2026-02-27 09:50:04
As somebody who appreciates and understands arts and entertainment the right way, it can be frustrating being surrounded by an internet full of people who are all doing it wrong. But occasionally it gives me the opportunity for even more profound insight, like the following:
The more you work to have a unique voice, the quicker and more likely people will be to dismiss it.
Earlier today I was reading a thread of people goofing on the entertainment news that Mike Flanagan is developing a version of The Mist. Specifically, that he’s promising it won’t be a remake of the Frank Darabont movie, but will be “going in a different direction.”
As almost always happens in online “conversations,” the thread started out playfully poking fun at the idea, and then the responses quickly started coming, increasingly missing the point, and then becoming increasingly dismissive and outright hostile.
I’d never thought that much about how the cycle of responses to an artist or entertainer always has the same pattern:
See also: Wes Anderson, and the weirdly personal attacks on Emerald Fennell’s movies. (Mysteriously, David Lynch appears to have been mostly immune, often parodied but pretty much universally beloved without ever compromising his voice).
The more of yourself you put into your work, the more it invites derision. Some of that is patently obvious; the more specific and unique your vision is, the less likely it is to be universally appealing. That’s not just inevitable, but good, actually.
I think the more interesting aspect of this is the idea, which I hadn’t really considered before, that the more of a unique voice you bring to your work, the quicker a receptive audience of fans will be to conclude that they’ve got you all figured out.
I do it all the time, pointing out commonalities in an artist’s work because it helps make sense of their viewpoint and how to interpret what they’re trying to get across. Or sometimes I just plain like it. When I say “oh here comes Mike Flanagan again, with the glowing eyes and jump scares and Kate Siegel and/or Rahul Kohli,” it’s not at all to be dismissive, but because I really do love seeing an artist being successful making projects that feel personal. Like there’s a reason he wanted to do it, more than “they’re paying me quite a lot of money.”
It helps explain how I’ve always hated the idea of auteur theory, but still often refer to something as “a Coen Brothers movie” or “a Sam Raimi movie,” etc. “Auteur” suggests that everything in a work is the direct result of a single person, which is almost never the case. More often, it’s that an artist has a strong enough sense of their own vision that it comes through no matter who they’re collaborating with. (And that they choose the right people to collaborate with, and understand exactly how to use their work to its fullest potential).
It also helps me recognize when I’ve got blind spots. Recently I was reminded of a big one when I read about another artist I like taking on a reboot: Ryan Coogler leading an X-Files reboot and the news of casting Danielle Deadwyler as a lead. My gut response was “Hell yeah, bring it on. We need more black voices in popular science fiction, and as much as I love the original series, it was extremely white.”
Which is still my take, but it’s awfully reductive. It’s kind of like when people kept expecting Jordan Peele to keep making Get Out over and over again. I went into Us and Nope trying to stay on the lookout for any metaphors to make sure I didn’t miss or misinterpret them. Instead, I wish I’d gone in remembering, “You know you can totally have black characters in a story that has nothing to do with their being black, right?”
And even worse than that, the take “Hooray! The X-Files for black audiences!” is astoundingly stupid because it ignores the fact that that exact thing already exists, and it’s called The X-Files. Just because everybody on screen was white doesn’t mean everybody in the audience was.
But even after years of watching Key and Peele, enjoying the sci-fi freak show concept albums of Janelle Monáe, and hearing Thundercat make songs about Dragonball Z and then appearing on a Star Wars show, I still have this dumb, lizard-brain idea that black nerds aren’t a thing.
Some of that is just because as a lifelong nerd, I generally consider it a compliment not to lump other people into the same demographic as me. But I also feel like along with the two wolves, there’s some White Male Ad Exec From 1992 inside me, clinging to outdated or downright false ideas of What People Like. Constantly lying in wait, liable to spring intrusive thoughts like “is this even made for you?” and “how does this play to the ‘urban’ demographic?” at random moments.
Anyway, having better representation in nerd spaces will help get rid of that mindset, and hopefully have the ripple effect of making fewer assumptions about each other. Part of what makes Coogler such a great filmmaker is that he’s able to make stuff that’s conscious and relevant without ever sacrificing the kick-assedness of it. I’m looking forward to seeing the result, even (or especially?) if it doesn’t conform to a single one of the things I think I know to expect from his work.
Maybe it’s ultimately a reminder not to conflate business with art, to understand the distinction between a brand and a voice. A brand will wear off as the novelty dies out, and its relevance only lasts as long as people can market it and profit from it. The voice is the part that actually connects with people and resonates with them. The stronger the voice, the fewer people it will connect with, but that connection will be a lot more powerful and meaningful.
2026-02-26 15:48:37
Wise men say only fools would rush in to make a concert movie about Elvis Presley in 2026! Will audiences find they can’t help falling in love with Baz Luhrmann’s Epic: Elvis Presley In Concert? Or will they declare it ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, and leave them crying all over their blue suede shoes? Does the audience love it, but it doesn’t know it yet? Or will they think it’s the devil in disguise? Elvis is a hero to Baz Luhrmann, but will he ever mean shit to IMAX audiences?
Seriously, why hasn’t Rotten Tomatoes responded to my emails?! This stuff is solid gold!1
The start of this movie is an extended montage recapping the major events in Elvis’s life and career, all leading up to the Las Vegas concerts that make up the bulk of the footage. During the montage, in the sequence where Elvis is released from the Army and returns to making movies, someone mentions Hollywood. We see the word “HOLLYWOOD” in big red rhinestone letters, and then a shot of Elvis behind the gun of the tank, and then the tank fires and the word HOLLYWOOD explodes with a stock sound effect.
I’d been enjoying it up until then, but that was the specific moment when I finally said, “Ah, okay, I know exactly what this is now.”
Honestly, it shouldn’t have taken me that long. The titles have the overwrought logo of Luhrmann’s production company, then a big, sparkly, gaudy, computer-generated sequence putting BAZ LUHRMANN’S name first, and then spelling out Elvis Presley In Concert, much like the credits for CHiPs used to do.
And this is 100%, top to bottom, Baz Luhrmann’s take on an Elvis concert movie. Not a bio pic, not an expose, not really a documentary, and definitely not a Stop Making Sense-style cinematic presentation of an entire concert. Instead, this is exactly what you get when a filmmaker known for self-indulgent excess finds a kindred spirit in an entertainer known for self-indulgent excess, and is given free rein to sift through hours of concert footage, interviews, and backstage scenes.
It doesn’t even feel too tacky — at least, in an environment like this, which raises the bar on tacky to uncomfortable levels — for Luhrmann to put his name above the title, or to have his stylistic voice (not his literal one) all over the movie. It doesn’t come across as self-aggrandizing — at least, in an environment like this — so much as nerding out. Oddly, it’s a little like “Wuthering Heights” in that there’s the undeniable sense of someone saying, “I need people to understand why I love this so much!”
Almost all of the “never seen” footage that makes up this movie was the result of research for Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic Elvis. I never saw it, and frankly I forgot it even existed. But that was never a movie I had any interest in seeing; I’ve never been much of a fan of Elvis2, and have never been as interested in the person as in the performances. And the Vegas performances in particular.
And almost all of the audio in the movie is either from the concert — with modern remixes that in most cases, tried to get as close as possible to feeling like an unedited live performance — or from Elvis himself, in voice-over from interviews. The movie has Presley saying at the beginning and the end that this is his side of the story. The repetition seems to insist that you’re getting the whole unvarnished truth directly from the King himself, but that’s not really the case. It’s Luhrmann presenting a version of the man, through careful editing and presentation of clips.
Which again, I’m completely in favor of. Presley’s voice-overs feel like he’s either reading highlights from his own Wikipedia entry, or he’s reciting lines from his own biopic. None of it is controversial, or even particularly insightful. It all sounds like the kind of thing an absurdly famous man would be saying to a crowd of journalists — especially one raised in the south in the 30s and 40s, with all of the tact and politeness that implies. The personalities that come through are all in the choices of what to include and how to present it. And that’s personalities plural, since again, Luhrmann’s presence is very present throughout.
And you can see almost immediately why he’d feel like they were kindred spirits. It’s not just the love of spectacle and rings and rhinestones and other sparkly things — the first of the Las Vegas shows begins with a glittering gold curtain rising, and you can almost hear the gasp Luhrmann must’ve made when he first saw it. There’s also a feeling throughout that I’d always assumed was modern, and never would’ve associated with Elvis: a kind of completely earnest camp.
This version of Elvis comes across as goofy, unassuming, and self-aware. Which has this bizarre dissonance, since I never associate the word “unassuming” with someone so obsessed with capes, rings, tinted sunglasses, karate moves, and an entourage. And “self-awareness” might be even more odd, since it’s probably near the bottom of the list of 1000 Terms You’d Use To Describe Elvis Presley. But this version of him does seem to realize that the whole Elvis persona is pretty absurd. He wishes he’d been in better movies. And he thinks the early Sun recordings that helped make him famous are “weird” because they have so much echo.
I don’t want to oversell the “self-awareness,” since this version of Elvis doesn’t seem particularly deep, either. Frankly, this version of Elvis seems like he wouldn’t have even understood the concept of “appropriation” if somebody had explained it to him.
The biggest controversies he had to deal with — and a ton of the opening montage concentrates on those controversies — were from conservatives decrying him as too sexual, and a bad influence on The Youth. You get the feeling that if he time-traveled to 2026, after marveling at how many drugs are freely available now, it would take at least a week of explanations and Public Enemy videos to get him to understand what happened to his legacy. And most of that week would just be him saying “do what now?” and “come again?” before putting a microphone in his mouth or mugging for the camera with his glasses on upside down or a woman’s panties on his head.
I think the movie handles it in an interesting way in one scene, somewhat acknowledging the “problematic” part of Presley’s legacy, while also getting across the idea of why the movie seems uninterested in exploring that in any depth. And I want to stress that this is completely my interpretation; I can easily imagine 100 different takes on it, and am sure there are plenty more I can’t even predict.
It’s a moment on stage when Presley is harassing one of the backup singers. He’s vamping in the middle of a song, and he seems to single out one of the women and he seems to be coming in for a kiss.3 She looks extremely uncomfortable and is trying to get away, and the other singers are starting to make a kind of protective circle around her, all with plastered-on smiles of the “we’re on stage” and “we need this job” variety. He backs off and at least seems to be trying to make it clear that he was goofing around and trying to be playful. Shots earlier in the movie showed him interacting with all of the singers as if he were genuinely trying to build some backstage camaraderie.
I don’t remember enough about casual misogyny in the 1970s to tell just how gross it would’ve felt back then, but it feels hell of gross in 2026. And based on everything else in the movie, I can’t imagine that it wasn’t included for a specific purpose. This is not a subtle film.
It has cut-aways to audience reactions that seem so deliberately, 1950s-commercial-film-style staged that they made me laugh just by how on-the-nose they were. It has concert footage of Elvis singing about growing up in the south, and it has black and white photos of him as a baby fade up in the background, like the cheesiest and most maudlin movie showing in a Disney park. It has repeated shots of one of the male singers looking on in almost envious admiration as Elvis nails a key moment in a song. One of the few shots of Colonel Tom Parker is a brief glimpse of him in the audience, and the footage freezes and plays a camera-flash effect, as if they’d caught the villain in a True Crime documentary.
Because all of the chosen shots feel so blatantly purposeful, the impression I get is that the movie wanted to at least acknowledge that Presley wasn’t the best guy. It’s not the hagiography I expected, and it’s not a particularly deep or even comprehensive portrayal, either. The takeaway I got, at least, was that Elvis was fascinating, and it’s fun to watch him, even if it might not have been that fun to hang out with him. Presumably especially so if you weren’t a white man.
And while never mentioning cultural appropriation in any way, the movie does, I believe, make a case for why it chose not to. It includes a few of the gospel songs that made up the regular set list, and those are the performances that the movie really seems to linger on as performances. Not goofing off, flirting with the audience, making jokes about his costume, forgetting the lyrics, all the kinds of things he does with the “hits.” With these, it really plays up the idea that he’s singing with genuine passion, conviction, and sincerity. That they’re coming from a genuine place of faith.4
I’d assumed that Epic was an IMAX release because the show itself was spectacular, that there were some kind of huge stage theatrics that we’d never gotten the full effect of in cropped versions. That never seemed to be the case, though. Instead, it seemed to be in IMAX for a weird sense of intimacy. Everything is extremely large and incredibly close. You see every pore, every whisker in the gigantic sideburns, every cold sore, and especially, all the sweat. A lot of it feels uncomfortably like Ren & Stimpy close-ups, as if you’d been watching a fun stage show and then you suddenly zoomed close enough for it turn repulsive.
It feels like a sharp contrast from all of the footage used in the opening montage, mostly taken from his movies. In those, he’s got perfect skin, perfect hair, in scenes — if not entire movies — designed specifically to show off the eyes and the smirk. In another movie, the contrast might’ve been intended as mockery, to play into that popular perception of his rapid decline during the Vegas years. For all I know, in this movie, it might’ve been intended to add some verisimilitude, to draw attention to the fact that this is real, behind-the-scenes footage, and we truly were getting a side of the man that we hadn’t seen.
The impression I got was a little more nuanced than that. It felt like Luhrmann and the editors saying, this is why people loved this guy so much. Not just the fake, often silly movies, and not just the studio recordings. But the live performances, where he was putting all of himself into it, and it showed.
As the concert portion of the movie started, I had this weird feeling of being reminded of Cleopatra. Specifically, the way we’re often reminded how she lived in a time that’s ancient to us, but so much of Egyptian civilization was ancient to her. On a much smaller scale, obviously, but: I was watching a guy who died when I was six (and at a much younger age than I am now!), who was talking about most of his career and his unprecedented fame as if it were so many years in his past.
It helps sell this version of Elvis as somebody who was well aware that his legend was some made-up construct, and he didn’t take it all that seriously. Not exactly humble, and emphatically not austere, and way too famous to ever be some regular guy. But there’s a feeling of sincerity to it. Showmanship and spectacle, but not in the PT Barnum sense of trying to put one over on people, but more like the Dolly Parton sense of giving people exactly the version of you that they want.
You can see how Luhrmann, more than any other filmmaker, would be so captivated by this fearlessly corny and almost painfully earnest and sincere version of Elvis Presley. The one song in Epic that gets the heaviest remix treatment is “In The Ghetto,” which might be Presley’s most cringingly dated, condescending, and maudlin.5 My impression was that this was the movie’s way of trying to get audiences to reconsider it, instead of dismissing it immediately. To witness just how seriously Presley took it when he was performing it, and how much the line was blurred between “just a performance” and something he really believed in.
I’m highly skeptical that this movie will be enough to convert anybody who dislikes Elvis and turn them into a fan. I’m skeptical that it’ll bring in younger audiences, either, since it’s such a time capsule of the late 1970s. But for people like me, who had always been indifferent at best, they might be surprised to see a version of the guy that’s this unabashedly corny and goofy. I’m happy that there’s a recent resurgence of movies rejecting arch Gen-X bullshit and instead celebrating sincerity, and being unafraid to really feel things again.
2026-02-24 08:33:20
I was a big fan of SimCity 20001 and even more into SimCity 3000. I think the latter was the first time I ever spent literally an entire day playing a video game. I’m still not sure whether the video game I’ve put the most time into is The Sims 2 or SimCity 3000, but they’re certainly the two top contenders. And whatever the actual number is, it’s an unhealthy amount.
So I came into SimCity 4 as a huge fan of the series. And I’ve always thought of my relationship to that project being as an “embedded fan:” I’m proud of the game and my work on it, while being completely comfortable saying that my part in it wasn’t what makes the game great.2
Which I mention just to make it absolutely clear that I’m not at all claiming to be one of the creative or technical leads on the project; there were some straight-up geniuses on that team, which is evident in the later work they did on Spore and the 2013 SimCity. And that I’m not a fan-level expert, either, since there are tons of people still making fantastic stuff with the game, 20+ years later, that I wouldn’t be able to replicate.
I haven’t even been able to really play the game since the expansion was released. Every time I’ve tried, I would find my muscle memory taking over, repeating the same first steps I did over and over, creating countless starter cities and building them up to test the game. Plus, there’s always been the anxiety of catching a bug I’d missed3, and even though it’s far too late to matter, I would know it was there. It’s that case of getting the rare opportunity to work on exactly the game you’d most want to play, but never getting to play it.
But recently, I got the urge to dive back in. I started a couple of cities in SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and a new region in SimCity 4, figuring that enough time had passed that I could go in kind of fresh. Now that I’ve forgotten all the cheat codes and hot keys and even basic controls, much less the best strategies or weird quirks of the simulation.
And I was immediately hit with a shockwave of nostalgia. The first thing you notice is the thing that has always made these games exceptional: the music, and the art direction.
Both of these games have music that has become such a part of the soundtrack running constantly through my brain, that I’d stopped even associating them with SimCity or video games at all. There’s a track called “Epicenter” (which I can’t find a “legit” copy of, presumably because of licensing or rights issues with the vocals?) that seems to go way too hard for a game like this. But then, it’s always been an implicit part of the gestalt of this series that there’s something magical about seeing a living, breathing city come to life. You can’t hear the track “Rush Hour” without thinking F yeah I am laying infrastructure and zoning the ever-loving hell out of this metropolis!
And especially with SimCity 3000, you get such a dopamine hit from seeing huge plots develop with vibrant green, perfectly-manicured lawns that you happily ignore how much you’re being rewarded for gentrification. It’s so satisfying seeing these huge, glistening skyscrapers pop up in your downtown area that you don’t concentrate on how much the abstraction favors Reagan-era economics.4
The other day, I saw a conversation on Bluesky where a friend was wishing that EA would do another installment of SimCity. I’m still of the opinion that a successor won’t come from Electronic Arts ever again; it’s simply not the same company anymore. Specifically, I don’t get any sense that the company even has the same philosophy or agenda as it did when it acquired Maxis.
It may sound overly precious or high-minded, but it’s easy to forget that Maxis didn’t approach their series with the simple idea of “making simulations fun.” They were more like this holistic blend of science, art, philosophy, and culture, all abstracted into a simulation, and then turned into a game. That’s why the SimCity 2000 manual had lengthy sections about urban planning, with a bibliography of academic research on the topic. For that matter, that’s why The Sims mashed up ideas about the hierarchy of needs and a satire of consumerism into a game that was essentially an interactive dollhouse.
And it’s why really excellent games like Cities: Skylines can get so much right about the mechanics, and even have flashes of charm, but still leave SimCity fans with the sense that “the vibes are off.” I don’t believe that the game is shallow, just that its highest priority is making a city simulator game.
That’s also probably why the 2013 SimCity was so frustrating. Visually amazing, with the clear sense that not only the buildings but the entire presentation had a coherent vision. Musically exceptional, more orchestral than the jazzy soundtracks of earlier games, but still giving that feeling of the magic of watching an entire city come to life, neighborhood by neighborhood. And excellent in terms of designing a from-the-ground-up reimagining of the series. Getting away from the cell-based simulation and rethinking everything in terms of agents making connections — pulling in that philosophical abstraction of cities as living organisms.
There are various reasons it didn’t really work, most of them extremely well-documented already. But I don’t think it’s any one thing, like the always-online requirement (which was a bad call), or the limited city size (which, as I understand it, was primarily a technical restriction based on personal computer power at the time, required to reach the size of audience EA needed for the game to justify the cost).
From what I played of it, my personal opinion is just that it would’ve worked better if they’d leaned into a smaller scale, making it more like a SimTown or even SimNeighborhood. It had this obligation to appeal to players who always saw the end goal of the series as being a city with millions of residents and a downtown full of skyscrapers. Even though the series had a long history of emphasizing how there’s such a wide variety in even successful cities: sprawl vs density, types of transportation, balance of residence and industry and culture, all of the things that give a city a distinct personality.
Playing SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 together, after such a long hiatus, I was surprised how quickly my starter cities started to feel completely distinct.
SimCity 4 just has more stuff, including a ton of “quality of life” things that I’d misremembered as always having been part of the series. I almost immediately started thinking of it in terms of specialized cities: this one would be where all the power infrastructure goes, this would become my industrial town, this would be my residential suburb, here would be where the waterfront resorts develop, and so on. I quickly zoned out big blocks of RCI zones, hooked everything up with power and water, plopped down city services and parks, and let it all cook for a bit.
Meanwhile, SimCity 3000 felt surprisingly finicky. I knew you had to stick to the grid, but had forgotten how much it prevented you from zoning on certain types of terrain. My randomly-generated hills were splitting up my residential zones, giving me pockets of unreachable land on slopes the roads refused to drive up.
But even in a short time, a kind of personality to the city started to develop. And it helped explain why I often had an uncanny sense of deja vu while driving through the Bay Area. This part feels like Piedmont, with a high-income, low-density main street at the foot of the hills. Houses on individual plots are popping up all over the higher elevations, with winding, narrow streets working upwards to reach them. This is a flat, industrial area, like the east and south of Oakland. Over here are bigger blocks of tiny residential homes, kind of like Berkeley and Richmond. There’s a circle of high-income housing around the university, with rings of service commercial and industry around it.
And I could finally see how a sequence of decisions while making SimCity 4, more than just the most obvious ones, led to the two games having such a different vibe. (And again I want to stress that the decisions were all made by people much smarter than me; I just had the somewhat unique position of being able to see the game as it was being made):
Every one of those decisions makes perfect sense, either as an immediately-recognizable upgrade to the fidelity of the game, or as a quality-of-life improvement. And they all feed into and interact with each other, along with a thousand other decisions about the simulation layers, how buildings have areas of effect, and so on.
The end result is that SimCity 4 makes it easy to build sprawling grids across the landscape, paying as little attention to the underlying terrain as you care to. And that has a subtle but significant effect on how the city “feels” as you’re building it. In my experience, it’s less about neighborhoods with unique character, and more about individual cities that eventually develop an overall character, as part of a larger region. And of course, I don’t want to make it sound as if that’s accidental, since region play was one of the main ideas of this version of the game.
But it does change the vibe in a way that I’ve never before been able to articulate while playing it.
(And no doubt that I’ve got a built-in bias while playing it, since it was always in my best interest to get the densest city possible going as quickly as possible, because I needed enough cars on the road to find bugs).
So I guess in addition to being a short love letter to the SimCity series, and being happy that I can actually play them for fun again, my main point is that video games are complicated.
Especially when you’ve got a multi-layered complex simulation that’s being designed and implemented by dozens of different people, but just in general. Every single decision can have an effect that ripples out to affect everything else, completely changing the entire feel of the game.
I’m still skeptical that another SimCity will ever come from EA, at least in anything but name. But there are still plenty of city simulators being made. I’ve been watching a lot of the City Planner Plays channel on YouTube, which has been interesting not just for the kinds of ideas about urban planning that used to go into SimCity manuals, but about how different people play these games. His approach, for instance, has a lot of self-imposed limitations; part of his merch is a T-shirt that reads “respect the topography.”
Not to mention calling attention to how many different types of simulator games there are, and how varied the games are in what they prioritize. There are a lot of promising ones; one that I’m most interested in is Citystate Metropolis, simply because of its flexibility.
But none of them are ever going to be “the next SimCity” because that’s pretty much impossible. You could even nail the mechanics and the simulation, and it wouldn’t be the same, because it was never just about the mechanics or the simulation. It required not just a bunch of uniquely talented and smart people, but a philosophy about the union of science, games, culture, and art that you simply don’t see much of anymore.
So instead of trying to replicate the mechanics of SimCity, or even the vibes of it, I’d be a lot more interested in seeing what comes from people trying to replicate the vibes that went into the making of a SimCity game.
2026-02-23 07:00:35
I’m still a firm believer in my rule of “celebrate the stuff you like, ignore the stuff you don’t.”1 So there’s not a lot worth saying about how much I disliked Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die2 as a movie. Like how it was so tedious, a two-plus hour movie that felt like four or five. Or how it had lots of truly exceptional talent, but kept putting them in scenes with seemingly no direction, making the whole thing feel like an amateurish YouTube comedy video.3
I will say that the plot is about a man played by Sam Rockwell coming back from a post-apocalyptic future, to stop the creation of an AI singularity that will bring about the downfall of society. And it’s ironic that AI is the villain, because there’s barely a single image in the entire movie that feels original or memorable; everything feels like the least inspired and most obvious choice, taken from other media.
The only image that comes close to feeling new and original is that of a giant centaur cat made from smaller cats, walking through a residential neighborhood eating people. That, combined with the audacity of an earlier sequence with Juno Temple as the single mother of a child killed in a school shooting, were just enough to keep me from writing off the movie as a completely unoriginal waste of time. But then I thought about it for a few seconds, and I realized that the giant cat is just the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Not that it feels similar, but it’s used exactly the same way as in a movie from 1984.
My initial take on all of it was that it felt like some crusty old relic, a movie dug up from a time capsule from the early 2000s, and it had been derivative even then. It’s like if the phrase “ok, boomer” had been turned into a motion picture. I would’ve been content to just roll my eyes and make a wanking gesture, and then let it be quickly forgotten.4
But I realized that it had somehow crossed the line from tasteless and irrelevant to genuinely offensive. And offensive in a way that’s depressingly relevant. I can’t imagine a coherent read of this movie that’s anything other than conservative propaganda.
The bulk of it just feels like “Old Man Yells At Cloud” ranting. It starts with what’s essentially an extended monologue from Rockwell, chastising people in a diner for staring at their damn phones while the world is falling apart around them. Shortly afterwards there’s a flashback that’s only remarkable for having Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz and making them annoying and uninteresting, something I’d never imagined possible. The gist of this whole sequence is just how hard teachers have it nowadays, with the scary, surly teens and their smart phones, scrolling numbly through Tik Tok all day.
Later, there’s another sequence that’s all about Haley Lu Richardson as a woman who’s literally allergic to phones and WiFi, finding her soulmate in a guy who has also made a pledge to reject modern online technology, and then losing him to the temptation of virtual reality.
It’s all lazy, hopelessly dated, and completely devoid of insight, feeling like someone who read an article about emerging tech in Wired 20 years ago and has been fuming about it ever since. Now they’ve appointed themselves a modern-day Cassandra, screaming about the dangers of The Screens to a society that refuses to listen. It feels like 2025 tech commentary from someone who still refers to everything they do on a computer as “that program.” It feels like a movie that had to halt production periodically to get help, since now all the icons were in a different place and they can’t find the one they always use.
The only exception is that sequence about the aftermath of a school shooting. The idea is seeded in the earlier flashback, as the school day stops for a shooting incident, and it’s treated as something as common and mundane as a fire drill. The point there is just to underscore that idea of how scary and downright insolent The Teens are. But I’ll be super-extra generous to the movie, and assume that it was supposed to feel more light-hearted here so that it’d feel like a shocking gut-punch later, when we see it from the perspective of someone who as actually affected by it.
That sequence with Temple is the closest the movie gets to actually working. It’s shockingly tasteless, but that’s the point — it’s about how one of the most horrific things that can possibly happen has become so common now that people are numb to it, and an entire sub-industry has developed around it. The mom finds a shadow network of support groups and an organization that will clone murdered kids, replacing them with a copy that is almost as good as the real thing. Temple’s character then is connected to an even more shadowy group that will give her a device that lets her communicate with the real version of her murdered son.
Honestly, if that whole sequence had been removed from the rest of the context of the movie, it would’ve worked okay. It would’ve been like a C-tier Black Mirror episode. The tastelessness, the refusal to suggest a solution, and again the audacity of it, might’ve worked as black satire. An angry wake-up call demanding that people take it seriously.
But instead, it’s in this movie. Which undermines any potential impact by making it feel irrelevant, since it just makes a lazy hand-waving gesture at the problem, insisting that it’s all this dang technology that we’ve gotten so dependent on! And worse, it feels dated and toothless, since it’s either unaware or unwilling to admit that we have all figured out who and what are causing the problems.
As soon as I heard the stated premise of Rockwell’s character’s plan, I thought “well that’s a load of bullshit.” It’s stated that the world-destroying AI is being developed right now by some genius ninth-grade kid in a bedroom in a residential area of Los Angeles. Their mission is to get in there and plug in a USB drive that will override the AI’s programming and put the necessary safety protocols in place.
The problem isn’t that this all sounds like hand-waving nonsense from someone who’s never used a computer apart from Outlook before. It’s actually fine that the mechanism is just a MacGuffin, in a deliberately ludicrous story that’s not about technology so much as its impact on humans. The problem is that it perpetuates the bullshit mythos about “AI” that has already been incorporated into the hype bubble and scam that’s actually impacting humans.
Even Terminator and Terminator 2 had the foresight to implicate corporations in the fall of humanity. Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die refuses to acknowledge the existence of anyone outside of its characters (and by extension, its audience). It passes itself off as a satire of gun violence that never once shows the police, and has multiple scenes using gun violence as a “black comedy” punchline, responding with a shrug. It passes itself off as a warning about the dangers of technology without ever mentioning tech companies. It’s all created by this one genius kid working away in his bedroom.
This is like making a movie about climate change without once mentioning oil companies or auto manufacturers, and instead spending over two hours chastising the audience for using plastic straws. It’s an indictment of out-of-control technology and AI that could have been executive produced by Sam Altman.
But wait! The end of the movie has a huge twist!5 The AI wasn’t actually created by a kid in his bedroom! That kid was a clone, and it was actually just a case of the sentient, omnipotent AI creating itself! It presented you with this false happy ending to keep you comfortable, complacent, and compliant!
Don’t you feel silly now, dismissing this movie as nothing more than an edgy-for-the-sake-of-edgy screed against the threat of technology? Weren’t you spending the whole time focused on tech as the obvious villain, while ignoring the deeply humanist message at its core?
Well no, actually. The ending is the final push that transforms this noxious fart of a movie into a wet, steaming, turd.
Just for the sake of showing some grace to the movie, assuming incompetence instead of actual malice, I won’t concentrate on how it turns Temple’s story from “tasteless” to deeply offensive. Because it refuses to implicate anyone outside the movie in the problem of gun violence, it only points a finger at her and her handling of it. The real, actionable problem, see, is that she was looking to be placated and comforted by a cloned or AI-generated replacement for her son, instead of the irreplaceable, real person. “Maybe if you’d set some limits on screen time and spent more quality time with your child, he wouldn’t have been murdered.”
After all, the final scene has Rockwell realizing he was wrong to leave his mom behind so many times, and they’re going to solve this problem together!6 That solution: give everybody in the world the same allergy she has, to physically force everyone to avoid technology!
In other words: don’t worry, big tech (and especially tech companies who’ll invest in funding movies like this), this is just a silly fantasy! We’re not going to offer any real solutions to relevant social problems. We’re going to “carbon offset” it, reminding people that the most beautiful world is the one that exists off your screen, and we can make that world happen together. Somehow. Maybe you can start by putting down your TikToks and reading a damn book for once!
Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s total bullshit to claim that your movie has a humanist message, when you treat its characters as disposable.7 I think it’s bullshit to even approach the topic of school shootings if you not only have gun violence played for comedic effect, but you flat-out refuse to acknowledge that we are all fully aware of the network of politicians, lobbyists, manufacturers, and special-interest groups that perpetuate it. Instead, this bullshit movie treats it as if it were just something that happens, like earthquakes.
And by presenting an omnipotent AI that, as it turns out, somehow went back in time and set up the sequence of events to create itself, it makes this movie contain pretty much every single part of the bullshit AI hype bubble scam:
Again, this is a movie that is so adamant about not assigning blame to anyone but the people who are least responsible, that it feels regressive even compared to Terminator 2, which came out 35 years ago.
When I left Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, I was left with the impression that it was gross but harmless, ultimately yelling at nothing. Just a few minutes thinking about it makes me realize it’s even worse. It’s deeply ironic that it has a takeaway message about technology lulling people into a sense of complacency, since it’s a movie that’s designed to do exactly that.
2026-02-20 02:00:00
I spent way too much time writing about “Wuthering Heights”, and I don’t think that because I think any of it was wrong, or because the movie doesn’t warrant it, but because it’s a waste of time to respond to all of the wrong things.
I spent so much time rejecting the most facile and close-minded takes on the movie, that by the time I started to hit on exactly why it had such a surprising impact on me, I was already tired of talking about it. Usually my rule of “respond to the thing, not to what people are saying about the thing” is so that my impressions of it are my own, instead of just being influenced by other people’s takes.
But I’d forgotten the most important corollary of that: the easier it is to explain why something is wrong or not useful, the less value there is in doing so. The Discourse is designed to feed on itself. Throwing more fuel into it is just a waste of energy.
As if on cue, YouTube offered me two videos today, side by side: One was this fun interview with Emerald Fennell on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, talking about all of the influences that went into making “Wuthering Heights”, and wanting to make something additive to a book that was so transformative for her, and which has already been adapted, read, and analyzed so many times over so many years. The other was a video from an essayist that was titled “Heathcliff Isn’t White.”12
I chose to listen to what the filmmaker actually had to say, and especially how her take on influences was so expansive and inclusive. She talks about how much she loved Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Titanic, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and even Dracula: Dead And Loving It, four movies that I’ve always been indifferent to at best, if not outright disliked.
It gave me the impression of someone most interested in engaging with art in terms of what it has to offer. Not in order to categorize it, to provide a definitive interpretation of it, or even to put much of a value judgment on it. Camp, gothic romance, horror, parody, open sentimentality, melodrama, all mixing together into this near-infinite well of stuff to draw from.
With that in mind, going back to engaging with YouTube videos or Letterboxd comments feels like even more of a waste of time. What are we even doing here?
It’s apt that this was sparked by Wuthering Heights, a book that I so closely associate with assigned reading. It helps explain why my gut reaction to so many of the reviews or video essays I’ve seen has been, “Shut up, nerd!” It takes me back to being in school again, and learning how to engage with literature and other art.
It feels like so many people are pointing and shouting “this is making a mockery of the sacred texts!” and declaring that the filmmaker clearly didn’t “understand” the book, because our most formative years were spent having this mindset drilled into us. There’s a pre-defined list of key ideas to take away from this book, and it’s your job to be able to find them. For probably 100 years, students have been writing papers that say roughly the same things about the novel Wuthering Heights, and teachers have been grading them according to how well they understood the ideas they were supposed to find.
A lot of the people making video essays now3 probably did well in school, and were rewarded for reading books and watching movies in the correct way.
That fits pretty naturally into the internet and social media, which is designed not to reward insight, but engagement and consensus. You’re still rewarded for having the correct take on everything, even if it’s just with views and likes instead of a letter grade. That’s why you keep seeing the same things repeated over and over again.
It’s never really about “what is your take?” But “did you figure out the correct answer?”
It extends into the areas of nerd-dom that I’m more familiar with than gothic romances4 with all of the fixation on “canon.” Every time a new MCU project comes out, there’s a host of “explainers” comparing it to the comics, listing all the references, explaining all the back story. Even though source material was often intended to be either ephemeral or self-contained, and even though the MCU rarely engages with the source material in any interesting way, there’s still this notion that you need all of the additional info to fully get it.
And for me, it’s kind of funny to read back over my own take on “Wuthering Heights” and see myself fall back into that. Early on, I seemed to get that a lot of the appeal of the movie for me was that it seemed to be so many contradictory things simultaneously. But the more I tried to explain it, and especially the more I tried to react to other people’s takes on it, the more reductive I got.
I thought that I’d found the key — a-ha! It’s subverting a teenage girl’s first impression of a classic novel! — and that explained everything. The movie was showing you that, but it was actually saying this. I said that one of my biggest complaints was that the ending seemed to want to have it both ways, presenting a subversion of a grand romance but still ending with a moment of romantic sentimentality.
The thing that I hadn’t considered: that shouldn’t have been a complaint. It does want to have it both ways, and probably a couple more ways that haven’t occurred to me yet. It’s not showing you something but subverting it; it’s showing you something and subverting it. It wants all of it. That’s probably a big part of why I was able to enjoy it, despite my complete lack of interest in period pieces and romantic novels, and despite its glaring lack of spaceships and ghosts.
It’s a movie devoted to maximalism, not just in its images and performances, but in everything. There’s a scene where Catherine is first seeing the dead body of her father, an abusive alcoholic who’d wasted the family’s entire fortune on booze and gambling. It’s framed with him lying on the floor, in between two mountains of empty glass bottles in the corners, piled up to the ceiling.
It’s an absurd enough image to get a laugh out of me, and Heathcliff has a line of dialogue that’s the closest he ever gets to being funny. But the scene isn’t camp, or black comedy. It’s that, plus grief, and anger, and tragedy, and poetic justice, and character development, and just the simple appreciation of such a distinctive visual image. Like so many of the scenes in the movie, it seems like its primary purpose isn’t to tell you something, but to make you feel something. Whatever that something is, is up to you.
It doesn’t seem particularly interested in hiding ideas below layers of meaning — I’m showing you this but I actually mean that — but instead letting them all float on the surface and mix together. “I know authors who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.”
And I’d said that it was never intended to be an adaptation of the book, but Fennell herself describes it as an adaptation. What I’d been assuming was wry subversion, was in fact completely earnest. The scare quotes around the title aren’t indicating some kind of ironic take on the source material. They’re an acknowledgment that her cinematic version would never be able to contain everything that makes the book so special to her. It’s an extremely personal take on the source material.5
In Rain’s review of the movie, she describes it as Emerald Fennell wanting to make Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi into “her own personal Barbie and Ken, acting out her teenage fantasy of Wuthering Heights,” and I thought that was a really good way of putting it. But I’d been thinking of it merely in terms of style and visuals. In other words: if it can have even me enraptured, as someone with no attachment to the novel and no interest in movies like this, then that’s reason enough.
But hearing Fennell talk even in brief about her thinking behind the movie, I’m realizing that it goes deeper than that. There are a lot of things that I had noticed, but considered them all distinct ideas and images, without thinking about how they’re all inter-related in an idea that carries across the movie.
Specifically: the character of Isabella as Fennell’s surrogate.
Again, none of it is particularly subtle; it’s all there on the surface. Maybe it’s just more difficult to put it all together if you’ve never been a teenage girl yourself. But Isabella’s introduction feels like a young girl reading a classic story and being swept up by all the adventure and romance in it. She recounts the story of Romeo and Juliet, in vivid detail, highlighting all the most shocking and tragic moments.6 She is, literally, trying to explain to an older man, who couldn’t be less interested, why she was so enraptured by this story.
And she dotes on Catherine, with charmingly creepy details like the flesh-colored walls of her bedroom. And the doll, which she emphasizes was made with Catherine’s real hair! In a fit of jealousy, she sets up a scene culminating with a bloody Catherine, much like the director is going to have play out in the final act.
And the title screen to the whole movie, which I’d taken to be just a whimsical flourish: a seemingly hand-made stop-motion title screen made from blonde hair.
I love it, but I’d been reading it as little more than a wry wink at the camera. What’s really most remarkable to me is that the movie has such a strong feeling of affection towards Isabella. She’s the source of almost all of the movie’s humor, but even at her extremes, you’re never really mocking her. She’s charmingly awkward, and naive, and spoiled, but even when she’s talking about having a room dedicated solely to her ribbons, it doesn’t come across as careless excess, so much as simply having no other frame of reference. (And she gives up her ribbon room, gladly, for Catherine).
The shorthand version of her story is “an innocent defiled,” but it’s never quite that, either. I still say that the most uncomfortably ambiguous scene in the movie is the one in which Heathcliff is repeatedly asking for — or demanding? — her consent, because it would be vile in the real world, but feels a little different in a movie that spends so much time in surreal fantasy. It’s a bit like the difference between imagining being kidnapped by a dashing and hyper-sexual pirate in a romance novel, vs how horrific that would be in reality.
Here, it feels as if Isabella is exerting some kind of agency in the kind of grand, tragic romance she’d always dreamed of. Almost as if it’s a lucid dream, and she’s now aware that she’s been elevated from quirky side character to major player. Because it’s not just that she wants Heathcliff; she wants to be part of Catherine and Heathcliff’s story. Even if it’s as the obstacle.
And Catherine and Heathcliff do feel like characters in a story, even though we follow them through their entire lifetimes, and we see them go through every single possible emotion. There’s always a feeling of distance from them, even when we’re seeing them at their most intimate. The movie is more sympathetic to them than I am, but even with that, it always seemed to be looking at them, instead of being present with them. They’re both too big, and too much. Even if you can relate to individual moments with them — gasp! he put his hand around her ankle! — they’re larger than life. Unlike Isabella, and Nelly, and even Linton.
So even though I liked the movie, I think my initial take was a little too reductive. I was describing it as being arch: it’s presenting this novel as she experienced it as a teenager reading it for the first time, and then subverting that, to comment on it now that she’s an adult. This is how she read it as a child, but now she’s put aside childish things.
But it’s too sincere for that. I’m not even sure if I’d stick with the claim that it “invites interpretation,” since that sounds too preoccupied with some kind of intellectual response instead of an emotional one. I called it deliberately provocative, but I’m not sure that it’s trying to provoke an argument so much as to provoke a feeling. To get swept up in all the excess and heartbreak and horniness — to experience it like that teenage girl and like that more experienced adult, at the same time.
It’s not intended to be a completely “faithful” and literal adaptation, but it is still an adaptation. It’s intended to contain as much as possible of what the filmmaker loves about the book. So it’s more like a personal, impressionistic interpretation.
Which goes back to my lengthy preamble about avoiding The Discourse, and un-learning everything that school and social media have taught us about how to engage with art and literature. The idea that there’s a correct answer that just needs to be understood, or that there are pre-determined and pre-approved lanes of discussion, and you’re rewarded for saying the right thing more than saying something insightful.
There are tons of adaptations of Wuthering Heights out there. At least one gets the ethnicity of Heathcliff “right,” and several are closer to the novel. One of them gets the ethnicity of Heathcliff shockingly wrong; how blasphemous! One of them inspired an iconic song.7
But it’s hard to get enthused by accuracy alone. I have little doubt that each of them has some aspect that’s additive, to keep it from being nothing more than adding visuals and slimming things down, for people who don’t have time or patience to read. But also… so what?
I can pretty much guarantee that none of them are as personal as this version, because it’s rare to find any movie that feels as personal as this version. I compared it to Adaptation because it feels just as much like a personal account of an artist trying to express what they got out of a book, but without that movie’s distance or explicit self-awareness. “Wuthering Heights” is saying both “I want you to understand what’s in this book” and “I want you to understand just how much I love this book, for my entire life, ever since I was a teenager.”8
And that means this version is the one that actually connected with me, a 54-year-old man, who has little frame of reference for being a boy or girl in England in the 1800s, or even being a teenage girl in England in the late 1990s. Because while I can relate intellectually to the universal ideas contained in a piece of classic literature, I can relate emotionally — profoundly emotionally — to the ideas that this specific book unlocked for this specific filmmaker.
I can look back on all the times I went batshit crazy nerding out over something (or someone), as well as the times I was either too eager or too afraid to grow up, and the bad decisions that sometimes resulted. For that matter, I can look back on times that I was carelessly selfish or unintentionally cruel, and extend myself some grace. And instead of my usual reaction of being embarrassed or ashamed, I can have genuine affection for those old versions of me. Instead of regretting my awkward naiveté, celebrating it. Or at least being charmed by it.
Every time I sit down to write something about a movie, I’m usually most concerned with picking it apart to make sure that I “got it,” meaning making sure that I fully understood what it had to say. This was one of the rare movies where “getting it” means I understand how it makes me feel.
2026-02-18 07:03:10
Last night we got a YouTube recommendation for a wonderful video called “Bend Your Knees” by Henry Mansfield and Digital Velvet. It’s a joyful song about falling in love at a roller rink, with a joyful video filmed at a roller rink, all of the horns and percussion and singers weaving in and out of each other as they circle the camera (and include the keyboardist, because they’re not rude).
It’s the kind of thing that made me instantly nostalgic for the days when it was more common to just randomly stumble onto people on the internet making something delightful. I really hope it becomes a big hit.
Looking more into Mansfield’s music, he describes himself1 as a queer musician living in Seattle. I’ve only heard five or six songs at this point, but I’m liking what seems to be a mash-up of contemporary musical theater sensibilities with pop and rock. His clear and heartfelt voice is what makes me think of musical theater, and his experimentation with finding just the right style and the right hook is what makes me think of genreless pop and rock.
And his lyrics add on to that sense of modern theater — romantic and contemporary, using something topical and occasionally mundane to spin off into a metaphor about new love, ended relationships, or just being with people you love. Using learning to skate as an analogy for not over-thinking or stressing about falling in love, and instead just relaxing and allowing yourself to enjoy the moment, is ingenious.
It’s a similar sentiment to his song “Now vs. Forever” from 2021. It’s about waking up with someone after a good night together early in a relationship, and your mind spinning off into all the possibilities of your future together.
I think it’s wonderful because that’s something I always associated with embarrassment and anxiety. Isn’t the early part of a relationship supposed to be nerve-wracking? Don’t get too attached so quickly! Slow down! Stop being weird! You’re setting yourself up for heartbreak! What I like so much about this song — and I wish I’d learned when I was closer to Mansfield’s age — is that it’s all ephemeral.
It’s not just that infatuation is fleeting, but the heartbreak (if it happens) is as well. How many times have we stifled that euphoria for ourselves, in a vain attempt to soften the heartbreak later. (Which never works; it always sucks). Wouldn’t it be better to let ourselves be fully in the moment, enjoying the excitement of everything that could happen, instead of the fear of what might? Why not let ourselves enjoy that elation to the fullest?