2025-07-12 04:17:23
Once you enter the space of F1: The Movie, you can’t escape! It’ll have you under its control, and you’ll want to return again and again. When you see F1 shift into high gear, you’ll hardly be able to function, and you’ll want to strap yourself into that driver’s seat and turn the key. Bored? No way!
Excitement? Thrills? Put ’em on my tab! It’s not an option: I command every cinema lover, looking out their windows and wanting to insert themselves into a more invigorating alt life, to run, don’t walk to the theater! Put on your movie-watching caps, lock down those tickets, and go!
Don’t be content to sit at home with social media and mindlessly scroll. Lock yourself into an adventure with so much power, you’ll never want it to end!
If sitting in a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie about car racing gives you pause, put those worries on mute! You’ll have plenty of back space, since you’ll be watching the whole movie from the edge of your seat! And you’ll spend the whole time remembering the pulse-pounding danger of the previous track, while looking forward to even more action on the next track! (If you’re worried about bringing the little ones: none of the characters curse or get into uncomfortable sexual situations).
I almost feel bad for the editors slash trailer creators, since I can’t think of a single senses-shattering moment I’d want to delete! Plus, you can take a screenshot of the screenplay and scan any page up and down, and you’ll find quote-able dialogue without equal, period. This is the kind of positive story you simply can’t find in print. Screen it immediately!
It’s clear that this is a movie you’ll want to watch at full brightness and maximum volume, no ?. Multi- -ate Brad Pitt is 100% the best in his [] @ what he does, & he has a # of 24-^ gold scenes that grab you and don’t let go ~ movie’s end. (+, with his -ing good looks, even @ 62 he’s still a * you’ll want to ! in the :. | down, naysayers, Brad Pitt is \ he never left!)
If F1 is this thrilling, I can’t wait for F2 through F12!
The author of this post received no financial compensation for this review, and he clearly couldn’t be bothered to spend 155 minutes of his life watching a film about a sport he has no interest in, even though by most accounts it’s pretty good and entertaining. This review of F1 should not be interpreted as a cry for help.
2025-07-07 09:15:20
My take on Jurassic World: Rebirth wasn’t what I’d call “glowing,” but after seeing some of the vitriol directed at this movie online, it’s made me feel like an apologist for the franchise.
I’ve seen commentary about the questionable ethical footing for the whole movie, having its main protagonists be mercenaries with little motivation beyond money, but some of the comments seem to be from people who hadn’t bothered to check the title of the movie before they bought a ticket. No, this is by no means an “essential” movie; it’s a franchise picture. What part of “Jurassic World” were you not understanding?
But then I saw this take on the YouTube channel The Nando Cut, and while I disagree with specifics, I think I agree with the overall idea. Consider the movie based on what it’s trying to do. And by that measure, I think it’s fine. But the most interesting idea in that video is the thought experiment of coming up with alternate versions of the movie, if it hadn’t been so completely predetermined by the constraints of a huge-budget summer blockbuster sequel.
Nando’s version was a dinosaur version of Jaws, but I’m more taken with the idea of a movie that leans more into the disjointed nature of the existing story. What if it were really about a family stranded on a deadly island along with a bunch of dinosaurs and the mercenaries trying to hunt them?
I realize that this version would never, ever happen in this universe. So this post basically has all the weight of someone trying to describe their dream to you. But I’m still intrigued by the idea.
In this version, we get rid of Rupert Friend’s character entirely. Or better, since morally-compromised corporate stooges are a core component of the whole Jurassic Park franchise, have him be more like Bryce Dallas Howard’s character — fully in denial that he’s the bad guy, gradually learning that he’s gotten in way over his head by trying to deal with mercenaries.
Because Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and maybe even Jonathan Bailey’s character are full-on villains in this version. The most glaring problem with this is losing your big-name actors as blockbuster movie heroes.
But one thing that becomes immediately apparent in Jurassic World: Rebirth is how much it feels like a bunch of extremely charismatic, talented actors without any material to work with. I feel like each of them in particular has made career choices that let them play interesting characters, instead of just being blandly competent action movie leads. I can imagine they’d be interested in taking on roles that have actual character arcs, even if they’re not immediately sympathetic.
Their archetypes are exactly the same, but their motivations are stronger and clearer, and they’re not positive. Jonathan Bailey’s character could still be a dinosaur nerd, but now more pointedly engaged in corporate espionage, in league with Friend’s character if not replacing him entirely.
The family on the boat is no longer a weirdly disjointed B-story that happens to cross with the main story every so often; they are the main story. They’re at sea, minding their own business, and something gets them off course and into a restricted area. Strongest would be if it were the result of the boyfriend’s laziness or incompetence, to make that conflict between the dad and the boyfriend stronger from the start.
While they’re trying to get back on course, they cross the paths of the dinosaurs which have been angered by the mercenary ship. It’s no longer just a random encounter, but was directly caused by the reckless behavior of our villains. Their boat disabled, they need to head to the nearest piece of land, which is the forbidden island with all of the abandoned InGen research.
The family is going to call for help, so it’s immediately in the mercenaries’ best interest to stop them. Get rid of the mushy idea that Friend’s character was going to let the teenage girl die instead of calling mayday, and instead give the entire crew the same motivation. Not to kill them, but to stop them. A disposable member of the mercenary crew — disposable, because we want our big stars to be the villains, but not irredeemable villains — either attacks the family directly, or sics the dinosaurs onto them.
So the family’s goal is largely the same as in the existing movie: get to the abandoned InGen facility, either to call for help or to get a working boat. The mercenaries’ motivation is to get to the abandoned InGen facility to steal the DNA from the research projects there. No more of the video game premise of “get DNA from the three biggest dinosaurs,” but have those encounters happen more organically as boss fights along the way.
Both groups are having to contend with the dinosaurs as they’re also coming into conflict with each other. No, it’s not plausible or realistic that a normal family would be able to hold out for long against a group of highly-trained mercenaries, but 1) the dinosaurs are a problem for both, and 2) since when have these movies had anything to do with being plausible?
Finally, our heroes reach the facility, the surviving mercenaries in close pursuit. There, they discover exactly why the facility was abandoned, and why they’re the first group to try to go in and retrieve the research: the weird hybrid dinosaurs have taken over and are impossibly deadly.
Now, the villains and heroes are aligned in motivation: they’re all going to die unless they find a way to help each other out. It’s in this act where the double-crosses and tests of loyalty happen. Ali’s character sacrifices himself to save the little girl, because he doesn’t want anyone else to go through what he did with his son.
Bailey and Johansson get the research, but Friend’s character betrays them, shoots Johansson, takes the research and leaves them for dead among the dinosaurs. They’re saved at the last minute by Hot Dad or lazy boyfriend. As the survivors are making their way to safety, they witness the gruesome death of Friend, cleverly sneak past the super-boss dinosaur, and ride off to safety.
On the ride away, Bailey reveals that he grabbed the vial of dino DNA or whatever, but laments that they have no one left to sell it to. Hot Dad reveals he works for a research org that could develop life-saving drugs with that DNA, but they’ve never been able to compete with the funding of the big corporations. (Maybe he reveals that this wasn’t just a random encounter during a family vacation, but that he’d deliberately chosen a course close to the restricted area as a test run to see if it were possible?) Our villains get their redemption arc by agreeing to turn over the DNA, possibly in exchange for the family not pressing charges against them.
The structure of this imaginary version of the movie is very similar to that of the real one, but it dispenses with all of the scenes trying (vainly) to establish that our mercenaries are really good people at heart. In fact, the premise so clearly lends itself to a version where everybody has stronger motivations that it makes me wonder if there were a draft in which that was the original intent. That they’d let Johansson and Ali and Bailey really relish being the (redeemable) villains in a big-budget blockbuster, but any weird ideas like that had been completely sanded down in one revision after another.
I don’t know if the version I’m describing here would’ve been any better than what we got, or if it would’ve been any good at all. But it does seem like it would’ve been very different from anything else in the franchise. At the moment, I can’t think of any other blockbuster action movie that made its biggest, highest-profile stars the antagonists. Is that even possible anymore?
2025-07-03 03:35:11
Just a quick programming note: Yesterday I discovered that WordPress had stopped sending me notifications when people filled out the comment form on the About page of this blog. As a result, I completely missed about a year’s worth of really nice comments from people, and came across as rude as a result.
Sorry about that! I’ve checked the settings on here and the spam filters on my email client, and I still can’t tell what’s changed. I’ve replied to a couple over email, so check your own spam filters and/or try contacting me again!
Comments on regular blog posts are still working, and I tend to see them. (If they seem to be stuck without showing up, it’s likely because it includes a link and is being held for “approval” by the anti-spam plugin).
Otherwise, if you want to contact me directly for whatever reason — I still prefer comments on individual blog posts to “live” on the post itself, instead of social media — at the time of this writing I’m more likely to see comments or DMs via my Bluesky account, or my Mastodon account.
2025-07-02 11:32:54
Book
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman
Series
Book 4 in the Thursday Murder Club series
Synopsis
A heroin smuggling ring drops off a valuable shipment in a shop owned by one of the old friends of the Thursday Murder Club. The plan is to have a handler pick it up the next day, and he’ll be able to make a tidy profit just by keeping quiet about it. But a few days later, he’s found murdered in his car, and the box of heroin has gone missing. The club resolves to find out who murdered their friend, and the case will end up involving every one of their increasingly growing group of colleagues and acquaintances, as well as getting them involved with drug smugglers, art forgers, online scam artists, shady government organizations, and murderers with multiple levels of experience.
Notes
This series started out aggressively cozy, just on the verge of being insufferable, but managed to win out on charm. The stories have gotten better with each installment, finding a good balance between a cozy charming mystery story where you’re hanging out with a bunch of familiar characters, and making them all feel like real people with real concerns instead of just a bunch of stereotypes about the elderly.
The Last Devil to Die is unquestionably the best in the series, both for keeping up with a twisting plot and also giving the reader time with each member of a cast of characters that’s grown to unwieldy proportions. But most of all, it deals with the death of a main character across several chapters that are extraordinarily well written. It’s sentimental without being maudlin, respectful without being cold, and all handled in a way that feels honest and not manipulative. It’s an extended series of emotional gut punches that feel earned in a series that’s always shown affection and respect for its characters.
This feels like the last book in the series, but Osman quickly assures readers in the afterword that it’s not. He’s just wrapping up the first four-book run of the story and taking a break to concentrate on a different series of mysteries. I think it’s a good call, and it’s definitely going into a hiatus on a high note, reminding us why we’ve gotten to feel like these characters are friends, instead of growing tired of over-exposure.
Synopsis
An excellent wrap-up to the first four books of this series, balancing the obligations of a twisty murder mystery with readers’ desire to spend more time with characters they’ve gradually gotten attached to.
2025-07-02 10:39:41
All of the marketing for M3GAN 2.0 has abandoned any notion of the franchise being horror or satire, and just gone all-in on the idea that M3GAN is a sassy bitch who loves drama. Which had me expecting the worst, because what I liked so much about the first one was how it nailed (no offense to dog neighbor lady, RIP) its tone.
I don’t want to overstate the appeal of M3GAN, because it’d be revisionist history to claim that it was a brilliantly insightful classic. But I thought it was a ton of fun, and downright masterful in how it made the movie itself reflect the creepiness of its main character: it never settled fully into camp or fully into horror, always remaining in the uncanny valley where everything just felt off.
A perfect example of that was how M3GAN would spontaneously launch into song at odd moments, to help Katie come to terms with her emotions. It was corny but sincere, awkward and unexpected and just plain weird.
After I realized that M3GAN 2.0 is more broadly comedic than its predecessor, and doesn’t even pretend to be a horror franchise anymore, but more cheesy 1980s hyper-violent action thriller, I settled into just enjoying it for what it was. It still had flashes of very clever people making something deliberately silly — a bad guy gets his entire head punched off in the first five minutes! — and a casting decision that I hadn’t been spoiled for and was a terrific surprise. (In retrospect, the trailers were actually fantastic for not giving away some of the movie’s best surprises).
But then, in the middle of a scene I was already liking anyway, M3GAN starts singing at an unexpected moment. And it was sublime. Without exaggeration, the most I’ve laughed in a movie in years.
Until that point, the movie had been coasting along as a shallow action comedy, with just enough flashes of cleverness to remind you that it’s the case of a bunch of smart people having fun being silly. It’s all on the level of the aforementioned artful decapitation, or including the theme from a 1980s TV series at an opportune moment.
It also did something that I don’t think I’ve seen before, where the introductory exposition has clips from news shows not just reporting on the events of the first movie, but explicitly recapping the theme of it. It’s unusual for a sequel to so bluntly say, yeah, this is what the first one was about.
But then there’s an extended sequence of the team working to rebuild M3GAN, that felt like the moviemakers finally trying to rebuild M3GAN. It’s full of the flashes that made the first one a genuinely clever satire, instead of just an opportunistic Chucky for Girls. It really leans into how bonkers this movie’s alternate universe is, and how creepy M3GAN is. Her attempts to rebuild herself have resulted in a wiry-haired abomination with huge eyes and exposed teeth, and the eyebrow servos are accentuated to show how unsettling it is when she tries to emote. Even when she gets her old face back, there’s an excellent moment that leans into her wrongness as she tries to make amends with one of the team.
Then there’s the scene between Allison Williams’ Gemma and M3GAN. Where the movie decides it’s had enough fun skipping along the surface of a goofy comedy, and it wants to actually be about something, which in this case is motherhood and responsibility. It’s surprisingly well-written, with Gemma actually acknowledging how much of this is her fault, and M3GAN revealing she’s more self-aware than we’d thought as well.
The scene is sublime for so many reasons. The song choice is so perfect, both for maintaining the “I Love the 80s” vibe of the movie, and for being so weird and yet so tonally appropriate. The song is extraordinarily, almost uncomfortably sincere, the power of the original version coming largely from how fearless and heartfelt the performance is, and how it would’ve fallen into mawkish sentimentality if it had been handled any differently. For people my age, it triggers a kind of buffer overflow that is so over-the-top in its sincerity that it short-circuits any attempt to mock it. And here, it’s perfectly selected to be funny and heartfelt at the same time, mocking and sincere, a genuine mission statement for the emotional message of the entire movie that’s also undeniably off.
Plus, it’s a wonderful idea that it’s simply in M3GAN’s nature to sing, because she’s still a toy.
My theater had sustained laughter for what felt like five minutes. And I already liked Allison Williams for being eager to take parts where she’s a villain or extremely flawed (her one glam moment in this movie is undercut by M3GAN saying, bizarrely, that she’s dolled up like “a Portuguese prostitute”); here, she dead-pans the scene so pitch-perfectly that it makes everything funnier.
Even if the rest of the movie had been terrible, that one scene would’ve knocked it out of the park for me. And the rest of the movie is kind of rough — it’s got pacing issues and is at least 20 minutes too long, it’s still implausible even after you account for its not giving a damn about being plausible, and it is shamelessly corny as hell.
But there are flashes of cleverness and originality throughout (I especially love the flashback to a 1980s toy robot) that remind us the corny stuff isn’t simply ineptitude, or a crass sequel cash-in, but an homage to action movies that were simpler and stupider. And its funniest and goofiest moments are also its most emotionally resonant, showing us how the titular villain and the actual villain of the first movie grew to understand each other and realize that they’d always been motivated by the same thing.
2025-07-02 01:00:00
Featured photo from the Athens, GA tourism page
Pride month is over, so it’s a perfect opportunity for corny people like me to misquote Proverbs and say that it’s time for the Fall. Especially when it lets me listen again to one of my favorite REM songs, which always conjures up good memories of my college years in Athens.
Corny jokes aside, it’s also a good opportunity for a refresher on what Pride month is all about, which is the rejection of shame. There have always been bad faith attempts to equate it with the deadly sins, from people trying to disguise their bigotry as a valiant fight against sinfulness.
Back when I first came out, I even bought into a less-bigoted version of that, wondering “what is there to be proud of? It’s just a part of me, and being ‘proud’ would be like being ‘proud’ of having brown hair or being right-handed.” The part that I was missing — and I wonder if people still miss, or if it’s nothing more than disingenuous posturing to keep marginalizing people — is that the achievement to be proud of isn’t simply being gay, or trans, or bisexual, or non-binary, or any of the variations on “queer,” but in having the courage to live your life being true to yourself.
Keeping with the “not what I thought it was at first,” I’m pairing it with The Beatles’ “If I Fell”. I always thought that this song was romantic at best, harmless at worst, but paying more attention to the lyrics, I see that it’s kind of gross. Maybe not “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her away from the things that she loved” gross, but still the opposite of everything I think of as romantic.
Based on the title and wistfulness, I’d always thought of it as being about falling recklessly in love, but of course it’s explicitly not. It’s a guy on the rebound demanding loyalty from a new prospect before they’ve even gotten to know each other, and presumably before she finds out what made his last girlfriend break up with him. Even if he weren’t setting up a relationship where he’s constantly comparing the new girl to his last girlfriend, he explicitly says at the end that he’s trying to make her jealous.
And appropriately, he includes the line “don’t hurt my pride like her,” in the bad sense of “pride.” Which all leaves me asking the question I’ll probably be asking a lot over the next eleven months: are the straights okay?