supergirl should be most exciting turn tedious instead. (I also don’t know how Kara Zor-El built, or learned to build, intergalactic spaceships, but that’s easy enough to overlook).

Which is a shame, because Supergirl does have quite a few things going for it. Like a great villain in addition to a winning Popeye format. Early in Kara’s intergalactic pub crawl, a tween girl with a sword bursts in the door of the Mos Eisley-style cantina where Kara is drinking and delivers her Inigo Montoya schpiel (yes, Supergirl is something of a stew of obvious influences): her name is Ruthye Marye Knoll of the Danastia Clan, and she needs a champion to help her kill the brigand, Krem of the Yellow Hills, and avenge her family. Eve Ridley, the young actress who plays Ruthye has a tendency to swallow words and rush her lines, but I think I picked up the name the third or fourth time she said it.

Krem of the Yellow Hills, meanwhile, is played by Matthias Schoenaerts, the Belgian actor who should’ve won an Oscar for Bullhead and is one of the most underused and underrated performers on Earth. He can do a lot more than play the heavy, but boy can he play a heavy — in this case a ruthless space scavenger with metal studs all over his face (sort of like an evil mo-cap Andy Serkis) and a duster full of poison darts. After Kara reluctantly kinda sorta agrees to become Ruthye’s champion, Krem shoots Kara’s dog with a poison dart and fucks off back to space.

The only way to save the dog from a protracted, painful death is to find Krem and retrieve the antidote. Kara has three days to do so (the relativity of time on different planets is never addressed, perhaps mercifully so). And so, even if Kara is ambivalent about helping Ruthye, she has to find Krem in order to help her dog. Popeye, John Wick, Princess Bride… what was I saying about obvious influences?

On the one hand, it’s rather refreshing that the James Gunn-era of DC has, on some level, solved the stakes-inflation problem that bedeviled the MCU. Where every plot was about a big bad planning to destroy the Earth, all life in the universe, the very fabric of reality, etc (exhausting!). They solved it largely by ripping references from other movies, sure, but still: an improvement. That being said, if you’re going to make a movie that rests on a mission to save a cute dog, maybe just use a real dog? There’s a limit to how much I can care about a “dog” rendered in mediocre CG. I suppose I can understand the need for CG when the dog is doing super stuff, but not when he spends most of the movie lying sick on a table or doing regular dog things. Could we not find a real dog? It’s not like there’s a shortage of real dogs in the world.

The rub is that Kara and Ruthye have to follow Krem and his band of brigands to an alien planet where the brigands have traveled on a raid for “brides.” Aka, unwilling female vessels for the brigands to “replenish their all-male race.” If the bride thing sounds familiar, yes, they even dress like the brides in Fury Road.

Suffice it to say, our heroes have to save a dog, avenge a young girl’s family, and break up an intergalactic sex trafficking ring, all on the same quest. On a narrative level, it’s both reasonably tidy and sort of inspired (even if the sex trafficking angle is clearly more of a Fury Road riff than an Epstein one).

That simplicity of story unfortunately collapses under the weight of having to also introduce Lobo, an intergalactic vampire-coded bounty hunter played by Jason Momoa, who wears Aidan Hutchinson eye black, smokes cigars, drives a space chopper, and calls people “bastid.” I’m generally all for more Momoa in my movies, but everything about the Lobo interlude smacks of Poochie the dog, as envisioned by the manosphere. Whoa, he’s totally in my face!

It’s clear that Supergirl is going for a kooky, zany Guardians of the Galaxy tone, but the babyface retrofuturist era of sci-fi that begat Superman is still a very weird fit for Lobo, a superhero who feels like he was pieced together from all the totems of masculinity that the Ben Shapiro crowd might find cool — cigars, motorcycles, Hell’s Angels, guys that don’t take no shit from anyone maaan. According to the Wikipedia page, Lobo was initially intended as a parody of Punisher and all things Grim & Gritty, but fans didn’t register the intended satire, and he took off on the largely irony-stripped basis in which he seems to appear here. And just on a story level, there’s really no justification for Lobo being involved beyond teasing a future DC film.

Allegedly, the stand-alone Lobo movie was canceled, which, if it doesn’t get un-canceled, renders Lobo’s appearance here even more confusing and pointless. Jason Momoa notably also plays Aquaman, who is part of the same comic books universe. I don’t know, man.

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“Honestly, I cared a lot. I wanted to win so bad.”

Chef Laurence Louie is a Chinese-American chef from Boston, who came into the show cooking Turkish food, but pivoted early on to the Cantonese cuisine of his childhood, spent in his mother’s bakery, where at nights she was the keyboard player/multi-instrumentalist for a Chinese rock band. He’s also a former college basketball player who loves Warhammer, has a master’s degree in Asian-American studies, and never went to culinary school.

People have argued — well, me, mainly — that as the caliber of chefs competing on Top Chef has gone up, the resumes have gotten standardized; the personalities homogenizing a bit in kind, which can detract from the messy, scruffy reality show charm of the show’s early days. As my Top Chef podcast co-host Joey Devine wondered, “has Top Chef reached peak James Beard?”

In a lot of ways, Chef Laurence refuted this premise, a compelling character who was eccentric and different, interesting without performing some reality show shtick and relatable in his multi-facetedness (not to mention candor and general likability). This even as he arrived with basically the same resume bullet points that all Top Chef aspirants have now: a James Beard Nomination for Best Chef of the Northeast, one of Bon Appetit’s Best New Restaurants (2023). The latter was for Rubato, the Hong Kong-style cafe he opened on the site of his mother’s bakery, after moving home from London where he had been the head chef at Oklava (hence the background in Turkish food).

It’s no secret if you read my Top Chef Power Rankings all season, I was in the tank for Laurence early on (I see now that I really whiffed on “Mr. Rubato” as a nickname). I had him handicapped number one starting in week three and continuing on basically all the way on through to the finale when he lost a closely fought battle to Rhoda Magbitang (alongside fellow finalist Sherry Cardoso).

But I don’t think I’m just defending my rankings when I say that this season’s competition felt incredibly close. I have to imagine that most viewers will come away remembering Laurence and Sherry’s food almost as much as they will Rhoda’s win (deserved, as far as I could tell). Which doesn’t always happen; a lot of times people only remember the winner.

Chef Laurence had a rare combination of great-looking food that seemed professionally executed but not cheffy or fussy. Meanwhile he came off genuine, and capable of telling his own story in a way that felt both vulnerable and natural. He might be the first chef to make me cry during a Top Chef episode (for which I will never forgive him).

He lost out on the $250,000 prize in the end, but the cash prize is only one part of the reason that chefs choose to compete on the show. The other parts being: the visibility, the chance to prove themselves, the opportunity to level up their careers, to make their style of food part of the conversation. In all those other areas Laurence’s run on the show feels like a big win.

At the same time, coming off a great run on the show feels like the most intense part of many of these chefs’ professional lives: with the palpable sense that you have to make all the best career decisions NOW, while your professional profile is possibly at the highest it’s ever going to be.

I got to talk to Laurence this week, to pick his brain about this complex mix of feelings — of having the pressure to make all the right decisions at the possible pinnacle of your career, of having to relive and talk through the scene of your great professional disappointment months later, probably just about the time when you’ve finally managed to stop dwelling on it yourself.

These chefs remind me a little of the memoirist, who finishes writing a book and then 18 months later has to promote it, essentially having to play publicist for a version of themselves that they no longer are. Or maybe that’s overly dramatic. Anyway, I got to ask Laurence about Turkish food and why he screwed up that duck.

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The toughest part of writing this review was the belated realization that I had to change the title of the feature. It used to be called “the Toddler Dad Movie Revue,” which has a much better mouthfeel, but then Google informed me that my son is no longer a toddler.

That stage, apparently, ends at age three. Makes sense, I suppose. He no longer really “toddles” around. Now he runs and jumps and even swims, all while keeping his head perfectly still like Fred Flintstone, which never doesn’t crack me up. (I assume he learned this from going through his first few phases with a 97th percentile-sized skull).

The other day, fresh off another round of swim lessons, he showed me how he could swim all the way to me from the short side of the pool. He climbed up on to me, smiled, and started rubbing my shoulder with his hand. My heart was all a-swell, since mom is usually for sweetness and comfort, while dad generally functions as combo punching bag/human jungle gym. Just as I was thinking about what a pleasant reversal this all was, he said, in his sweetest child voice, “It’s spit.”

Ah, yes. That would explain the shoulder rubbing.

Now, does this realization, that he’ll never be a toddler again, and that by the time I could truly appreciate it, it was already gone, and that the same thing will inevitably happen with this stage, and the next, and the next, hit me like a dagger to the guts every time I stop and take the time to think about it? Of course, and that’s just the kind of maudlin sentimentality on which the Toy Story franchise was built. It worked on me long before I even had a child of my own, as do most ain’t the passage of time a bitch? narratives (see also: most Peter Pan-related stories).

The way Toy Story assigns sentience to toys (a gift to the toy manufacturers, the bane of declutterers) is a little consumerist and gross on the face of it, sure, but it’s an effectively straightforward metaphor for the parenting process: the better you do your job, the more irrelevant you become. We’ve all got a bit of Woody in us, don’t we? (Not as much as your mom).

Preschooler Review

I brought my son and his not-my-literal-nephew-but-still-calls-me-uncle best pal who just turned five, and they were suitably stoked even before I loaded them up with snacks and icees (one of the first lessons of parenting: bribery works). My not-literal-nephew was singing the theme song before we even hit the lobby door. Never underestimate the power of good theme music (see also: the difference between Moana and Moana 2). Toy Story has never been my favorite of the Pixar franchise(s?), but it’s arguably the one that has most broken through to both kids and adults. Being the longest franchise probably has a lot to do with that, but Randy Newman music and Tom Hanks voicing a cowboy doll are a match made in heaven.

During the opening credits, the preschoolers actually argued with each other about who the little Pixar lamp animation was looking at during the credits sequence. He was looking at me! No, he was looking at me!

It’s a cute lamp. No one denies this.

As for the actual film, I wouldn’t say that they were over the moon with glee, but they remained in their seats the entire time and never hassled me for more candy or fidgeted too badly or asked to do something else (generally a 50/50 proposition at this age). That the theme of this installment was big tech was probably lost on kids this age, along with the couple of scenes in which information was conveyed by onscreen text messages.

They understood vibes though. By and large, this Toy Story functioned, like most Toy Story movies do, as a sort of extended chase sequence. And it’s not hard for little kids to understand chase sequences or the mechanics of being left out.

Did they like it? Certainly. Did they love it? I’m not convinced. They were interested. It was fast-paced enough, but also didn’t have any mind-blowing visions of other worlds or brain-expanding action. It did, however, have characters they recognized and compelling action. Very much a case of “good enough.”

They didn’t exit the auditorium buzzing about what they had just seen — remember this? remember that? remember when that one thing went da-da-da? — but they were happy. It seems like the kind of movie where they left remembering a good time at the movies rather than the mind-blowing movie they just saw, which is maybe not the best compliment for the movie, but a pretty good outcome for dad.

Adult Review

As noted, the villain of this fifth installment of Toy Story is “tech” — manifested in the form of a frog-themed iPad-like device called the “Lilypad.”

Our main child, Bonnie, who took over Andy’s toys in Toy Story 3 and 4 (I saw these movies but still had to Google this), is trying to make friends across the yard with some neighbor kids in an early scene. Shy Bonnie musters the courage to wave at the neighbor kids (boy and girl fraternal twins) with her toy, kid-like, only for them look at each other in confusion and run back inside their house.

Bonnie’s parents, who witnessed the interaction, share confused glances, trying to make sense of what just happened. Looking around the neighborhood through a Rear Window-style wide panning shot, they come to discover that none of the kids Bonnie’s age are playing with each other anymore. They’re all glued to their dang devices! Eyes transfixed and faces aglow with the blue light of their screens.

Too real? Maybe a little.

Bonnie’s toys, led by Cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack) and Buzz Lightyear (Woody and his toy wife, Bo Peep, live with another boy now), come to the same frightening realization as Bonnie’s parents: that they toys might be obsolete, along with the act of “playing” itself, and maybe “friendship” too. Or at least, playing and friendship as they’ve come to understand them.

Bonnie’s reeling parents, not knowing what to do, buy Bonnie a Lilypad of her own, who the rest of the toys all reflexively fear and dislike, with the anthropomorphized “Lily” (voiced by Greta Lee), becoming the sort of know-it-all frenemy of the group. Jessie goes on a tirade, blaming Lily and the dreaded “devices” for making kids grow up too fast and alienating them from each other. Lily protests, using her software to make Bonnie two new “friends” on the “pond” app. “She did it in 15 seconds!” gasps Trixie the Triceratops. “I counted.”

Still on the fence about whether tech like Lily can be friend or foe, Cowboy Jessie (with help from Woody, with whom she consults over a walkie-talkie), connives a sleepover plan with Bonnie’s online friends that, in the end, only seems to further Bonnie’s sense of alienation from her peers and shame over her own childishness. She wants to play but all they want to is fiddle with their tablets, and they make her feel bad about it. Man, this future sucks! Ditch these cunts before it’s too late, Bonnie!

Toy Story 5, co-written and co-directed by McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton (the latter a co-writer of the previous four) gets points for boldness, though one of its greatest failings is that it presents such an intractable social problem in the first act that all its folksy solutions end up feeling timid, or like deflections. It’s hard to blame them for not “solving” something so big, but at the same time, they’re the ones who asked the question.

It’s basically Toy Story canon that one or a group of toys must become separated from the rest of the group (as a result of fate or a child’s capricious whims, later to be regretted). In Toy Story 5, that task falls to Cowgirl Jessie, who, through a series of events too complicated to recount here, ends up at the house of her original owner in the 1960s (ish), where now lives Blaze, a potential friend for Bonnie. In order to get the gang back together and save Bonnie from life as a lonely outcast, Buzz and Woody have to team back up with their respective groups of toys to save Cowgirl Jessie and get Bonnie to ditch her fake friends so she can rock out with Blaze, the only other kid in town with a real imagination.

Which is to say, tech isn’t entirely the big bad Jessie assumes it to be at the outset. The movie ends up being just as confused about what to say or do about it as any of the rest of us. Instead the real villain is something like peer pressure, or haters, and the message, delivered by Jessie late in the film, is something like “It’s not our job to tell you when or how to grow up, the important thing is being there when it matters.”

Sure? I suppose we can’t really expect a Toy Story movie to tell us what to do about predatory tech companies and surveillance capitalism, but there are times when the “can’t we all just get along”-style narrative feels as anachronistic as cowboy toys.

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“This is the stupidest day in American history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history.” -Matt Christman, 2017

UFC Freedom 250 went down last night, a UFC card staged on the White House Lawn broadcast live on Paramount+, which somehow lived up to everyone’s highest and lowest expectations for the evening. It was a mind-bendingly stupid spectacle that made us, as Americans, look every bit like the laughingstock tin-pot dictatorship we’ve become, with a main event that was, for better or worse, one of the better fights I’ve ever seen. A land of contrasts?

On one level, of course it was stupid. How could it not be? This was an event that the organizers (mostly president Donald Trump, who wanted it, and UFC president Dana White, who made it happen) swore up and down was held in honor of America’s 250th birthday. This despite the glaring fact that it would be taking place on Donald Trump’s birthday, which was supposedly a coincidence, even though everyone on Earth knows that the USA’s actual quarter-millennial isn’t until July 4th. A day that falls, by the way, on a Saturday this year, the day of the week when virtually all UFC events are held, as opposed a Sunday, the day on which this event was held, when basically no UFC events are ever held. It was, however, Flag Day, which the organizers were forced to acknowledge several times throughout the telecast.

The idea that this event was held to honor America’s sestercentennial and not Donald Trump’s vanity was one of those lies so blatant and stupid that you sort of feel embarrassed for the teller, like when your fifth grade buddy swears up and down that his dad is really the manager for the Dodgers while everyone averts their eyes and tries to change the subject.

Which is to say, UFC Freedom 250 was born of stupidity and mostly continued to be fabulously, kaleidoscopically stupid, for nearly its entire run time. I have to think that if Dana White had offered to stage this event in front of the presidential palace of, say, Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan, that they would’ve rejected it as too tacky.

1?

It all kicked off with Travis Pastrana and Nitro Circus doing motorcross jumps in front of the White House:

Technically it was in front of a fake White House facade in front of the real White House, presumably for some arcane security reasons, but who even knows anymore.

From start to finish, the event had the feel of a choreographed event staged for Kim Jong Il meets a cut scene from the alternate future act of Back to the Future II where Biff owns a casino meets one of the parties that Billy Madison threw himself every time he passed a grade. It had everything but a clown on stilts cracking his head open next to the jetski pond.

2/3

Before the event even started, commentator and ex-champion Daniel Cormier (ALLEGEDLY) posted, then deleted, a DM that he received from an Eric Trump account asking whether any of the fights were rigged:

Cormier and Trump both quickly claimed the exchange was fake, with Cormier telling TMZ “I was hacked or something.”

Did the exchange even happen or was it all just a photoshop job? For what it’s worth, replies to the deleted tweet still exist on the site.

I don’t know the answer. I can’t devote any more brain power to figuring out whether the son of the president DM’d a UFC commentator to see whether any of the UFC fights staged on the White House lawn were illegitimate.

4.

What I do know is that early on, the telecast announced that that night’s $250,000 performance bonuses would be paid out in USD1, “the stablecoin issued by the Trump family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial.”

Trump’s financial disclosure lists his stake in World Liberty Financial at over $50 million. The administration maintains that there is no conflict of interest and that Trump’s assets are managed by a trust run by his children. [CoinDesk]

Throughout the evening there seemed to be this same kind of concerted effort, to blur the lines between the open, unprecedented corruption that gave us the president’s family promoting a cryptocurrency during a publicly sanctioned event, and the precedented but-never-so-fully-realized tacky sketchiness, of dirtbike jumps in front of the White House and not even the event’s organizers knowing how far the fix was in.

Dana White seemed to show up as a pitchman in every other ad during the broadcast, starting with Dodge’s new “In Loud We Trust.”

That one began with Paul Revere (“the first great American yell, echoing like a sonic boom across history…”) drawing on the kind of reflexive anti-British sentiment that can usually unite Americans across the class and political spectrums. Then the telecast cut back to notably British UFC commentator Michael Bisping, showering the event with praise and gushing about the patriotic it stirred in him.

5.

Likewise, in arguably the most surreal event of the evening — “surreal” was the word the announcing team kept using throughout the evening, the only term both accurate and value-neutral enough to describe it without getting themselves into trouble — a DJ played Don McLean’s “American Pie” over a heroic shot of the White House. The shot then faded to an interior while the music kicked over to “Your Sex is on Fire” by Kings of Leon, as the shot revealed a shadowy figure.

A figure who turned out to be… British boxer Tyson Fury! wearing a loud suit and big silver necklace with no shirt, walking through the White House and descending the stairs outside.

Fury expressed how happy he was to be at the event on Donald Trump’s birthday (lol) before teasing a huge announcement that he didn’t actually make (probably a future fight or something? Who cares?). The whole thing lasted almost four minutes, almost as long as couple of the fights.

The grand entrances continued throughout the event, with fighters walking through corridors and down staircases — often with a Marine band playing cover versions of their walk-out music — past actual troops dressed in Colonial-era powdered wigs, flanked by Real American Heroes like medal of honor winners and fire captains. It played like an almost too-perfect mash-up of Triumph of the Will and a Bud Light commercial.

15 years ago I could only dream of a day when MMA would one day be mainstream enough that I could watch its marquee events without having to pay $60 for a pay per view or a $20 cover charge at my town’s weirdest bar. So too had the UFC, at long last, finally recaptured the true grandiosity of PRIDE fighting in its Japanese heyday, before the UFC themselves bought the organization and folded it into their homogenized product. The “Not like this… not like this…” Matrix gif looped around inside my brain.

6? 7?

Grand spectacle and gauche patriotism amid ads for a Saudi cultural festival and crowd shots of the Crypto.com CEO looking like an alien baby. Throughout the night, fighters walked past and gave thumbs’ ups to the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” Trump’s gilded and politicized presidential portrait gallery that looks like a middle school classroom display as envisioned by the interior decorator of a casino hookah lounge.

If there was a centrepiece moment of the evening, it was the fight between up-and-coming UFC heavyweight Josh Hokit and Derrick Lewis, with Lewis supposedly there at the request of Donald Trump himself. Hokit, known as much for bizarre shtick as his fighting (which has been undeniably pretty good), began his walkout by shaking the hand of a wheelchair-bound veteran (kind of a sweet little moment, if you’re very good at compartmentalizing). As Bruce Buffer introduced the fights, I briefly allowed myself to dream of what a Derrick Lewis post-victory speech might look like at the White House in front of Donald Trump — Lewis being known for pretending to pee like a dog in the cage and taking his pants off after one victory and, after being asked why, delivering the immortal line “my balls was hot.”

Over and over, the Derrick Lewis highlight reel replayed him making the suck it gesture from pro wrestling — a thing so old that my high school yearbook had to spend hundreds of dollars airbrushing(!!) a group photo of our class because one guy had been doing suck it hands in it. I unabashedly love Derrick Lewis, one of the UFC’s most effortlessly charismatic fighters, and I try not to think too much about Donald Trump having possibly had some of the same thoughts.

Then Josh Hokit walked across the cage before the fight, reaching over two or three security guards to flip Derrick Lewis the bird, his signature move. I giggled. Was I laughing with Josh Hokit or at Josh Hokit? I have no idea.

The fight began and very quickly Hokit looked like the former D1 wrestler he is while Lewis looked like the aging slugger with bad knees that he is. Lewis had a couple puncher’s chances (having famously capitalized on those in the past) but soon looked like he didn’t want to be there. Lewis lost by TKO in the second, in another impressive win for Hokit.

He left the cage briefly to present Trump with some kind of medallion before returning to the cage in his signature sunglasses and American flag bandanna. For his post-fight speech, he transitioned from some canned rhymes into “I just want to say that there’s only one person more incredible than the Incredible Hok, and that’s my Lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

He briefly called out of Alex Pereira after that, before finishing with his big closer: “Michelle Obama is a man!”

It was all a heady mix of pro wrestling patter, kitsch religiosity, and gross toadying, culminating with an esoteric sop to… racists? Transphobes? Who even thinks about Michelle Obama anymore?

Hokit’s appeal doesn’t seem to rest on whether he actually believes any of this stuff, assuming you can even assign a belief system to it. To me it feels like he’s just mashing buttons. When I’m interested in him beyond his fighting at all it’s in his willingness to transgress. And yet, it’s not like he transgressed against Trump or Melania, who were sitting right there, which might have cost him something. (He also said Brittany Griner was a man back in January, on the under-undercard of UFC 324, when far fewer people were watching).

Instead Hokit did something much safer, and the UFC’s broadcasting team still affirmed his naughtiness by immediately pivoting away from it, like a yearbook airbrushing a crude gesture. (Dana White later told TIME, “I hate that kind of nonsense.”).

What to even make of it? Mostly it felt like bait for dull debates of decorum, when the open corruption was right there all along. I predict a Josh Hokit face turn by the end of the year.

8/9

The fights continued. Sean O’Malley knocked out Aiemann Zahabi, the first American to defeat a foreign-born fighter on the card. Then respectful, multi-lingual Frenchman Cyril Gane TKO’d Alex Pereira in the co-main event, setting the stage for the very real possibility that Donald Trump’s fabulously elaborate, patriotism-pimping birthday party might end with its championship belts being held by a Frenchman and a Spaniard, respectively. Footage of Trump himself seemed to wane in the later parts of the evening, giving way to a focus on the marquee fighters’ elaborate, cultural music-infused walkout sequences (dare I say it, some of the best-produced pomp the UFC has managed in years). One friend I was texting with was convinced that Trump’s handlers gave him the giant white “USA” baseball cap he started wearing halfway through the show as a way to keep the cameras from catching him nodding off during the fights. I saw no evidence for his drowsiness during the broadcast myself.

In the final fight, Georgian-Spanish champion Ilia Topuria closed as a -550 favorite (that means you had to put up $550 to win $100) over 37-year-old American Justin Gaethje. For the first few rounds, it looked like the fight would go down pretty much the way the oddsmakers had imagined. Topuria kept landing hard straight rights and left hooks. There was just one problem — Gaethje seemed to absorb Topuria’s hardest shots and Topuria (who looks a weightclass smaller) was wearing Gaethje’s counters all over his swollen, bleeding face. Meanwhile Gaethje looked like he always does, dead-eyed and half bored.

Still, Topuria put Gaethje down with ruthless liver shots in the second, and for a minute it looked like he was seconds from getting the stoppage. But Gaethje made it out of the round, and Topuria started to look gassed from trying to get the finish. With both his eyes almost swollen shut and his swelled orbital bones jutting grotesquely, Topuria’s corner stopped the fight between the fourth and fifth rounds.

A friend I was texting with was convinced that the fight had been a work. Admittedly, there was evidence: The Cormier tweet controversy before the card began. The chyron just before the fight that said someone had just put a $150,000 bet on Gaethje. The fact that Topuria didn’t finish the fight when it looked like he could have. The weirdness between rounds three and four, when it seemed like the ringside doctor called the fight and then un-called it and let it continue. The fact that it ended with a very-rare-for-UFC corner stoppage, supposedly against the wishes of Topuria himself and his brother. The fact that the outcome gave the pseudo-patriotic event its come-from-behind, pseudo-patriotic upset.

In the end I can’t really see it as a work though. Topuria’s face was just too destroyed, and the knee Gaethje landed to Topuria’s ribs just before the fourth round bell was too gnarly-looking. I actually winced at the replay. Both guys clearly fought their asses off.

Narratives and conspiracies aside, it was a fantastic fight. And Gaethje looked the way he often has — like a guy who would barely blink if you hit him with a two by four while dealing out devastating punches and leg kicks. It was the ending Trump World surely wanted, on a fight card that gave us seven fights with no judges decisions and no stinkers. If you watch UFC regularly, you’d know that a no-decision card is almost as rare as a fight card on Sunday.

10?

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Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, feels to me less like a story than a series of cinematic tricks. And yet it’s a monument to trickery. I’m not sure how much it’s actually about aliens, nefarious government agencies, or the idea of a consciousness beyond humanity’s — its ostensible subjects — but Spielberg is such a consummate bullshitter that it’s mostly about the act of bullshitting itself. It’s not so much about what Spielberg actually has to say, but about the kineticism and verve with which he creates the constant feeling that he’s about to say… something. He parcels out what information there is in such minuscule, irresistible morsels that I found myself fascinated the entire time.

It’s genuinely a feat to reveal so little in the end without an audience feeling cheated, and I didn’t. Disclosure Day runs two hours and 25 minutes, and if, on the way out, someone had told me that it was 85, I would’ve believed them. Time does not exist within that theater. Disclosure Day is a magic trick and its main subject is Steven Spielberg: magician, combining just the right tropes in just the right ways as to leave us helplessly rapt. A real “Fable Man,” if you well. Probably the most fitting review I could give it would be a series of satisfied grunts.

The film opens, oddly, on a pro wrestling match. I thought I’d accidentally bumbled into a screening of Spider-Man 2 for a minute (BONE SAW IS READY) until we zoom out to the audience, revealing Josh O’Connor, the hot rodent man from Challengers, with an intense expression on his face. A hand grasps his shoulder. “The next time the crowd gets to its feet, let the backpack slide off your shoulder.”

Cheers rise, the crowd stands, and the Rodent Man begins to let the backpack slide before jerking the man towards him. “Now tell me where Jane is,” he hisses.

There’s such a beautiful rhythm to this mostly-sorta-corny interaction, a meticulously storyboarded concoction of careful framing, event photography, and back-and-forth dialogue that hooks you instantly. And that’s sort of Disclosure Day in a nutshell, an extended sizzle reel for the cinematic language. (Neither here nor there, but Rodent Man is wearing a jacket and like two sweatshirts indoors. Virtually everyone in the film is insanely overdressed for the entire run time).

Rodent Man, it turns out, is Daniel Kellner, some kind of tech wunderkind who has, in his words, “stolen the information that I was hired to protect.”

He explains all this to his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter), once they manage to escape the clutches of the Evil Government Man, played by Colin Firth. It was Firth’s character who had kidnapped Jane in an attempt to coerce Kellner into giving back the film’s two macguffins: a collection of files proving the existence of aliens and government knowledge thereof going back 70 years; and some sort of hand-held device with mysterious mind-melding powers.

Now, if you’re thinking that government cover-ups of alien activity and mind-melding powers sound a lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET, you wouldn’t be wrong. Disclosure Day slots easily into a kind of Spielberg alien trilogy, attempting to mix the paranoia of a government keeping secrets of Close Encounters with the benevolent, empathic alien race of ET. Disclosure Day works as a sequel to both or either, and as an attempt to marry and further their central ideas.

These ideas are represented, in turn, by Disclosure Day’s dual protagonists: Daniel Zellner, the math prodigy trying to blow the lid off the government’s alien cover up, and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City weather hottie who becomes Disclosure Day’s Elliott when a CGI cardinal flies into the window of her loft one day, makes intense eye contact, and gives her the powers of extreme empathy. These include the ability to understand every human language and read minds, though, like Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters, Fairchild employs them reflexively, barely recognizing when she’s doing it.

When she glitches out during a broadcast one day and starts speaking in guttural clicks, Zellner is the only one who can understand her. It’s just math, the universal language of the cosmos. What does she say? “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.”

They’re both saddled, meanwhile, with skeptical partners — Zellner’s former novitiate girlfriend (that’s a former nun, the Eve Hewson character), and Fairchild’s shitty musician boyfriend, played by Wyatt Russell (at some point it dawned on me that he looks like a handsome JD Vance and now I can’t unsee it).

Hewson’s character — “Jane Blankenship,” yet another eyeroll-inducing name — represents people of faith, worrying that humanity suddenly discovering the existence of alien superbeings will destroy the fabric of belief holding societies together. Russell’s character worries that his girlfriend’s newfound status as prophet of the cosmos will destroy their cushy life in Kansas City (and that she’s maybe having a psychotic break). Zellner needs Fairchild’s platform to get his message out to the world, and Fairchild needs Zellner to give logic to the feelings she’s been having.

One of Disclosure Day’s funniest subthemes, meanwhile, is the grandiosity with which it depicts a local news station in Kansas City — a place, in the movie’s telling, capable of both capturing the national conversation and employing a weathergirl earning enough to afford a fancy loft and moochy boyfriend. I guarantee the real-life Margaret Fairchild earns $63,000 a year, but it’s adorable to see the way Boomers still imagine the world of television news.

Disclosure Day has yet another doppelganger construction in the form of Zellner’s dual mentors. One is his evil estranged boss, Colin Firth, who uses the mysterious alien doohickey to take control of Jane’s body sometimes, a sort of nefarious ET-style mind-meld that makes her eyes change color. Firth’s character obviously, wants to keep the existence of aliens a secret from the world. Meanwhile Zellner also has a good mentor, in the form of Hugo Wakefield (I’ll get you for this, David Koepp!), played by Colman Domingo, essentially Zellner’s lieutenant in the rebellion against Firth. Hugo counsels that these aliens prove that “Empathy is an evolutionary advantage,” and that humanity should let them into our hearts.

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This week, we closed the book on another season of Top Chef. And what a finale it was! There were TWO separate decisions this episode that had me shouting “NO! NO!” at the television.

One of those reservations proved entirely correct, dooming a contestant’s chances, and the other ended up working out just fine. Thus proving that my armchair handicapping of this show is precisely as accurate as a coin flip. Mr. 50/50, they call me. Half right, 100% of the time, that’s my motto. Terrible day for my haters.

Before we get into the meat of this recap, I thought it was worth it to do an Oscars-style “In Memoriam” segment, on all of the brave Top Chef competitors we met and lost on the way to this season’s finale.

/black and white montage footage

Remember Day Anais Joseph, eliminated episode 1? Cynthia Endive-o, she went down in the herbes de provence disaster of episode 1 (Gail keeps a satchel in her panties!). There was Jassi Bindra, aka Punjabi Simon, aka Sikh and Destroy, eliminated week 2 for too-weak leg of lamb. Then there was Nana Araba, aka Nana from Ghana, that one hurt! She had her last meltdown in week three, when Tom was grumpy. After that Brittany, aka Mumbles McGillicutty, shambled her way out in week 4 thanks to a bum steamer. Spongey Monk fish claimed Rhoda in week 5, but not for long.

Sieger failed to gird his pork loins, eliminated in week 6. Justin the wife guy in week 7! Jennifer, his wife, in week 8, forced out of the competition with ropeswing-induced Bell’s Palsy! She’ll be back, and so was Sieger. Until week 12 when he was tragically eliminated in a wet mousse-ening.

So many good chefs we lost… Boastful Brandon and Affable Oscar in eight and nine. Duyen in week ten, Anthony 11, and then Sieger again. (Are you reading this like an Animaniacs song yet? That’s what I was going for.) Finally it was Jonathan, and his raw pumpkin brioche roll surprise in week 13. Only a guy as nice as Jonathan wouldn’t have gotten brutally roasted for that one. Roasted, unlike Jonathan’s pumpkin.

All gave some, some gave all. It wouldn’t have been a Top Chef season without them. Their contributions won’t soon be forgotten. See you in Velouté Valhalla… (*chugs a shot of aguachile*)

/End montage.

Actually I just realized that Kyle Busch, guest judge in episode one, actually died after his episode aired. Damn, sorry to be such a Debbie Downer, I was just trying to do jokes.

The Challenge

Now then, the finale. This week’s episode took the three remaining contestants up to the summit of Grandfather Mountain, “the highest peak on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

It was a fitting setting, Kristen Kish noted, for a group of chefs that had just reached the summit of Top Chef season 23 (the highest honor on the reality-competition escarpment of the Bravo network). Everyone paused for minute to let the brilliance of Kristen’s segue sink in. Nice on, KK, nice.

Meanwhile, after three previous finales set in Milan, Curacao, and Paris, respectively, I have to imagine this season’s finalists were thinking “Oh, Charlotte? Yeah… Uh, I mean, that’s cool too…”

Charlotte, it’s America’s second or third favorite air traffic hub! Top five, at least!

If the finalists were miffed over not getting a finale trip, they didn’t show it. And anyway, the show was too busy introducing this season’s biggest finale twist: Mentors!

That’s right, this year the producers brought back Joe “Flamm Bae” Flamm, Sara “Party Mom” Bradley, and Stephanie “Lot Lizard” Izard (jk jk it was just a good rhyme!). The plan? Partner with one finalist each, to offer them moral support, and talk them out of whatever dumb shit a first-time Top Chef contestant might do — like attempt a dessert with a gelatin component, or serve an entree in the form of a duo or trio (good on Sara for that last piece of astute advice).

The new mentor wrinkle, meanwhile, didn’t mean that the show didn’t also go back to the classic format, of finalists choosing their sous chefs from the last three eliminated contestants. Their sous’ job? To talk them back into doing dumb shit, like using sous vide to cook a protein (Jonathan, you bastard!).

Those last three contestants? Jonathan, Anthony, and Sieger. If you thought the show might try to wring some drama out of Sieger leaving show on a cascade of saltyness (he brought on the Top Chef rule book to defend his dish! the rule book!), you would be wrong. No one even considered that Sieger might try to sabotage the show, disgruntledly, like so many of us would some of our former employers. Instead he was chosen second, and seemed properly gruntled the entire time.

The challenge? Basically the same one as always: “cook the best four-course progressive menu of your life.”

Tell your story, own your POV… every Top Chef season basically stresses this same idea, in slightly different words (which isn’t a criticism, what else would they do?). This season, the prompt was, “Each dish should be a toast to someone or something in your life that got you where you are.”

A series of toasts! Sure, why not. Incredibly, no one made an actual toast, which seems like a missed opportunity (Carrie “Fancy Toast” Baird for one would’ve never let this happen). Sad to see. My kingdom for a crostini.

The Competitors

Sherry Cardoso

AKA: Sleepy. Latka. Carmen Saõ Paolo. Cardi B (the B stands for “Brazil”). Army Mom. The Haberdasher.

POV: Classical, with a Brazilian twist.

Yearbook Quote: “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

Mentor: Sara Bradley.

Sous Chef: Anthony.

Menu theme, in her own words: “I want to toast to past experiences, moments, places, ingredients that have shaped me.”

Rhoda Magbitang

AKA: Boss Baby. Goose. Lil’ Evil. Magpie. Batangarang. Rhoad Dawg. The Rhod’ Scholar. Shortrib.

Yearbook Quote: “I want you to remember my name.”

Rhoda is the realest, because usually when Top Chef introduces a guest judge, they immediately cut to a contestant pretending to know who that guest judge is. (Taylor Waller-Fairchild? OMG, he’s like the original gangster of Neo-Rust Belt Sea Lunch!) This time around, Rhoda pulled a knife that said “Sara” and was like “am I supposed to know every Top Chef finalist of the last 20 years on a mononymical basis??” Love her for that.

POV: Michelin with a Filipino twist.

Mentor: Joe Flamm (fellow Last Chance Kitchen winner).

Sous Chef: Sieger

Menu theme, in her own words: “A toast to all the things and people that put a stamp in my memory as to why I’m here.”

Laurence Louie

AKA: Punch Out. Larry Louie. LL. L Train. The Boxer. Long Tong Silver. Gamergate.

Yearbook Quote: “I never went to culinary school.”

POV: Global Cantonese.

Mentor: Stephanie Izard.

Sous Chef: Jonathan.

Menu theme, in his own words: “I want to take you not just on a traditional four-course menu, but more how I eat now, and the different spaces and people that made that happen.”

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Theme-wise, none of the chefs did a great job articulating a vision that went beyond the original prompt, but Rhoda arguably came the closest. The succinct version of her theme was probably “sense memories.” That was clearly what she was going for, though she didn’t quite say it that way, and if she had it probably would’ve been a bigger advantage. Laurence, meanwhile, seemed simultaneously the least beholden to old ideas about fine dining, but least experienced in executing a four-course fine-dining menu. That was basically the story of the entire season.

The Judges

A murderer’s row of Hunter Lewis, Editor-In-Chief of Food & Wine, local chefs Eric Ferguson, Camari Mick and Nok Suntaranon; mentors Sara Bradley, Joe Flamm and Stephanie Izard, permanent judges Kristen, Tom and Gail, plus by chefs Brandon Jew and Val Cantu.

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Backrooms is one of those movies that had me thinking, about halfway through, “wow, I still don’t know where this is going!”

And then about two-thirds of the way through I realized, “Oh, the filmmaker doesn’t know where this is going either.”

This is the inherent paradox of horror movies, that the hook is always something unexplainable, and the resolution requires, at least on some level, some sort of explanation. Young filmmakers often struggle to square this circle, even if it’s not what viewers tend to remember (with all due respect to M. Night Shyamalan and The Sixth Sense).

Backrooms never quite graduates from idea to story, but it is a hell of an idea. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a depressed middle-aged alcoholic in 1990s San Jose who manages the confusingly named furniture store, “Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire,” in which two punny themes compete within the same four-word phrase (buccaneering and the Silk Road). Clark spends his days alternately shooting bad ads for his store in a pirate costume and discussing his failed relationship with his therapist (he wanted to be an architect! he was only working at the furniture store to put his fiancee through law school!). Mary, the therapist — played by Norwegian Renate Reinsve, inexplicably opting to play Mary as vaguely Latina — is the only character outside of Clark to get more than five minutes of screen time in Backrooms.

At night, homeless Clark sucks on a fifth of whiskey and sleeps in his own store. It’s there that he eventually discovers a wall that isn’t actually a wall (more of a portal), leading to a lost subterranean space of endless levels and creepily empty rooms (or are they?!).

Anyone remember the reveal at the end of From Dusk Till Dawn, where you realize that the bar was actually just one layer of massive underground pyramid? Sort of like that, if the temple was a drab furniture store.

Directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, Backrooms apparently originated as a thread on 4chan, and the whole concept feels distinctly videogame influenced — perhaps best illustrated by the anonymous 4chan user who named it:

If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

Parsons started adapting the idea into a series of YouTube horror shorts in 2022 (when he was 16!), and the feature-length film version still hews pretty close to this original pitch.

This liminal space, as far as Parsons bothers to explain it (not much, which was probably the correct choice), exists as a sort of maze of corporate showrooms and hotel conference spaces regurgitated as incomplete, half-remembered copies of their above-ground iterations, that seem to degrade further with every subterranean level. “The Upside Down meets Blair Witch meets lost videogame levels” would be the glib way to explain it. Intentionally or not, it’s a lot more evocative than that. Certainly richer than Backrooms’ characters own attempts to explain it: “Imagine trying to describe a dog, to someone who has never seen a dog…”

While Backrooms could probably use more characters, more character development, and clearer resolution, it is a vibe, and horror movies don’t have to be much more than a vibe. Parsons’ ambiguous, open-ended finale — scripted by Will Soodik, with a handful of TV credits including Westworld and Ash vs. Evil Dead on his resume — reminded me of Zach Cregger’s not-especially-successful attempt to tie his own story strands together in Barbarian (2022). Where Cregger falls back on gore and comedy to direct himself out of jams, Parson just sort of leaves things unfinished. Parsons doesn’t have Cregger’s skill for comedy (Backrooms does pass the levity test, though just barely) but in both cases, the questions asked are far more memorable than the answers offered. A few years after Barbarian, Cregger went on to give us the far more fully realized Weapons, and it’s not hard for me to imagine Parsons maturing in the same way.

He’ll certainly get the chance. Backrooms earned $81 million in its opening weekend, the highest ever opening for an original horror film (non-sequel, non-remake) and A24’s biggest opening ever. Between Backrooms and Obsession (another smash hit original horror movie with a $700,000 budget directed by a 26-year-old YouTuber) the trades are abuzz with the news that Gen Z actually likes going to the movies, and the impending inevitable YouTube takeover of the film industry. Many film industry observers are suddenly seeing echoes of the seventies, when the Film School Brats (Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas) proved that the aging studio execs had lost touch with their audiences.

Another key factor in all of this is that the success of Obsession and Backrooms came in the midst of the relative failure of The Mandalorian and Grogu (which may have done better if they’d just called it “The Baby Yoda Movie”). Just three weeks into release, that seemingly obvious IP home run has fallen behind two surprise horror hits directed by 20-somethings and has yet to earn back its $300 million budget. This is where the YouTuber invasion of today most closely mirrors the young filmmakers taking over Hollywood in the seventies: even without big budgets, they’re making the system they’re poised to replace suddenly feel very corny — in ways that we all sort of knew, but, until now, had no alternative to.

This, I think, is the best way to enjoy Backrooms; as both a troll on and a reaction to the pop culture ecosystem it’s poised to replace.

What is a liminal space, after all — where half-remembered visions of the 1990s, complete with shitty puns, bad lighting, and big box stores, replicating themselves in endless, increasingly glitchy iterations — if not the perfect skewering of the kind of millennial anti-culture that gave us The Mandalorian and Grogu? It’s not hard to imagine Zoomers feeling like they’re living their entire lives wandering the abandoned hallways of previous generations’ shabby utopias. There was something here… what was it even supposed to be? Backrooms is where metastatic corporate design imperatives meet reflexive nostalgia, a zombified chain store mascot trudging after you groaning “Waaazzaaaap” and “I can haz cheezeburger?”

Fitting as well that this vision came from a YouTuber. It’s terrifying when you ask grade schoolers what they want to be when they grow up and 70% of them say influencers or content creators, but then, what other viable industries have we left them? The only thing more horrifying than the world of TikTok pranksters and slop video overacting is the job market for today’s college graduates. In that sense, “a giant maze of boring empty rooms filled with people occasionally trying to feed on you” feels like a solid metaphor.

Who else but a Zoomer could give us an enduring vision of our own enshittified pop culture as an extended uncanny valley AI hallucination? I don’t love Backrooms as a movie, but as a harbinger of things to come, its timing is pretty damned perfect.

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After last week’s banger of a Top Chef episode, filled with surprise snake attacks and a big tantrum at the end, this week’s Top Chef was comparatively subdued. No big drama, everyone cooked well, Tom Colicchio was happy, everyone thought about their wiener kids and cried (they cried, I crew, we all crode). For a second I thought everyone might hold hands and sing Jack Johnsons songs by the campfire. Much as it pains me to say it, they had me at full buy-in.

With 13 episodes down and one more to gos, I found myself trying to explain (mostly to myself) why it is I’m still watching this show religiously after 23 seasons, whereas, I have to remind myself to catch up on episodes of America’s Culinary Cup — the CBS version of Top Chef hosted by Padma Lakshmi that started this season.

ACC has Padma (indisputably a compelling host), some fun judges (Wiley Dufresne, Michael Cimarusti), and a cast of characters arguably more interesting and eclectic than Top Chef’s this season (one guy was in prison!). And yet, I still find myself preferring Top Chef.

Partly it’s force of habit, I’m sure, but Top Chef, as it proved once again this week, seems to have this sly decorum about it that most other cooking shows lack (decorum being a crazy thing to say about something on the Bravo network, I realize, but it’s true). You might not even notice it until you watch other ones, but they always seem just a little desperate, like they’re stretching just a bit — either for populist slop or for unearned grandiosity. Top Chef has its quirks, but it kind of just is what it is without trying to be anything else. It never feels like it’s begging you to care what these chefs are doing, or about food competitions in general. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to sell me on its own importance. I get a weird comfort from that. Anyway.

Smell Tom’s Bowl

For this Quickfire, Tom put on the apron and started cooking. What was he making? As Tom described it to Kristen and Gail (both looking especially fly this week I might add), “It started off as a Billy B, but then I took it to Spain.”

Wow, taking a Billy B to Spain? Sounds like a violation of the Mann Act.

Tom was actually talking about a billi bi, which America’s Test Kitchen describes as “an exquisite bisque.” Mussels in broth, thickened with cream and egg yolks. Sounds pretty good. Tom poached some cod in his, then added chorizo and some aji dulce (that’s a type of chili, you ignoranus).

Of course, he accomplished all of this before the contestants entered the kitchen, and Gail and Kristen ate all of it before they were allowed in the room. The quickfire challenge? Trying to recreate what Tom made, simply by looking at the empty bowl, and asking him a series of yes/no questions, 20-questions style.

I actually really enjoyed this challenge, which tested both the chefs’ intuition, and their deductive reasoning. It also gave Tom Colicchio the opportunity to express great displeasure at the notion that his dish might have included Tuscan kale. Did you his face when Jonathan asked that? The man was aghast! (Tuscan kale? …Get the rope).

In fact this challenge was so successful, that I wouldn’t mind seeing a version of it that didn’t even include the 20 questions part. Like maybe amp up the eroticism and have all the contestants come up and smell Tom Colicchio’s breath to try to figure out what he ate.

“What is that, congnac? Brandy? Was it some kind of flambé?”

“No, actually, I was just kissing your mother before this.”

Peculiar Vessels

For the elimination challenge, the theme was peculiar vessels. As in, what can you serve a dish in or on that isn’t actually a plate. Sir, I’ll take your most chilled vichyssoise, served in a bowler hat!

Sadly, the producers chickened out on including arguably the most famous unusual vessel, the sushi served off of a naked woman (or man). Boo! More full frontal, Top Chef!

That being said, it was actually, again, pretty inspired for one of the final (if not the final?) elimination challenges of the season. The contestants all rose to the challenge, cooking their little hearts out to deliver an ending where it seemed genuinely a shame that one of them had to be sent home.

I actually think that there was a clear weakest link this week, and that the competition wasn’t nearly as close as the editing made it seem, but we’ll get to that.

Judging said challenge were a random comedian lady (Liza Koshy), Hunter Lewis from Food & Wine, and a guy who looked like a James Bond villain:

Okay fine, that was Jon Yao, an LA chef recognized by culinary awards bodies too numerous to recount here. And as for Liza Koshy, she earned herself a lifetime of gratitude from this ex-rugby player and Australophile for making Tom Colicchio take a shoey:

Damn, he’s drinking that thing like it has a nice Columbia Valley riesling in it. My first shoey (we used to call it “shooting the boot” in those days), drunk from an actual, game-worn shoe, had Natty Light from a keg, poured over a man’s bare ass crack, and mixed with enough ghost pepper hot sauce that it made my face numb when I drank it (probably killed all the ass crack and shoe bacteria though, that’s just good food handling practice). Eat your heart out, naked sushi woman.

Sadly, the camera sort of cut away, but I don’t even think Tom chugged his. Which, in Australian, would be a boot-able offense:

Tom is going to have to present his bottom if they ever want to do an Australia season of Top Chef.

Results:

Quickfire Bottom: Jonathan, Laurence.
Quickfire Top: Sherry, Rhoda*.

Elimination Bottom: Jonathan**, Laurence.
Elimination Top: Sherry*, Rhoda.

(*Winner, **Eliminated).

Power Rankings (change from last week)

4. (even) ((Eliminated)) Jonathan

AKA: Big Twin Big Twin. Thicc Twin. Meat. Brawnathan. H Bomb. GLP-2. Rawdaddy.

Ranking History: 4 4 4 5 5 6 7 7 8 9 8 8 5.

Damn, this week had me sweatin’!

Jonathan was the obvious underdog, but then he pulled off a weirdly inspired dish that had the judges raving. Whereas the favorite, Laurence, who at one point a few episodes ago had won 40% of this season’s elimination challenges, was busy struggling with a steamer (not in the toilet way, c’mon, guys).

Jonathan’s dish?

Elimination Challenge Dish: Pumpkin seed dinner roll with pumpkin purée compound butter.

The judges raved, calling it fun, and a “confident flex.”

Which… uh… sure.

I get the “fun” part. That’s a goofy first course that all the judges had fun with (and apparently the bread was very good). It probably would’ve made me smile too. But at the end of the day, Laurence made a four-course meal and Jonathan made a dinner roll served inside a pumpkin. One is food, the other is mostly stunt.

The worst part of Jonathan’s dish is that as far as I could tell, they weren’t even meant to eat the pumpkin. Sure, there was a pumpkin compound butter that had pumpkin purée in it (served in the stem part of the pumpkin), but it looked like the rest of the pumpkin was just used as a presentation vessel and discarded. That’s not food, it’s a wack-o-lantern.

Even with bread bowl clam chowder, part of the gimmick is that you get to eat the vessel. Jonathan also perpetuated the notion that seeds and purée are the only way to eat pumpkin. You can eat the body too! You can roast it and it’s like a sweeter potato!

“Fun” as it is, Jonathan’s dish kind of gets stupider the more you think about it. This was a vessel challenge, and did this one even need the vessel? All the vessel did was put the pumpkin at eyeball level. Which, I guess sort of improves the bit, but not by a lot.

All that being said, it was a nice one to go out on. Jonathan got to leave on a dish that he executed well, rather than something he screwed up on. And it was pretty on brand for Jonathan — the more affable, lovable of this season’s twin competitors (Jonathan’s twin, Brandon, was eliminated in episode eight) — he didn’t make things too hard on the judges, the same way he didn’t make his brother feel bad for being so mean to him during Restaurant Wars. Jonathan seemed like the go along to get along brother.

Jonathan even got to set up Tom for one of his best lines of the season. When Jonathan said his pumpkin was “bald like me and Tom,” Tom countered with “I’m not bald, I just cut my hair like this.”

Damn, dude, that is an absolute laser of a dad joke. Jonathan: excellent wingman until the end. I hope he gets that fan favorite $$$.

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It’s Parasite meets Looney Tunes! It’s the Communist Manifesto meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit! It’s Sorry to Bother You meets a Terry Gilliam cartoon from Monty Python!

While there are a lot of kooky shorthand constructions you could use to describe I Love Boosters, the main feeling it evokes is of freedom. Is there anyone less constrained by the traditional rules of narrative and the common assumptions about what makes commercial cinema than Boots Riley? I Love Boosters is an inspired mix of visual maximalism, gleefully scat comedy, and unabashed agitprop that left me thinking, simultaneously, “this guy does whatever the fuck he wants” and “why isn’t anyone else going this hard?”

I Love Boosters, the sophomore feature from Bay Area old head Boots Riley (his debut being Sorry to Bother You, in 2018), follows “Corvette,” (Keke Palmer) a professional shoplifter (aka a “booster”) who lives in an abandoned chicken shop in Oakland, but dreams of becoming a fashion designer. Her idol-cum-nemesis is the highborn child science prodigy turned Girlboss fashion entrepreneur, Christie Smith, played brilliantly by Demi Moore, doing a riff on Rachel Zoe if she spoke mostly in spooky aphorisms (a nice little skewering of the tech industry alongside the skewering of the fashion industry). Smith, in turn, lives in a luxury tower in San Francisco that lists at a 30-degree angle, which feels like the Leaning Tower of Pisa meets the six and half floor from Being John Malkovich. One of many Bay Area easter eggs, Smith’s tilted building is actually a reference to San Francisco’s Millennium Tower, a fabulously expensive address whose residents have included Joe Montana and Peter Thiel, that was actually leaning 28 inches northwest as of 2022, reportedly thanks to the builders choosing not to anchor the structure to bedrock, leading to a slew of lawsuits. Truth, fiction, etc.

Filming Zoolander-esque scenes of an imperious fashion queen abusing her underlings inside a set tilted at 30 degrees is sort of Riley’s approach in a nutshell — building upon the real-life absurdities of class and capitalism to create this bugfuck romper room where Top Secret! visual gags, rainbow explosion funk styling, and straightforward sex and toilet humor combine into something wholly original.

Corvette infiltrates Christie Smith’s tilted penthouse by posing as a manager for her home barista service. Attempting to improvise a fake name on the fly, Corvette comes up with “Corvoisieresy,” a gibberish joke so beautiful it had Lewis Carroll masturbating in his coffin. Corvette soon comes to realize that Smith has been stealing her designs. Idolization curdles into spite and Corvette makes a plan to use her booster crew not just to leech off of Smith and barely stay afloat, but to actually bring her down.

One of Corvette’s crew, played by the wildly underrated Taylour Paige, has a trick whereby she can hold her breath and make herself look white enough to be the decoy (her light-skinned incarnation played by Robin Thede), which has since become the film’s most ubiquitous gif. This mix of elaborate camera effects (the sideways-tilted set) and the kinds of low-fi tricks you might improvise with your high school buddies (cutting to a lighter-skinned actress) is something of a Boots Riley signature. I can’t remember anyone making their own production methods part of the joke so successfully since the cat scene in Team America. Practical effects this clever always make CGI feel like a failure of imagination.

Corvette, meanwhile, has a love interest, in the form of a mysterious character played by Lakeith Stanfield, credited only as “Pinky Ring Guy.” He shows up from time to time, seemingly at random, staring deeply into Corvette’s eyes, making her feel woozy and faint every time he appears. Turns out, he’s actually a demon who sucks women’s souls out of their pussies (the film’s words). In any other movie this would be a spoiler, but in I Love Boosters it’s merely one of many wild twists. Another great thing about Boots is that his daydreams about class war evolve into sex stuff about a third of the time and he never edits them out.

In general, filmmakers with Riley’s flair for grandiose conceptual pieces and tendency to go hog wild on a single idea rarely have his facility for deadpan humor. Arthouse auteurs are almost never good at crafting punchlines and succinct scene buttons (which is why I always remember the ones who do). It almost requires two different brains — the kind that can build ideas bigger and bigger, crafting skyscapers out of their own bullshit, and the kind that can cut through the clutter and boil things down to their essence for a memorable one-liner. I can’t tell you how many bad indie movies I’ve seen where a character jumps out of the text for a big laugh line — what the fuckity fuckballs is happening?!? — that only the festival nerds laugh at because it isn’t actually funny. Boots is singularly two-brained in that way, where his characters often drop a pretense mid-tirade for deadpan vulgar laugh lines. In Riley’s hands, this always feels like a genuine character choice. It’s a joy to watch; I laughed harder at I Love Boosters than at anything else I’ve seen so far this year.

One of the film’s central conflicts is between Corvette and her friend Sade (Naomie Ackie, who I wouldn’t have known is actually British if she didn’t have such an unforgettable face). Where Corvette eventually wants to take Christie Smith down, Sade is all about the money, and worries they might overreach and end up killing the golden goose. Together they represent the age-old “fulfilling career” vs. “comfortable life” conundrum. At one point Sade drags Corvette to what Sade makes sound like a self-help group, but is actually a pyramid scheme, being led by Don Cheadle in a fatsuit with waist-length dreads, easily the greatest Don Cheadle cameo in the history of Don Cheadle cameos.

Eventually Corvette’s plans to rob Christie Smith’s flagship store (Will Poulter has an excellent turn as an evil effeminate middle manager) are foiled by a rival booster. Thus is introduced Boosters’ final act sequence, dealing with a magical-realist teleportation device, and potential solidarity between Corvette’s booster crew and the Chinese factory workers making Smith’s garments, along with a local union organizer played by Eiza Gonzalez, in full goth mode (which suits her weirdly well). The groups lined up to take down Smith all have slightly different but overlapping goals, Riley’s suitably Looney Tunes take on the collective action problem.

Just as in Sorry to Bother You, Riley amps up the magical realism in the final section (which is, again, more magical realism by way of Chuck Jones than M. Night Shyamalan). It’s not quite as effective this time around, as I Love Boosters abruptly forgets to be funny for about 10 minutes late in the film. The trouble seems to be that whereas Sorry to Bother You’s wildest sequence late in the film comes slightly unstuck from allegory, I Love Boosters’ analogies turn more obvious. It seems to get stuck halfway between lecture and satire. You get the sense that maybe Boots Riley cares too much, before belatedly remembering his sense of humor for Boosters’ thankfully rousing coda.

That he can pull that off speaks to his peculiar malleability. One of the greatest joys of watching Riley’s movies is that his big ideas and inspired slapstick gags exist easily alongside his flair for blue humor and deftness with one-liners. He combines the maximalist fashion sense and kaleidoscopic color palette of funk music with Tim & Eric-style weird humor and Marxist politics.

…Can he do that? Why hasn’t anyone else done that?

There’s a famous Arr tweet, “The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going “but a dog can’t play basketball!” while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over.”

Boots Riley Movies = Dog dunking a basketball, but from the left.