2026-08-26 01:30:00
I still don’t know exactly what “A Long December” by Counting Crows was meant to evoke in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but I can tell you what it did for me: instantly took me back to that window of time in the early-to-mid 1990s when I was working in Atlanta. Spending a lot of time driving around and listening to the radio station 99X, which seemed to have every one of their songs on frequent rotation.
Supposedly, 99X was the home of “alternative rock,” but I suspect they said that mostly to let people like me believe we weren’t listening to mainstream radio.
I guess technically, it was accurate, since “mainstream” hits at the time were dominated by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. But it didn’t feel very alternative to be listening to Counting Crows, or Hootie and the Blowfish, or The Dave Matthews Band, all of which would become Starbucks and Borders Books mainstays.
Don’t get me wrong; I got all of these albums on CD, and I listened to them incessantly. There was a period when I had all of August and Everything After and Cracked Rear View memorized, and I continued listening to Under the Table and Dreaming well into my move to California. I’m not saying they’re bad, just that they’re not edgy in the slightest.
“A Long December” came out in 1996, which was the end of that period for me. The beginning was around 1993, when there was another song that got played constantly: “Shine” by Collective Soul. Collective Soul didn’t stick with me as much as the others (although I still like “December” from their later self-titled album), but this song is quantum-linked in my memory with the Counting Crows.
2026-08-24 01:00:00
This post will have spoilers (to varying degrees) about:
When I wrote about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I’m not sure that I made it sufficiently clear how much I loved the movie. I really think it’s something special. Every idea it presents can spin off into a dozen other, even deeper ideas. But the really remarkable thing is that for as dense as it is, it’s still fun, open-ended, and non-judgmental.
And most remarkable of all: it’s about feeling as much as, if not more than, thinking. It’s not presented as a puzzle box for the viewer to solve, to decipher its one true meaning. Writer/director Jane Shoenbrun almost certainly had a concrete idea of what every image, every line of dialogue, and every moment was intended to represent, but they also seem adamantly opposed to declaring that their version is the “correct” interpretation.
I emphasized that it was “meta” mostly to repeat a joke that’s in the movie. But it is still my main criticism: I kept feeling like I was just on the cusp of really deeply feeling the significance of something, when the movie would present a moment that drew attention to its own artifice. It seemed like being shown something that was profoundly personal and then being kept safely at arm’s length right as I was about to internalize it.
The “meta” joke comes from Kris insisting to a bunch of Hollywood types that her vision for the Camp Miasma reboot was not meta like New Nightmare from horror master Wes Craven. And it’s both a good gag — a clever bit of self-referential humor — and is also completely true. Neither Kris’s Camp Miasma reboot, nor Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma itself, are meta like New Nightmare, since they’re not all that concerned with functioning as a horror movie, and they’re not that concerned with establishing what’s “real.”
I admit I’ve only seen New Nightmare once, and I honestly wasn’t paying much attention. But even when it starts blurring the lines between reality1, the “reality” of the movie, and the fiction of the Elm Street series, there’s still a strong sense of which layer is which. I don’t think it’s a shallow movie — you can pretty easily see how it’s got commentary on the franchise, the people who made it, the fans, and the consequences of its fame — but it does feel like the meta-fiction is primarily there to be the premise for a new Elm Street installment. (Or more accurately: to be the premise for Wes Craven to talk about the Elm Street series).
When Kris insists that Little Death is very real and lives underneath the lake, watching everyone, that’s essentially when the movie turns itself inside out. She’s so adamant that it’s not a meta-gimmick, and the depiction of Little Death’s “lair” is so earnest and unsettling, that it suggests it’s not only real within the world of her reboot, but that it’s real within the movie itself. Possibly even real with our world.
The sequences that follow are dense with opportunities for interpretation. It felt as if the entire movie up to that point had been setting up these ideas, and then the conference call, which seemed to be the moment of Kris’s epiphany, started a process of putting all of those ideas in motion. Ideas that range in scale and scope from commentary on how horror movies work, how we watch them, and how we talk about them, to the whole notion of gender, identity, how we define ourselves, and how we repress our true selves.
The idea of Little Death watching through the air vent calls back to an earlier conversation with Billy about filming the movie, and that enigmatic look in her eye in Camp Miasma’s famous scene2: that classic idea that horror movies make audiences simultaneously the voyeur and the participant.
The idea itself is practically Cinema Studies 101, but even when I’ve seen movies that convey it viscerally — Rear Window‘s shot of Raymond Burr looking directly into the camera might be the most famous and effective example — it’s still remained an idea to be intellectually processed instead of really felt. When put into the context of a woman shedding her inhibitions and actually feeling desire instead of just writing it down in a notebook, I got the full impact. And I finally got the significance of Kris’s earlier movie being described as “Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain:” neither the killer or the victim, but a passive observer removed from everything.
I got a similar jolt of recognition when Kris finds herself as the Final Girl inside the horror movie, stripped to her underwear and a nightshirt, and she’s delighted to realize that it’s finally happening. It calls back to an earlier scene where she’s topless and wearing a skirt, and nervously and awkwardly presenting herself to Billy. Here, though, her reaction suggests that she’s not presenting herself as a woman in peril, a helpless object to be looked at, but as an active participant in a thrilling experience. It’s a clever way to say not that the phenomenon of the Male Gaze doesn’t exist, but that it’s not always the only thing that’s going on. She finds it freeing and exhilarating. It’s a more profound take on the “dance like nobody’s watching” cliche: being preoccupied with how she’s being perceived would’ve distracted from the dangerous joy of it.
Even in the sequences that are broad and silly, which play out like an extended SNL Digital Short, it’s calling back to one of her first conversations with Billy. When Kris is asked to tell Billy about herself, she describes herself as queer, mentions her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s boyfriend, and then talks at length about her work. Billy points out that she’s said nothing about herself. Now, we see Little Death come in and dispatch all of the people who’d been the dominant forces in her life while still leaving her unfulfilled, stripping away the surface layers of her identity to leave the part that’s really her.
And the scene in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma that I think is the most realistic, the one with all of the layers of artifice stripped away, is the most surreal. It’s when Little Death finally comes for Kris, and he stabs them both with his spear. Sure, it’s slasher movie murder as a metaphor for orgasm, that surface-level interpretation that you might’ve been expecting from the moment you heard the killer’s name. But all of Little Death’s kills that we’d seen up to that point had been either perfunctory or over the top, a fake head rolling off of a fake body, with a geyser of fake blood spewing out of the neck. This was the one scene that tried to make it all look real.
It’s also the one scene that really broke through the fourth wall for me. As the camera held on Kris as her mouth filled with blood, I was wondering “how did they do that?” Not the usual sense of remove you get from watching a movie and wondering what kind of “movie magic” they used to pull off an effect. Really wondering “How did Hannah Einbinder do that, without drowning?” and the longer the scene went on, feeling a little concerned for her safety, even though I’ve been seeing clips from the press junket on Instagram. It was unnerving, and perfectly right for a moment that’s all about someone who’s no longer watching things happen to other people, and is instead experiencing them for herself.
I think it was only possible because the movie was filled with reminders of its own artifice, constantly drawing attention to the fact that none of it was real. It starts with a shaky cam POV shot that’s on a movie set. It has the weird freeze frame and cross-dissolve when Kevin McDonald’s character finds an old, dusty VCR in a closet. And most visibly: the camp itself, which is simultaneously a real summer camp that was used as a movie set and is now being used as a movie set. It’s all shot with Wes Anderson-level symmetry, and there’s an elaborate matte painting of snowy mountains in the background. A shot of Kris and Billy later on, walking in front of the matte painting, seems deliberately set up to show you the brush strokes.
That’s what I’m talking about when I say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is so “meta” that it feels like it’s keeping me at an arm’s length away. It’s also because the movie is so dense with ideas that it always feels as if it’s trying hard to make you understand something. But I also think that it’s an essential part of what this movie is trying to do, since so much of it is about that process of watching a movie. Any movie, but especially a slasher movie.
The only reason I’d compare it to The End of Oak Street is that it’s the movie I saw most recently. But I think that they do have one significant aspect in common, which is that they reference a specific style of movie and use that style to make (what I interpret as) a larger commentary.
It’d be easy to read Oak Street as just a “they don’t make ’em like they used to!” homage to the golden age of Amblin Entertainment, and for all I know, that actually was the entirety of its intent. But I couldn’t avoid feeling like it wasn’t just evoking the early 1980s, but commenting on them. Reminding us of the pitfalls of nostalgia, the fact that even horror and thriller movies of the time were escapist fantasies and not documentaries, and maybe even reminding us that the Reagan era planted the seeds of all of the problems in America we’re seeing today.
But it never reads as a parody or deconstruction of 1980s movies. It leaves the fourth wall completely intact — even if you’re looking at it through a split diopter — and never draws attention to the fact that it might be telling you something more than “dinosaurs are attacking this family.”
So my gut reaction leaving Teenage Sex and Death was wishing it could’ve worked the same way, without that level of remove.
I don’t think it’s a didactic movie; in fact, that’s a huge part of why I love it. You can tell that it’s dense with ideas, but I never felt like it was insistent that I watch it the right way, or that I make the right interpretation, or that I was being given a lecture about cinema studies or queerness or the intersection of the two. In fact, I was amazed at how deft it is at side-stepping the usual pitfalls of a meta-movie. I didn’t get the same feeling of self-satisfied cleverness that I got from The Cabin in the Woods3, and it didn’t fall into the spirals of self-awareness that collapse in on themselves, like a lot of self-referential works do. It just felt joyful and personal, a filmmaker using everything at their disposal to share their love of horror movies with the audience.
But I still wondered whether I’d have liked it even more if Billy hadn’t felt like a caricature. Or if Kris hadn’t felt so much like a stand-in for the filmmaker. Or if any of the aspects of the slasher movie had felt like an actual slasher movie. So much of the movie is about feeling it instead of getting it, so I wished there weren’t that level of distance. Where I was watching a slasher movie, instead of having Schoenbrun show me how slasher movies make them feel.
After letting the movie marinate for a couple of weeks, I’m not convinced that would’ve been possible without robbing it of its relevance or its impact. That feeling of total immersion that I’d thought was missing was in fact part of the movie’s message, at least how I interpret it. It’s me wanting to be able to split up the movie into what’s “real” and what’s not. But a key part of the movie is the assertion that none of it is real; it’s a movie. And drawing clearer lines between fiction and reality within the movie’s own fiction would’ve robbed it of its power.
Part of it is in how characters are identified or, significantly, not identified. Sarah Sherman’s character is never given a name, but identified on Kris’s phone simply as “Your Agent.” We learn later that Kris is on her phone as “Your Client.” It’s a running gag about how she’s Kris’s closest collaborator on a new creative project, but their relationship is purely transactional.
One of the participants in Kris’s Zoom call with the Hollywood execs is simply named “Queer Assistant.” It calls back to Kris’s earlier assertion that she knows she’s a “diversity hire,” and she’s been brought onto the project to rehabilitate the franchise’s image, since the first installment at least was so overwhelmingly transphobic. But it’s also notable that that assistant is the only person in the call apart from Kris who’s actually well-versed in horror movies. They’ve been hired based on their queer identity instead of their talent or their knowledge, the aspects that are actually personal to them.
That hit home with me, because I’d been guilty to some degree of doing the same thing. I went into Teenage Sex and Death with at least some thought of “I’m about to be educated about the transgender experience.” Even though I was excited by the prospect, it’s reductive and othering. Seeing Schoenbrun first and foremost as a Queer Filmmaker, instead of a huge horror fan, which is probably closer to their true self. And, ironically, the part that I most easily related to.
But as it turns out, I was educated. Just not in the form of a lecture, but in the form of another movie fan showing me how they felt, in a way that let me feel it, too. Among the many ideas in Teenage Sex and Death, one of the most obvious ones is addressing the question “How can any socially aware movie fan, much less a transgender movie fan, feel any kind of affection for a movie like Sleepaway Camp?“
When I first saw Sleepaway Camp, I was trying to appreciate the campy, nonsensical, charmingly inept trash that I’d expected. The movie where a kid responds to “Eat shit and die” with “Eat shit and live,” and where a girl is killed, somehow, by having a curling iron shoved up her hoo-ha. But it was difficult to enjoy it even as camp when there was so much bad taste, like pedophilia, homophobia, and a girl being killed by having a curling iron shoved up her hoo-ha. Oh and also, the premise that raising a boy as a girl would turn them into a psychotic serial killer.4
If you take even the slightest step back, it’s an odd reaction: attempting to draw lines between acceptable and inexcusable in a genre that is all about depictions of violent and gruesome murders. Enjoying horror and thriller movies at all, especially slashers, requires the understanding that nothing you’re being shown is real. So any intellectual interpretation of them — like the decades worth of essays examining them to draw out recurring themes of misogyny, racism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, or even political anxieties — requires a careful gerrymandering of the material into pockets of reality and fantasy. “I can excuse all the murder, but I draw the line at racism.”
One of the things that Teenage Sex and Death does so well is suggest the absurdity of all that, while still not giving objectionable material a pass. It can often seem like being a fan of horror, especially trash horror, means shrugging off any larger questions of social responsibility, and declaring that anything goes. “It’s supposed to be offensive! Stop being so uptight and let Eli Roth make all the movies!” But the scene from Camp Miasma with the counselors talking about the origin story of Little Death does a pretty great job of skewering transphobic attitudes. And not even by responding with great offense, but by drawing attention to just how stupid and absurd it all sounds.
The implication is that the objectionable material is still in there, and surrounding it with all of the other transgressive aspects of horror doesn’t make it any less objectionable. But also, it’s not the only thing that a viewer can take away from a movie. And enjoying it doesn’t mean condoning it, any more than it means condoning murder. Horror demands to be experienced first, and then processed or intellectualized later.
And I think a big part of what makes the movie feel so joyful instead of judgmental is that it transforms Little Death’s origin story into their super-power. I initially thought it was oddly specific for the story to emphasize the detail of the camper who lived even and odd days as different genders, and especially to visually illustrate it as clumsily as a movie from the Camp Miasma era would. But by the end of Teenage Sex and Death, when we see Little Death’s existence under the lake, and we take it in the context of everything else, it implies a wonderful kind of expansiveness and inclusiveness. There’s a loose implication that they are a sort of deity, having both male and female aspects, representing both creation and destruction, and encompassing all aspects of existence.
Part of that read comes from the extended murder scene set to “A Long December.” I definitely can’t claim that I understood that scene, and for all I know, it might have been intended to be purely abstract. But the song has a feeling of regret and hope, the repeated suggestion that things will get better. And the scene doesn’t focus on the kill effects like an actual horror movie would, but on Little Death and their movements through the room. It’s all in slow motion and it’s graceful, and it’s the only time we see their face when they’re in the costume. It feels like they’re doing it not out of malice but out of obligation. This is what they exist to do. And in most slasher movies, the killer’s motivations aren’t known until the very end, if it all. For most of the movie, they’re more like a force of nature. Getting top billing and often being the most memorable character, but having no role apart from watching the main characters and then killing them.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is full of overt imagery suggesting that it’s all about a sexual awakening: snow melting, an icy lake melting to free the serial killer who’s a metaphor for orgasms, winter suddenly turning into spring.
But it’s also full of imagery that goes even wider, suggesting a more expansive ideas about experiencing the entirety of life to the fullest. All of the junk food and candy treated like a celebration of sensual experiences without worrying about their nutritional content. And appreciating a trashy horror movie for the visceral experience of watching it, without treating it as if its message were the only reason for its existence.
It deliberately blurs all of the lines between what it treats as real and what it treats as fiction. Billy describes her infamous scene in Camp Miasma in a way that makes it bafflingly ambiguous what was real: she not only speaks as the character, but she describes the scene as if it were her first sexual experience, not as if she’d been an actor filming a character’s first sexual experience.
I was confused by how I was supposed to read that scene. Was she just an actor describing the character’s mindset in the first person? Was she speaking as a young actor, and suggesting that there was sexual abuse on the set? Were the lines blurring between movies and reality, and the actor was becoming the character, like John Saxon in New Nightmare by horror master Wes Craven?
Or had the entire movie been telling me that I was too focused on how I was supposed to read the scene, trying to parse out reality from fiction within a work of fiction, instead of focusing on the feeling that was being described? Of being both observer of her life and participant in it, and the moment when the two merged into one? She was describing the one moment in the film that Kris had never been able to explain, but still resonated with her so deeply that she loved the movie despite its flaws. It was the one moment that felt the most real.
2026-08-19 07:48:58
The one moment that changed my impression of The End of Oak Street was during the end credits. The man sitting next to me turned to the person he was with and said, “That was such a good movie.”
I’d been sitting in the theater practically fuming over what a bad time I was having, mentally deducting a half-star from my rating for every grievance, doing the “whatever, I guess” gesture whenever the movie made a decision I didn’t like1, getting angry at the movie for wanting the image of dinosaurs in suburbia without knowing where to go with it, getting angry at myself for expecting something different. All while surrounded by people who were just sitting there the whole time enjoying themselves.
To be clear, it wasn’t a case of my heart growing three sizes, my realizing I’d been a big ol’ grumpus, and deciding to meet the movie halfway and appreciate it for what it was. I’d gone in expecting the “fun romp” that I keep seeing people describe it as, but I thought it was a nearly relentless downer. Bad stuff is already happening before the really bad stuff starts happening. And then it gets worse, as it piles more and more onto these not-particularly-likeable characters.
I also frequently see it called “Amblinesque” or “Spielbergian,” and I totally get why people say that. But it either feels deliberately opposed to including any of the elements at the core of an early 80s Spielberg movie, or just unconcerned with how those movies work beyond what happens at the surface level. The comparison that kept popping into my mind was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, except if it was entirely about Richard Dreyfuss’s character’s familial dysfunction, or a single mom panicking over her toddler’s abduction.
It was almost entirely humorless, except for one scene that worked well, which ends with Denise (Anne Hathaway) taking a polaroid picture of Greg (Ewan McGregor2). I’ve already seen lots of people calling that scene out in a I can’t believe they went there! or A Spielberg movie could never doing that! sense, and I mean, calm down, Beavis.
Spielberg could have done that, he just almost always chose not to. Go back and watch Jaws again, and see how that movie is funnier than you remember, since it injects light-hearted moments throughout the drama and tension, when they’re most needed. Go back and watch Jurassic Park again, and be reminded how much of it is “we are incredibly stoked to see dinosaurs” before it turns into “dinosaurs are horrifying.”
For that matter, look at how the movies are structured as action movies. Jurassic Park is the closest analog to The End of Oak Street for obvious reasons, but even as a monster movie, that ostensibly has curmudgeonly leads3, there’s never a sense that the characters are in a hopeless situation with no clear objective they’re trying to achieve. The bulk of Oak Street has characters who can only guess what happened and have no solid idea of what to do next.
While I’m griping, look at how the movies that Oak Street references use camera flourishes like dolly zoom and split diopter. It’s always used for maximum impact: this is the moment where Brody realizes the beach isn’t safe. This is a crucial moment to focus on two characters simultaneously, and the surreality of seeing both in focus is what draws attention to what’s being said or shown. Oak Street, meanwhile, uses split diopter all over the place4, including an entire scene where every shot uses it. It was especially noticeable since last week, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma got a laugh from a Burbank theater audience for using split diopter in an unnecessarily mundane scene, for humorous effect. In Oak Street, it just pissed me off.
So hearing the person next to me make a simple declaration of how much he enjoyed the movie didn’t make me enjoy the movie, so much as make me nostalgic for a time when I would’ve been a lot more likely to enjoy a movie like this. Back in my phase where I thought Spielberg was too schmaltzy and corny, and I would’ve been more on board with a movie that delivers on the image of “dinosaurs in a suburban American neighborhood” even if it didn’t have a clear idea of where to go with that image.
That would’ve probably been around 1982, which is when The End of Oak Street is set. And from the start, I really appreciated how much the movie fully commits to the bit of being a period piece. It all feels like I remember it. Bikes and libraries and collect calls and family dinners and polaroid cameras. Everything is kind of brown. Even the songs used: there’s a scene that plays “Valerie” by Steve Winwood, which is an immediate sense memory of the early 1980s for me. Because it’s in this downer of a movie, it plays when a miserable teenager gets into the big family car in the garage to sing along to it and cry.
I realized that the movie is so good at conveying the sadness of the early 1980s in suburban America, which is almost always depicted with neon bright colors and leg warmers and cassette tapes and having enough money to spend all your time in malls. Oak Street reminded me a lot of It Follows, which might seem like a fatuous observation, but it’s not for me — for some reason, I conflated It Follows with Don’t Breathe when the two movies came out, and I mistakenly thought David Robert Mitchell was the writer/director of the latter movie. But It Follows also did a phenomenal job of capturing that feeling of deep melancholy that comes with nostalgia for adolescence. I was always at least a little sad back then, but I wish I was back there.
That’s why I want to be clear that all my gripes aren’t actually an accusation that “the people making this movie didn’t understand how 1980s Spielberg movies actually work.” I believe they’re all deliberate choices to do something that evokes the golden age of Amblin Entertainment, but is trying to do something different.
As further evidence for that: I spent much of the movie wondering (since it doesn’t use opening credits) who did the music, since it was often jarringly over-the-top and weirdly tonally “off.” At the end, I saw that it’s by Michael Giacchino, and whether you like his music or you don’t, it’s very very hard to make a convincing case that he “doesn’t get the movie.” The effect in The End of Oak Street is that it often feels exactly like what a movie in the early 1980s would do with its score, even if it didn’t quite work with what the scene was actually showing.
I won’t be so reductive as to declare that “the dinosaurs aren’t the point,” because they most definitely are, but I will confidently declare that when the movie jumps straight to the horror without giving us the scenes of characters being awestruck by the majesty of non-threatening herbivores, it’s for a reason. I’m not even sure that it’s consciously deliberate, but it still felt very intentional.
That intent, I think, is not to present a version of what action/thriller/monster movies in the 1980s were like, but what the 1980s were like. Those movies, no matter how much they showed people in danger or meeting gruesome ends, were escapism. So when Oak Street spends so much time with a family in the early 1980s who doesn’t know why terrible things are happening and doesn’t have a clear idea of how to do anything beyond survive as long as they can: yeah, that tracks.
It almost feels like an anti-nostalgia movie, a rejection of the conservatism that’s built into nostalgia. A reminder that no, things weren’t actually better back then. That the teenage girl in a car crying and singing along to “Valerie” isn’t just a needle drop, but a depiction of someone who was already feeling overwhelmed before dinosaurs started ripping apart her neighbors.
There are other ideas that are suggested throughout Oak Street, initially reading as the kind of character development that would flesh out an 80s monster movie before it gets to “the good stuff,” but here feels like commentary on the decade itself. Faith and religion vs science, presented as a question of optimism vs hopelessness. The slow thawing of gender roles that had been frozen for decades. Classism and wealth inequality, with kids wondering what private school must be like, and the literal goal for the story being a rich couple’s house at the top of a hill.
There’s even a suggestion that the idea of small town neighborhood community — which so much conservative nostalgia likes to emphasize as the backbone of a better, happier time — was more performative than genuine. There are plenty of neighbors casually killed off in the backgrounds of shots, but the camera seems to spend an unusual amount of time following one nuclear family — almost identical to our main characters, although not white — that we can only assume drives off to meet their doom. During the movie, I wondered “why is this frustrating downer of a movie drawing attention to them, which just leaves us wondering why we should care less about them than our main characters?” By the end of The End of Oak Street, I almost felt like the movie was staring at me intently with hands steepled in front of its face, asking, “Why indeed?”
It took me too long to realize that the title The End of Oak Street was a double entendre about more than just a cul de sac. But it wasn’t until the movie was over that I got the third, hidden meaning, that it was the end of a neighborhood community as well.
So I still can’t say that I liked The End of Oak Street very much, but I do think it does a lot of really interesting stuff with the whole concept of nostalgia, and the escapist thrillers it so clearly evokes. I still hate the split diopter, though. Even if it was drawing attention to itself for a reason, it was still way overdone.
(Also there’s one more observation about the ending that I think is kind of interesting, but it’s a major spoiler. Don’t continue until you’ve seen the movie, which I still think is worth seeing, even if you’re only interested in a monster movie about dinosaurs attacking suburbia and nothing more).
First, a digression about Anne Hathaway before jumping right into spoilers. I always give Allison Williams credit for being eager to play deeply unlikeable or at best flawed characters, but I’ve got to give credit to Hathaway for doing similar. She seems to be comfortably in a position where she can get top billing in a movie, and be almost completely unconcerned with the fact that there are lots of people who just plain dislike her, whether it’s irrational or not. At this point in her career, and especially with Oak Street, it seems like she’s not just accepted it but embraced it. She doesn’t have to be likeable to keep getting roles; she’s free to focus on who the character is.
Which might be a long-winded way of saying that I really disliked Denise through much of the movie, but I can totally see why it was the right choice.
Through at least the first half, I got the sense that we’d picked up the story at the point where she was already irredeemably bitter. You could totally understand how she’d gotten to that point, but even knowing that didn’t make me feel sympathy so much as, “Read the room, ma’am. It’s the 1980s. Everybody’s got shit they’re dealing with, and they’re trying to keep it together.”
That’s why I think saying “Amblin movies wouldn’t show dinosaurs fuckin’!!!” is shallow, beyond just the obvious. The more interesting things they wouldn’t show: gender roles that obviously left women feeling repressed and unfulfilled, but also overwhelmed men who felt like total failures if they couldn’t be the sole providers for the family. Teenagers struggling with their sexuality during a time when the media refused to even acknowledge that gay people existed beyond the broadest of stereotypes. And bona-fide legitimate economic anxiety.
Not “economic anxiety” in the sense that The New York Times and other corporate media have used it all throughout the 21st century: as a euphemism for bigotry and selfishness. This is real economic anxiety, the early 80s variant that had middle-class people seeing all of the wealth going to the ones living lavishly on television, but not trickling down like it was promised to. All while feeling that it must have been a personal failure on their part, instead of the truth that all the safety nets of benefits and community support had been taken away without replacement.
That’s all why I think the ending of The End of Oak Street isn’t as silly or shallow as it might seem initially. Again, back during the golden age of Amblin Entertainment, it’s the kind of happy ending that I would’ve mocked relentlessly as being hopelessly corny and undeserved. Everybody lives! Even the dog! And plus they’re rich now, because Denise has been lauded as a hero and written a best-selling book! Even dad is out there, very much alive, and barbecuing like he promised! And the daughter’s there with her new girlfriend and everybody’s cool and happy with it!
Well, okay, not everybody lives. That Latino family piling into their station wagon, for instance, including the young daughter looking at dinosaurs out of the car window, which almost definitely eventually ate her. The bully kid trying to defend his little brother with a broken arm. None of the son’s or daughter’s school friends. None of the various cats that get eaten. It’s actually only the people that Denise knows or likes enough to call.5
Since there are so many indicators of wealth mentioned throughout, antagonists who reveal exactly why they’re being antagonistic, and a climb to the top of a hill where the wealthy librarian’s family lives, with the deus ex machina conveniently blinking just outside their multi-story home, just a leap-of-faith away, it’s hard not read it as a commentary on wealth inequality.
The kind of commentary that an 80s dinosaur movie wouldn’t go into, both because it got in the way of the action and made everything feel like a big downer, but also because it’s just not the kind of thing that media in the 1980s openly acknowledged. If a non-drama even showed characters who were “working class,” it was almost always used for background character development, and it almost never was an obstacle once the action started. At best, it was a goal for them to achieve, a reward for making it through the end of the adventure. That’s the surface-level reading of the ending of The End of Oak Street: this harrowing adventure brought the family together, made them realize what was truly important, and their reward for surviving was wealth and comfort.
Knowing that David Robert Mitchell is from the Detroit area, I have to wonder how much that was a deliberate connection he was drawing. Seeing an entire neighborhood just wiped out with no warning and no explanation, and only a few people lucky enough to be able to make it out alive and become wealthy in the process.
2026-08-18 14:54:07
I spent the weekend with my husband at LFG Con, a board game and tabletop RPG convention which was started in 2025 by three friendly-local-game-store owners. It was hosted at a hotel across from the Burbank airport, but we made a staycation of it even though we live in the San Fernando Valley.
Probably due to its being new, and being scheduled right after GEN Con, it was fairly small by convention standards. But as somebody who gets anxious even seeing photos of the crowds at GEN Con, I thought it was almost perfect.
When we lived in the Bay Area, we went to KublaCon for several years, and I felt like I got spoiled by its accessibility, layout, and overall vibe. We both knew several people from the area into board games, so there were always familiar faces. And the layout of the hotel was ideal for it, in my opinion, with a large central atrium with lots of tables for casual or spontaneous games. You could choose a game, pick a table, and put up a flag indicating you were looking for people to play with. It felt very social and low pressure, although over the years it became more and more difficult to get into scheduled games before they filled up.
In Los Angeles, the three Strategicon conventions were the closest alternative, but I have to say I haven’t been extremely impressed the times I went. Most of that is because of the venue (a hotel near LAX), because while I’m sure it’s probably fine as a hotel, it’s pretty inhospitable for a game convention. Parking was a nightmare, and it seemed that every room for the convention itself was spread across multiple floors and hidden away at the end of dimly-lit cramped passages. Spontaneously picking a game and finding strangers to play with was all but impossible for me, and all of the scheduled events filled up long before I had the chance to get involved.
That might simply be an inevitable side effect of size and my not knowing a ton of other board gamers in the area. Whatever the reason, it was enough to get me mostly out of the hobby, even with an excellent local game store nearby.
Just a few days at LFG Con had me feeling back into it. There was a big open gaming area at the hotel, so it was pretty easy to find games in progress, or to sit down at a table and invite strangers to come join. They also put a lot of effort into an online scheduling system, so you could announce that you were starting a game and looking for players, and everyone at the con would be able to see it easily. (It was integrated with their Discord server as well). It was all a lot more slick and professional than I would’ve expected from a two-year-old local convention.
As a sign of how much I liked the vibe of the convention, I really enjoyed it even though I didn’t actually end up playing that much. Pretty much everybody I interacted with was friendly — which is unfortunately rare, since board game conventions tend to have a high number of grown adults throwing tantrums — and seemed to be there to play, not just to win.
I’m really hoping the convention takes off and manages to grow enough to be sustainable, but maybe not so much that it loses the charm of the early years.
This is a game by Donald X Vaccarino, designer of Dominion and Kingdom Builder, that got a lot of buzz last year but with the tariffs has been very difficult to find. (Big thanks to my husband for picking me up a copy!)
It’s an ingenious engine-builder/engine-destroyer that works like a co-op game and deck builder, except everyone is building a shared deck. The premise is that you’re a scientist building a colony on the moon, trying to build up a big but sustainable population, all before the inevitable collapse. Cards for disastrous events and killer robot attacks get introduced into the deck, killing off your colonists and eventually destroying your buildings. And because it’s a deck builder, the disasters keep happening over and over again, every time the deck is reshuffled.
I had a ton of fun with it, and I’m looking forward to getting to play it again. (There’s a solo variant included, as well). It’s one of those games where the clever mechanics are always completely visible, so you can appreciate it as a meticulously-designed and -playtested machine, but the theme still comes through.
This is one of the licensed games from Prospero Hall, the design studio that were1 masters at making licensed games that are far, far better than a licensed game needs to be. I became a huge fan of the studio after Godzilla: Tokyo Clash, and would buy just about everything they put out, regardless of whether I liked the license. I got Jaws several years ago, but never had the opportunity to play it until last weekend.
Jaws is such a quietly clever adaptation for two reasons: first, its game design is modern, but the presentation in terms of graphic design, typography, and component design all looks like it could’ve been a Jaws-branded game from the 1970s. The Orca and Hooper’s speedboat are depicted as big, chunky wooden pieces that the meeples stand in.
Second, the game is divided into two distinct halves, just like the movie. The first is a hidden-movement game where one player is the shark, and the other player(s) are Brody, Quint, and Hooper. The shark is trying to swim around the island and eat swimmers while avoiding detection; the more swimmers it eats, the more advantages it has in the second act. The humans are trying to figure out where the shark will attack next, rescue swimmers out of the water, and launch motion-detecting barrels at the shark.
The second act takes place on the Orca, and has the shark deciding where it’ll surface next, with the humans ready to defend against it. The shark is trying to destroy the boat or eat the three crew members. The crew is trying to kill the shark.
How much you like the game probably depends a lot on how much you like hidden-movement games, even more than how much you like Jaws. I thought it was a lot of fun (even though as it turns out, I’m not a great white shark) and an extremely clever and thematic adaptation.
I love this game, and since I found out that a second edition is now available for pre-order, I’ve really been wanting to play it again.
It’s a co-op game where you’re all playing as camp counselors being stalked and attacked by a bear mask-wielding maniac named Otis. My best description of it is that the goal of the game isn’t necessarily to win; it’s to make the best possible early-1980s slasher movie.
The game at the convention was delayed because someone very excitedly came up to the table and said she’d been dying to play the game forever, and would I mind waiting until they finished the game they were currently in? We ended up having to do a lighter and quicker session, and I think the game benefits from players who are more into vibes than game mechanics. But I still appreciated getting a chance to play a game that I love but almost never actually get to play.
Daggerheart is an RPG system published by Darrington Press, who were a major sponsor of the convention. They ran hourly sessions introducing first-time players to the game and its mechanic, and my husband, who’s already played it several times, sat in on a short beginners’ game with me.
I’ve tried at various points to get into tabletop RPGs, and it just never takes, for various reasons. But I enjoyed my 45 minutes with the game enough to want to try it again for at least one full session. Part of that is because we had a great GM (Erika Elder Martin), whose enthusiasm for the game and the philosophy behind it really came through. And the rest was that philosophy behind it: it tries to strike a balance between game mechanics like D&D, and cinematic, collaborative storytelling. I liked it, and if there were the same system in a non-fantasy setting, I’d probably like it even more.
My husband got a copy of this Mad Max-style racing game after playing the RPG version, and we tried it out a couple of times, once with just the two of us, and another time with four players.
It’s a lot of fun! Very chaotic, designed to maximize cars slamming into each other, tripping mines, smashing into walls or into wrecks and exploding, being taken out by airstrikes from helicopters, and so on.
There’s a mechanic where going off the right end of the track will cause the left end of the track to disappear, destroying every car on it. One of the players boosted his car over the line, wiping out all three of my husband’s cars in the process. It’s the kind of lightweight, raucous game where that can happen and instead of being angry, you say, “that was pretty bad-ass.”
Someone brought a giant playmat for Heat: Pedal to the Metal and ran sessions using Hot Wheels as the vehicles. I still like the game a lot, but that wasn’t an ideal way to play it.
Pirate Borg is an RPG set in a dark fantasy version of the Caribbean, with magic, vampires, zombies, eldritch monsters, and lots of pirates. A darker and even more fantastic version of On Stranger Tides. I got a copy of the core book with no intention of ever playing the game, just because I liked the setting and the design of the book itself so much.
It picks up the alt-punk magazine aesthetic of Mörk Borg, which is full of double-page spreads giving emphasis to bold artwork and weird, distressed typography, and almost all of the pages giving as much emphasis to the art as to the text itself.
As our last game of the last night of the convention, we played a one shot run by another great GM (Jason D’Alberti, who was there as part of OSR-LA), going through the process of rolling characters and then playing through an around 3 hour story about pirates boarding and raiding a ship full of vampires.
Pirate Borg describes itself as “rules light,” which makes it ideal for people more invested in the role-playing and storytelling aspect of TTRPGs than the tactical combat, but leaves players like me with uncomfortable pauses as I try to decide what to do next out of a billion different options.2 I definitely enjoyed the scenario we played, and it was a highlight of the convention for me, but I don’t think I’d be compelled to play more than the occasional one shot story. I need the structure and the mechanics to fall back on, and was actually feeling low-grade anxiety over not coming up with good story ideas in the moment.
It was a really good way to end the convention, having gotten to see a combination of board games and role-playing games, all with people really enthusiastic about their hobby.
I also went to a panel of independent game publishers who had surprisingly practical info and advice (since you rarely get specifics from convention panels) about trying to do everything yourself. It actually made me leave inspired to try to make a physical game, even if only to say that I’ve done it. The convention really exceeded my expectations for what I’d initially thought was going to be at most a single day’s worth of stuff to do, at most, and it rekindled my interest in board games as a hobby.
2026-08-12 06:29:02
Because I have connections in the industry, I was getting hints about the game Big Walk over a year ago during a business lunch.1 I got the sense that it was something really special. When you’re talking to someone who’s infectiously enthusiastic about seemingly everything, and even they seem especially enthusiastic, it sets a high bar.
As previews and details about the game were released, and I kept hearing people from Panic talk about it with reverence and excitement, my natural skepticism started to kick in and temper expectations. I am an unabashed fan of Panic, the people there, and the whole philosophy they bring to game dev and publishing. And I honestly don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Untitled Goose Game, the previous game from developers House House, was a quiet masterpiece. So it wasn’t “I don’t believe you,” but “I’m skeptical that I’m going to see what you all are seeing.”
After all, I’ve never been into multiplayer games, but I have still played several. So I do have some experience with being in an MMO and ignoring the quests to just hang out with friends and go exploring together. And even in a single-player game like Skyrim, I’ve spent an entire real-world night just wandering around, doing nothing of significance beyond enjoying a sunset, exploring the caves of the unknown, or just doing a photowalk through fake wilderness.
Last weekend, I played Big Walk for the first time with my husband and a group of four other friends from their Twitch stream. We played for a little less than five hours including breaks, and we got through the first two major checkpoints of the game. Without spoiling anything, I can say that that’s exactly enough to get an idea of just how big the game world is, and how much there’s left to explore.
It’s also enough to see what makes the game so special. It’s full of very deliberate design decisions, all working in concert to take those magical moments that happened as side effects in multiplayer and open-world games, and make them the core focus of the experience.
And it often seems designed specifically for people like me, whose experience with multiplayer games has been:
Big Walk is also a perfect example of how ideas aren’t worth much of anything without execution. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to hear the pitch for the game and think that it’s nothing particularly new or innovative. “I could already do the same in Final Fantasy XIV,” for instance. Or maybe there already exist small-group-multiplayer games that are puzzle-focused instead of being variations on Phasmaphobia and Lethal Company, and I’m just not aware of them.
But I suspect that it’s more like claiming “I can use a table knife to unscrew this.” Technically, it might be true, but it’s clearly not what it was designed for, and it’s definitely not the best experience.
In Big Walk, the good vibes aren’t a happy side effect. They’re the point of the experience. Right out of the gate, you do character customization by finding a structure with a big palette and asking your friends to paint you different colors. It’s charming as hell, and it lets you know this game’s priorities right from the start:
That last part is key, because Big Walk is largely a game about slowing down. Which means it runs directly counter to everything else in the 21st century, which is (supposedly) all about speeding everything up, increasing efficiency, and getting to the point already.
Even 20+ years ago, I found myself working at companies that were obsessed with “reducing friction” and “the first five minutes.” That fetishization of underestimating the audience’s attention span just got more and more extreme across all of tech giant-driven entertainment, to the point where even movie trailers have trailers. Because if you can’t show somebody an explosion or a car flipping over in the first nanosecond, they’ll have already scrolled away.
Big Walk is a lot more about vibes. While you’re doing the set of puzzles in the starting area, you can choose to just hang out on the beach. Or just sit on a rock and chill out. And after solving that starting block of puzzles, your reward is a little amphitheater overlooking the ocean, lined with speakers playing the game’s great music.
That music, at least all that I’ve noticed so far, is all 1) excellent, and 2) diegetic. The sound design is a huge part of Big Walk, so voices and other sounds get louder and softer and move around as you move around the environment. That alone isn’t entirely new. What does feel new is seeing a game that so completely embraces it at its core, making it essential for an experience that’s about communication, cooperation, and exploration.
So the world design makes everything work in concert to serve that core idea. When you get a somewhat cinematic moment, like the successful conclusion of a set of puzzles, it’s delivered in the form of an area where you can walk to, hang out, enjoy the music, and talk about what you just did and what you’re going to do next. When you walk away from the speakers, you can enjoy the quiet and nature sounds.
Or ideally, conversation, since you really shouldn’t set off without a buddy nearby. We spent much of the game getting separated from each other and then trying in vain to reconnect. One of our players fell into a hole and spent over an hour trying to get back to everyone else before giving up, all the while saying that they could occasionally hear people nearby, but nobody could hear them.
I was making an active effort to stick close to people, staying in a support role holding lights or whatever else was needed, all the while strictly staying true to the spirit of the game — no messaging, no communication outside the tools the game provides — and still kept finding that I could get completely separated from the group in under 30 seconds. A simple “I’m going to check out this blue thing” could result in you, or people in your group, wandering around in pitch darkness, trying to figure out which of the five or six blue things on the horizon they were talking about.
It’s more than a little frustrating, not just in practice, but knowing that it’s a case of the purity of the game design conflicting with reality. We had a really good group assembled. Everybody was cooperative and really into the spirit of the game. It’s a group that plays co-op games together frequently, so they naturally work well together. So it’s not like anybody was deliberately trying to break the game, or was even insisting that it act like something that it’s not.
But partly because the group works so well together in other co-op games, there’s a base-line assumption of how a co-op game works, and the kinds of “quality of life” tools that they usually make available, and which Big Walk deliberately removes. And it’s deeply unsatisfying to be left just saying, “Well, you must be playing it wrong.” It feels like when people2 would get frustrated with the weapons constantly breaking in Breath of the Wild, and they were met with a response of “it is crucial to the design of the game and you just don’t get it.” I can understand why it’s there, and still not think it’s a satisfying experience.
I’m also a bit reminded of how Imagineering has insisted on a purity of theme park experience over and over again, all the way back to Epcot, and it invariably falls apart when it comes into contact with reality. You can show people your design bible all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that when they come to Disney World, they want to see Mickey Mouse. When they come to a Star Wars land, they’re more interested in Star Wars than whatever alternate immersive timeline you’ve designed. And it doesn’t matter how meticulously you’ve designed your alternate-reality African and South Asian fantasy cities if people on vacation can’t find a shady and dry place to sit down.
To be absolutely clear, I’m not suggesting there’s any hint of arrogance in Big Walk. It’s an opinionated game, but also genuinely committed to delivering on a different kind of experience. And I really love the poignant idea that you can be left completely in the dark unless you have a friend nearby holding a light. Or that if you want to find somebody, you can’t just ping them on a minimap; you have to climb to a high vantage point and look, or call out and hope they can hear the echo.
But it’s also a game. Which means it’s playing to an audience for whom time is a fairly precious commodity, and putting them in a digital world — no matter how immersive! — is going to feel like a step backwards if that “friction” feels like an irritation instead of an interesting challenge. Especially when getting a group of adults together at the same time to play a video game is as difficult as getting a group of adults together to play an RPG campaign.
I don’t know what the answer is; I don’t even know if it’s a problem, or just a case of different strokes. It’s definitely not something with a solution as simple as “just stop being so precious with the timeline and put Darth Vader into Star Wars land already.”
I could tell it’s not a simple solution because opinions in our party wildly vacillated between “the proximity audio is wonderful!” and “the proximity audio is ass.” Based entirely on how urgent it was to hook up with other people in that moment.
So I really do hope that is as simple as “friction” and a case of adjusting expectations. Because I spent the first hour or so of the game thinking “okay I totally get why people are calling this the game of the year now.” It’s not something that’s easy to explain, because it comes from being in the moment and having a hundred different well-executed decisions all working in concert to deliver that moment. A game where you happen to find puzzles on the way to your next memorable hang-out experience, instead of vice versa.
Or a game where you can be hanging out on a beach with a new friend you don’t yet know very well, and they’re sitting and vibing and you’re both commenting on how well the game delivers on slow-down-and-relax moments, which is unheard of in modern video games, if not modern life itself. And then you sit down on a rock without realizing it’s sloped, so you slide helplessly down a cliff face and land on the ground dazed, hearing tweeting bird sounds. And you both laugh your asses off about it, until the rest of the group hears and comes over to ask what’s going on, and you tell the whole story.
And then a short time later, they fall down a hole and get cut off from the rest of the group for over an hour, until they log off and just watch everybody else playing on the stream. I’m hoping that future sessions have more of the former and a lot less of the latter, assuming they even have interest in playing again.
2026-08-12 02:00:00
When you complete the first set of puzzles in the game Big Walk, you’re rewarded with a chill-out amphitheater that overlooks the ocean, where you can sit and relax and listen to the music broadcast on speakers that surround you.
The music in the game was done by aksfx, and I believe the track that was playing when we arrived was called “12:00 AM Motif.” It certainly sounds familiar, but I could be mistaken because almost all of the music (apart from the main theme) kind of blends together in my mind and it’s all good.
To me, that moment in the game felt like the point where all of the disparate pieces clicked together, and it announced, “this is what this game is about.” It made me want to look around and take it all in, from the sight of the waves crashing on the shore, to the distant outcropping with an intriguing structure on top that looked kind of like Diamond head via a primary color version of Myst, to the way that you could see the speakers vibrating if you got close enough.
But the music by aksfx isn’t what I was hearing for most of the game, because I almost immediately got the song “Big Walk” by Poi Dog Pondering stuck in my head and could not get rid of it. I loved Poi Dog in college, and some of their concerts in Athens were formative experiences.
As the world moved on from the 1990s and things got more electronic and less earthy, so did Poi Dog Pondering, transitioning to dance music that was described in a review as a “sweaty gay disco.” I fell off around that point, but I listened to their first four albums so much that I still have all of them practically memorized.
Even if this song isn’t your thing (I regret to say it’s no longer really my thing either), I think the bridge at 2:30 is still pretty dang cool.