2025-09-11 04:17:49
(Featured image is taken without permission from a Bluesky post which rightfully refused to send link traffic to The Times. Using that because most of the non-copyrighted images of Ozymandias that I could find online are, depressingly predictably, AI-generated).
I touched on it the last time I went off on a rant about generative AI, but there’s one thing in particular that really bugs me about the increasingly-feverish hype bubble that we’re suffering through at the moment: nobody’s even bothering to make the case that generative AI is actually good for anything.
(Outside of a few narrow applications that involve predictable, verifiable results that don’t require actual reasoning or creativity. Which I probably should’ve acknowledged in the first version of this post).
It’s possible that there was an entire stage of it, and I just missed it. I might have simply done too good a job at curating my social media intake. After all, I just started a new LinkedIn account after years of not using it, and there’s been a jarring tonal whiplash between it and the social media I actually want to use.
On top of the general-purpose psychic damage I take every time I open LinkedIn, there’s now at least four or five new posts treating AI not just as an inevitability, but as something that’s already so firmly entrenched that if you’re not already completely committed, why are you even bothering to find employment? Contrast that with the pockets of the internet I tend to hang out in, where 99% of the people seem perfectly aware that generative AI is ludicrously overhyped and overvalued at best, an outright pyramid scheme at worst.
Whenever I see something like this article in Variety quoting Reese Witherspoon as saying that “AI is the future of filmmaking,” and that “you can be sad and lament it all you want, but the change is here,” it’s met instantly with derision and mockery.
(To be as fair as possible to Witherspoon, the extended quote tries to couch it as not being a replacement for creativity, and you can be charitable and take it to mean that she’s talking about using it as a time-saving tool for production and administrative tasks? Her examples of how she actually uses it aren’t “I used prompts to write a screenplay” but “I used AI to buy a blender,” but I can’t tell if that’s a bizarre non sequitur, or if it’s an earnest/overly optimistic take on how it can be used as a tool to support the creative process instead of replacing it. In any case, she’s financially investing in this stuff, so it’d be a mistake to take her quotes as being entirely in good faith).
The “you’ve got to get on board because otherwise you’ll be left behind!” refrain is extremely familiar, because we’ve seen it with every tech hype bubble: dot coms, web 3.0, cryptocurrency, NFTs. And as pointed out in the Bluesky thread I linked to up at the top, this is the part when the technology is spun not as a pyramid scheme for already-wealthy investors, but as democratizing technology benefitting women and marginalized people.
But again, I can’t recall ever seeing a pitch for generative AI that attempted to make a case that it was actually better. Complex? Sure. Hard for laypeople to understand how it works? Definitely. Saves time? Questionable, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Easier? At first, absolutely.
I’ve seen it pitched as fun and novel: here’s your selfie as if you were a character in a Studio Ghibli movie! I’m enough of a narcissist to see the appeal, but even I wouldn’t rank the results as better than mall kiosk art, and I sure as hell wouldn’t spend any money for it.
I’ve seen it pitched as being so much better at producing convincing text and images than any other methods of procedural generation we’ve tried before. And yes, that’s basically true.1
But never have I seen it convincingly pitched as being as good as the real thing.
To put it back into terms I can understand: it’s like if a Sith lord were pitching you on the dark side using quotes from Yoda. “Quicker, easier, more seductive, not more powerful.”
Even Apple, the company that has perfected the art of making a convincing and appealing case for spending a lot of something you don’t particularly need, hasn’t been able to make a strong case for the idea of generative AI.
I understand that FOMO is powerful, though, and can see why venture capitalists, along with the people riding an unpredictable mechanical bull made of billions of dollars in imaginary money, would be interest in speed-running to the “you don’t want to miss out!” part before making a convincing argument of why you don’t want to miss out. It does make it seem, however, that we’re a lot farther towards the bubble bursting than I’d previously thought. I’d expected at least another year before we started to see the flop sweat of desperate “get on board or you’ll be left behind!” messaging.
It does make all of the bubble seem suspect, though. I would’ve dismissed the people issuing public statements about how AI is going to basically become SKYNET and destroy all humans as coming from kooks. But now I suspect that they’re hucksters, pumping up the bubble by claiming that these systems can do far more than they actually can.
For the record, I’m still remaining optimistic that things will settle into narrow categories of very specific utility that’s actually useful. Almost entirely in processing data, not generating it.
The only part that I think is genuinely here to stay: everything’s going to get slower and more difficult, as we’re all flooded with loads of slop and are forced to differentiate between it and the stuff that’s actually worthwhile. It already takes more time than I’d like to determine whether a vacuous comment online was generated by a bot or by a dim-witted human.
So that’s why I’m giving you — and exclusively you, the readers of this blog — the chance to get in on the ground floor of my new venture: an unprecedented breakthrough system that detects whether something is worth your time. You’d better act fast, because you don’t want to be left out!
2025-09-11 01:00:00
When I first heard that Joel Coen and Frances McDormand were doing an adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth, it went directly to the top of my watchlist, with some trepidation. “Oh no, does this mean the Coen brothers aren’t making any more movies together?” was tempered with “Oh boy, finally I’ll actually be able to understand Macbeth!”
But as is typical for movies that I already know I’m going to like before going in, it’s taken me several years to get around to actually watching it. And it is as stunning as I’d been hoping it would be: the cinematography is unforgettable. The performances — not just McDormand and Denzel Washington, and Kathryn Hunter’s amazing performance as the three witches, but everyone across the board — are outstanding. The music by Carter Burwell is flawless because it’s by Carter Burwell.
It’s such a masterful display of filmmaking that I wish it were more surprising how masterful it is. Instead, it just seems to reinforce the idea that the Coens are physically incapable of making a bad movie.1
But as somebody who has never liked Shakespeare, mostly because I’ve never understood Shakespeare, I was disappointed that this didn’t do much of anything to change that. I’d been hoping that there’d be a moment like in The Hunt for Red October where the dialogue changes from Russian to English, and the camera would be panning around Denzel Washington in mid-soliloquy, and I’d suddenly be able to parse iambic pentameter.
This did not happen. I had subtitles on the entire time, which was a very disappointing distraction from the astounding cinematography, and yet I still didn’t get the point of the majority of the dialogue. I understood the story, for the very first time, and I can thank this adaptation for that. But I am no closer now than I was in my 20s to understanding why there’s always been such an insistence on staying true to Shakespeare’s exact wording, when so much of it seems to me to be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And when I say that, I don’t believe that I’m being blasphemous, or being a simpleton. Of course I recognize the power of the “sleep no more” dialogue, and how masterfully it conveys the idea of “oh shit I feel guilty” in a way that can still remain impactful after centuries. But so much of the functional dialogue is so bent on adhering to a centuries-old convention that it obfuscates its function.
I imagine that’s part of why Shakespeare adaptations are so eternally appealing to actors, theater producers, and filmmakers: the challenge of presenting something so archaic and so mannered in a way that it makes sense to contemporary audiences. Occasionally you get an adaptation that tries to add a level of thematic relevance, like “here’s how Macbeth has analogs with fascism,” but for the most part, adaptations seem to be striving for something that stays true to the source material but the audience can still figure out what’s going on.
No doubt it’s a combination of my modern sensibilities and a lack of understanding of what goes into an adaptation, but “I understood the plot!” seems like a pretty low bar to set.
In any case, it’s a bar that The Tragedy of Macbeth easily clears, and even surpasses in a couple of scenes. My favorite was the “is this a dagger which I see before me?” scene. I’m unfamiliar enough with the play to know its original context, but here, it takes place as Macbeth is approaching the door he’ll enter to reach the king’s chambers. At first, it appears in the distance as a dagger inexplicably hung suspended in the darkness. As he walks closer, resolving himself to the reality of what he’s going to do, it also resolves into the handle of the door itself.
But it’s also one of the disappointingly few scenes in the movie — along with most of the appearances of the witches, and Macbeth’s vision of Banquo during the feast — where the images and the words and ideas seemed to be working in conjunction with each other. Most of the movie felt as if the images and the words were just playing in parallel.
Throughout The Tragedy of Macbeth, I kept being reminded of the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit from 2010. I think it’s a masterpiece, one of their best films and one of the best, if not the best, adaptations of a book I’ve ever seen. I saw the movie before reading the book, and it felt so much like a Coen brothers movie that I was sure they must’ve taken extensive liberties with the source material. But reading the book — which is itself a masterpiece — felt as if Charles Portiss had somehow pre-written a novelization of a movie that wouldn’t exist for several decades.
What makes it a brilliant movie is everything that the Coens bring to a project in terms of filmmaking: a frequently-recurring cast of outstanding actors, amazing cinematography (here by Roger Deakins), music by Carter Burwell, editing by longtime collaborator Roderick Jaynes (who strangely doesn’t have any credits apart from working with the Coens). What makes it such a great adaptation is the depiction of Mattie Ross, both in Hailee Steinfeld’s outstanding performance and in the script, which lifts much of Portiss’s dialogue directly.
The entire significance of True Grit lives in Mattie Ross, who is so unwaveringly assured of her own correctness and righteousness that she demands a standard of justice, proper society, and Episcopalian morality that none of the criminals, businessmen, mercenaries, or Texas Rangers around her manage to live up to. The Coens’ adaptation captures that, along with the often understated, surreal humor of the novel.
The reason I kept thinking of True Grit during The Tragedy of Macbeth is because they’re both full of striking images and scenes that feel heavy with symbolism and significance, and very specific, mannered dialogue that is unnatural, but delivered as if it were perfectly natural. True Grit is much less stark and abstract that Macbeth, obviously, but it’s not naturalistic, either: it’s the Coens doing a classic Western in the same way that Miller’s Crossing was the Coens doing a classic gangster movie. They take place in a familiar but alternate reality, full of omens and portents and moments of explosive but beautiful violence. And they have a peculiar, probably-not-entirely-accurate pattern of “correct” or “proper” speech that characters all try with varying levels of success to emulate.
Two of my favorite scenes in True Grit seem almost like a trial run at combining Macbeth with a classic Western. One was an invention of the Coens, the scene where Mattie and Rooster Cogburn meet a stranger in a bear suit, who offers to trade them the body of a dead man for “two dental mirrors and a bottle of expectorant.” I still don’t understand the full significance of that scene, assuming that there was any intended, apart from underscoring how much Mattie was in a strange, foreign world to her. Not because of her age, but because of her steadfast belief in civilization, order, and a proper way of behavior. But simply in terms of mood, it was outstanding: characters confronted with something surreal and brutal, not too different from Macbeth and Banquo first encountering the three witches.
The other scene is when Mattie and Cogburn find the body of a man who was hung from the top of a tall, seemingly dead tree. The scene is framed so that the tree branches create arches, making the scene feel reminiscent of a cathedral. The rope holding the body is barely visible, making him appear to be a solid black figure floating in the sky underneath the arch, a black bird on his shoulder. The image feels to the audience like an omen of doom.
Neither of the characters seems particularly put out by it, though. For Mattie, her main concern is whether it’s Tom Chaney. She’s on a mission for justice, and this would be a kind of justice, albeit an unsatisfying one. She doesn’t seem all that disturbed — beyond how any 14 year old would react to seeing a decomposed body — because she operates on the assumption that this is a natural end for people who are “trash.” For Cogburn, he’s just interested in whether or not he knows the man. It’s unclear whether he actually believes in “justice” anymore at this point, but there’s a sense that he trusts his own assessment of a person’s character more than either the law, the church, or polite society can. Neither is particularly inclined to speeches in the moment (Cogburn says simply, “I do not know this man.”), but it does feel like the kind of portentous moment that would inspire Shakespearean characters to launch into a soliloquy about what drives them.
The mannered language in True Grit is obviously not as extreme as Shakespeare; instead of iambic pentameter, it’s just a version of the old west in which everyone spoke in purposeful, complete sentences and, apparently, contractions had not yet been invented. But some of the dialogue — in particular, the scene in which Mattie attempts to negotiate with a businessman to buy back some ponies her father had bought — has that feeling of extremely stylized speech that still somehow feels conversational.
Of course it wouldn’t be tonally appropriate or even make sense for Macbeth or Lady Macbeth to be taking significant liberties with their dialogue, but I did wish there were more opportunities for performances like Stephen Root’s as the porter.2 He has leeway to deliver the dialogue as if it were meaningless, inconsequential, vulgar rambling instead of centuries-old, carefully-constructed poetry. I did also love seeing a little bit of that break through Denzel Washington’s performance, those moments when his speech or his inflection let pieces of iconic Denzel in.
Root’s performance, while really not similar overall, made me think of Josh Brolin’s as Tom Chaney in True Grit: a shiftless murderer of low class, who betrays his low class every time he tries to speak. He always seems a bit confused by everything that is happening, and he doesn’t bother with proper English unless he’s being sarcastic.3 And that reminded me of yet another character from the Coens, which is Jon Polito as Jonny Caspar in Miller’s Crossing: eager to show that he’s every bit as refined, classy, and witty as the Irish mobsters he’s competing with, but unable to keep from letting his short temper and rage come through.
It made me wish for a Shakespeare adaptation — which, considering how many there are, undoubtedly already exists — that was willing to deviate from the text in ways that fit the characters. Keep “the good bits,” since I already spent most of this adaptation squinting at subtitles, trying to keep up, until I jumped to attention whenever I heard a famous phrase I recognized. But when the characters are in a fit of non-poetic rage, or just matter-of-factly advancing the plot, feel free to break the meter and use some contemporary vernacular.
I doubt that the Coens would ever be the ones to do that, because they love language and the very specific, precise mannerisms of speech, accents, and slang. But assuming that they didn’t see it as the utmost sacrilege, they’d also be the perfect ones to do it right, since their movies are already full of “code-switching” that doesn’t draw attention to itself.
And speaking of having the hubris to rewrite Shakespeare: again, I’m not familiar enough with Macbeth to compare it to the movie adaptation, but reading a synopsis suggests that all of the major beats are included. That surprised me, because even without knowing the original, the movie somehow felt very abridged. Characters go from normal to “we have to kill him” almost as fast as Susan Orlean deciding to murder Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. Macbeth goes from guilt-ridden ambitious king to despotic tyrant in a flash. And Lady Macbeth’s death (spoiler!) felt oddly anticlimactic, to no fault of Frances McDormand.
One change that wasn’t much of a surprise: the Thane of Ross is promoted from being more or less a background character in the play to having some kind of role in every major event in the adaptation. It didn’t surprise me because it seemed too ambiguous for Macbeth: the play is full of people giving long speeches explaining their exact mental state and their intentions, but this guy has barely any dialogue, yet seems to be scheming and plotting throughout. I’m still not sure exactly how I feel about the change, but I think I like it. It adds the idea that the tragedy of selfish, ruthless ambition will extend beyond the life of just Macbeth.
And again, now I can finally casually talk about Ross and Banquo and their roles in the play as if I know what I’m talking about, which to me counts as a successful adaptation. I already knew that The Tragedy of Macbeth was going to be a beautifully-shot production full of fantastic performances, which is absolutely true. And I was pretty confident that Coen would be able to bring the full force of his filmmaking talent to an adaptation, which is largely true. Only “largely true” because the movie is almost entirely humorless, which of course is implicit in the title, but the Coens tend to bring at least a sense of sardonic humor to even their most tragic movies.4
But I was hoping that it would be the movie that finally made me appreciate Shakespeare. Or at least help me understand why actors are so eager to play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, either because the characters are so deep and nuanced that they demand a performer who understands their depth, or because their dialogue is so powerful that it demands a performer who can make it sound natural. This adaptation and these performances didn’t do that for me. I can appreciate them as masterful, but it’s just that: an appreciation, instead of a genuine love for them.
True Grit did make me want to read the book immediately, if only to find out how the literary and cinematic versions were different. And I think the book and the movie work together perfectly, with the movie bringing out the aspects that you can tell they loved about the book. Not reinventing, reinterpreting, or drawing inspiration from them, but making them cinematic. After reading the book, the movie feels like the Coens sharing a book they love with the audience, and showing us exactly why they love it.
Winner: True Grit, not only because I’m eager to watch it repeatedly, but because it was a case of my favorite filmmakers introducing me to a book I would also end up loving. They made me want to read all of Charles Portiss’s work, while I’m still not particularly interested in Shakespeare.
2025-09-10 01:00:00
At first I might seem to be just a mild-mannered computer programmer, but I’m writing on my internet weblog where I write voluntary book reports and talk about my favorite Star Wars and comic book TV shows to assure you that I am extremely hard core.
If you’re not convinced, just get a load of the music I used to listen to when I was in middle and high school.
“Foolin’ by Def Leppard” yeah, that’s right, did I just blow your mind? It starts out sounding like it’s going to be a ballad but then I hope you’re holding onto something because this shit gets rockin’. I was one of the rare 12 year olds at the time to get in on the ground floor with Def Leppard from the start.
(I’m realizing that most of the people reading this are probably too young to know/remember that in the early 1980s, every adolescent suburban boy in the United States was required by law to have a copy of Pyromania).
That was my gateway to the even harder stuff, like Led Zeppelin, who destroyed hotel rooms and wrote songs about sex, drugs, and hobbits. I bought every LP because Zeppelin had and still has the all-time best album design. I didn’t even own a turntable, so I had to go to my friend’s house and record them to tape.
Oh and you know my punk-rock ass spent hours drawing detailed cassette labels for the tapes that mimicked the LP design! That meant a two-layered one for Physical Graffiti that showed the letters of the title inside the windows. I’m pretty sure I drew the label for In Through The Out Door on a paper bag, because the record was shipped inside a brown paper bag wrapper.
At least back then, In Through The Out Door already had a bad reputation with Zeppelin fans for being more pop-oriented, but I secretly loved it. At the time I thought the instrumental break in “All My Love” was transcendent, and I’m still a fan.
“Fool in the Rain” might be their most pop-accessible song, and it does sound like they were trying to appeal to the Jimmy Buffet crowd. It says a lot that even while they were struggling with addiction problems, John Bonham and Jimmy Page were bringing exceptional talent to one of the least Led Zeppelin-ish songs on one of the least Led Zeppelin-ish records.
2025-09-03 01:00:00
This week’s Tuesday Tune Two-Fer was prompted by a Google search to verify that I was correctly remembering the lyrics to “Born to Run.”
At the time I’m writing this, Google’s search page confidently posts a transcript of Bruce Springsteen’s introduction to a live performance of the song, where he speaks eloquently about trying to return to his childhood home and realizing how much of it is gone but how much of the soul of it still remains, segueing into his relationship with Catholicism and how much he cherishes his relationships with his friends and his band members.
It’s all great, powerful stuff, but it’s not the lyrics to “Born to Run,” which I knew mentioned “suicide machines” somewhere near the beginning, if only because of a comedy routine from Robert Wuhl about the attempt to make the song the state anthem of New Jersey.1 Google also hilariously categorizes the song “Born to Run” as being “Folk.”
We can’t possibly expect super-intelligent labor-replacing thinking machines to do something as complex as correctly return the lyrics to one of the most famous American rock songs, so what’s really funny about this story is how long I read that, believing that there was an opening verse I’d forgotten, and trying to fit those words to the melody. “This doesn’t actually scan all that well, and was there always this much swearing?”
But everybody has heard “Born to Run” lots of times2, so why not listen to two other songs that I haven’t heard before, but also offer a theory as to why we’re here.
It’s entirely possible that I’ve heard “Born to Die” by Lana Del Rey before3, but it was just so languid that it failed to register in my brain as a stimulus.
Sorry, that’s mean. It’s fine, and I can imagine it works perfectly well as background music if Morcheeba isn’t available. And now I can finally say I’ve heard a song from the white-hot up-and-coming artist that everyone is raving about, as long as I go back in time 15 years to say it.
In the opposite corner, coming to us from the 70s and the suburbs of Paris, is Patrick Hernandez with “Born to be Alive.” I’d never heard this song, either, and based on the number of covers and remixes that are out there, I’m one of the few.
This song is delightful, because it feels like one of those improv shows, like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, asked a contestant to make up a song on the spot in the style of: “Disco!” that had to use a phrase suggested by the audience: “Born to Be Alive!” Refusing to over-think it, just saying random things, cool if they make sense, no worries if not. Living in the moment. Thriving.
The more I revisit songs from the 1970s and early 1980s, the more amazed I am at how easy it was to have a hit song back then. Sure, it feels like they had to shake Lana Del Rey out of bed and give her a fistful of amphetamines before she could work up enough energy to record a song, but once she was up, she put in the effort, dammit.
2025-09-02 08:14:38
Before I was aware that my income situation would be changing imminently, I ordered a Nintendo Switch 2 and a copy of Mario Kart World. I’ve got the original Switch and a big backlog of games I haven’t even come close to finishing, so the new one was a completely unnecessary luxury extravagance.
Reader, I have not regretted it. My husband and I have been playing a couple of races each night before or after dinner, and it’s been an absolute delight. After playing only single-player games for so long, and rarely even those, it’s been a great reminder of why video game consoles exist in the first place.
Back when I was trying to talk myself into getting the Switch 2, I read a bunch of Mario Kart World reviews that seemed to be desperate to throw a wet blanket on top of my enthusiasm, with accounts that seemed to go counter to every single image or video clip I’d seen from the game. A recurring theme in the reviews seemed to be that the racing segments weren’t markedly improved over the previous Mario Kart, and the free-roam driving mode felt barren and kind of pointless, because there wasn’t much to do.
I’m not sure what alternate universe those reviews were written in, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt as much unbridled joy while swearing so much at cartoon characters.1 And in free roam mode, the missions are the least interesting part for me. It’s all about the fun of exploring this ridiculously elaborate connected world full of weird discoveries.
I never had unlimited access to a Nintendo console before the N642, so there are huge sections of Nintendo history and entire casts of characters that I know only by reputation and from references in other games.
The occasional parts of the Mario Kart World that I do recognize hit especially hard. Oh, this area feels like Super Mario Sunshine, which I didn’t give enough credit to at the time, because it was really novel and delightful.
The other night I was driving around the Peach Stadium area, which is modeled after the castle at the center of Super Mario 64, and the music from the first level of that game started playing. It was one of those end-of-Ratatouille moments taking me back to the joy of first getting that game and simply running around the castle grounds, jumping and climbing trees and exploring.
What’s weirder is the parts that trigger nostalgia for things that I never played. I can recognize references to tracks from early Mario Kart games, like the farm, and a track surrounded by brightly-colored rounded blocks that I believe is based on the original game.
I knew that the ghost section of any Mario game is always the most clever and interesting, and the one in Mario Kart World doesn’t disappoint: a spooky abandoned Boo Cinema that has you leap into the screen and drive around in an old horror movie.
It’s interesting that it’s making so many references to what seems like the entire video game history of Nintendo, but it doesn’t really matter whether I get them or not. I know that the flying Moai heads are from one of the GameBoy games that I never played, and I’m vaguely aware that Goombas on giant ice skates calls back to one of the SNES games, I think. But I’m never exactly sure what parts are references and what parts are original creations for this game, and it just makes everything seem so much bigger.
There’s a train that seems to circle the entire map, and even though I haven’t tried it, it seems like you could jump on top and ride it through its entire circuit. I don’t have the free time I did when I was a kid, but I could totally imagine spending an entire afternoon doing nothing but that.
While the racing doesn’t feel that markedly different from the last Mario Kart — apart from the fact that more racers makes the AI races feel challenging again — just the sheer amount of stuff you can do makes it feel like a sampler of video game history. You can grind rails and wall ride, or find a half pipe and just do tricks over the edges, like in a Tony Hawk game. You can drive around, exploring secret warp pipes, and finding secret switches and coins like in Mario 64.
Sometimes you’re on the water, doing tricks off of the top of a wave, and it feels just like Wave Race even though I never played that. Sometimes you’re flying and trying to hit a series of mid-air boost targets, and it feels just like Pilotwings, even though I never played that, either. Mario Kart 8 already seemed to cram a billion different things into one game, and World said, “let’s do all that, and also add skate tricks and open world exploration.”
There’s such an obscene level of detail to everything — for instance, I only just noticed that as you drive through snow, your tires start to pick it up and turn white until it melts — that I have no doubt they’ve already got plans for years and years worth of DLC to populate the world with more stuff to do. I also have no doubt that I won’t even scratch the surface of unlocking everything in the base game before the DLC comes out.
The game is as much a celebration of the Mario franchise itself as its own thing, but I can’t really fault Nintendo for being an unstoppable video game entertainment juggernaut if they keep making things that are this joyful to play.
When we hit the end credits and I saw the huge list of programmers, I had a second of feeling like I was snapped out of a trance. Oh right, this is computer software, and people made it with programming and not just magic. I realize that sounds hell of corny, but how else do you describe it besides “magical” that they can make me nostalgic for games I never even played?
2025-09-01 10:38:03
One of my favorite scenes in The Roses is the first one, where Ivy and Theo Rose are at a relationship counseling session. They’ve been asked to compile lists of the ten things they still love about each other, and it’s immediately clear that they each struggled to come up with more than one.
But when Olivia Colman as Ivy finishes delivering the last one — a string of angry insults that she didn’t even bother to disguise, calling him a wanker and the C-word1 — there’s a beat, and then she and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Theo both crack up laughing, while the counselor looks on horrified. As they leave the office, they’re joking with each other that the counselor shouldn’t even be allowed to tell couples that there’s no hope for reconciliation, and that it was very unprofessional of her.
The reason I love that scene is because it does so much to establish the characters and their relationship, as well as the tone of the movie and what it’s going to be doing, all in one scene. It’s establishing that the movie’s not going to be pulling its punches, but it’s also not just an exercise in nihilism for its own sake. You can see immediately that this isn’t a couple who’s just going through a rough patch; they have serious, long-running issues that won’t be resolved with just a counseling session and a mutual apology. But there’s still the core of something that makes them perfect for each other, so there’s still a chance that the movie could end differently from what you expect.
It’s especially remarkable considering that the filmmakers aren’t sure what the audience is going to expect. A lot of people are likely to be coming in knowing little other than that it’s got two extremely charismatic movie stars playing a fighting married couple. Meanwhile, people closer to my age are inevitably going to be comparing it to the 1989 adaptation of the book from Danny DeVito, Kathleen Turner, and Michael Douglas, and coming in with a huge set of expectations based on that.
I really liked that movie when it came out, and I remember its feeling unlike anything I’d seen from a Hollywood movie before. My memory of it has aged about as well as my memory of myself from that time period, though: it was a movie for edgelords before anybody was using the term “edgelords.” Its feeling unlike anything else from Hollywood was the entire point. Which more or less doomed it to irrelevance.
All I remember from it are the pointedly cruel moments. Turner insisting that letting the kids have sweets whenever they want means they’ll not see it as special and therefore never get fat, and then fast forward a few years to where the kids are both fat. Accidentally killing the family cat, and then in retaliation, deliberately killing and eating the family dog2. And of course, the iconic final scene as they both lie underneath the chandelier, and Douglas makes one last gesture of reconciliation.
I also remember the last monologue from DeVito’s lawyer character, which starts with (paraphrased), “So what can we learn from this, apart from the fact that cat people should marry cat people and dog people should marry dog people?” It’s a good line, obviously, or I wouldn’t still remember it so many years later. But it draws attention to how there’s not much of anything at the movie’s core.
It exists to be mean. And I think that’s entirely deliberate. It was extremely reactionary, specifically intended to be a rejection of the Hollywood formula with happy endings or valuable lessons and a list of taboos you absolutely should never break.
So I can imagine some people watching The Roses and going away feeling like it sanded down the rough edges. That it couldn’t fully commit to being a satirical black comedy. That it refused to let its characters go over the line into being irredeemable. I completely disagree, for two reasons: the first is that there’d simply be no point in going for shock value. That’s already been done. And the bar for shock value has been raised so high by 2025 that they’d have to behave so deplorably as to be completely unlikeable.
The more important reason is that the movie is back to being about something more than satire. It’s very funny and often silly, much funnier than I remember The War of the Roses ever being, but the couple at its core feel genuine and interesting.
I don’t recall anything from The War of the Roses that showed me why Douglas and Turner’s characters fell in love with each other. I just kind of took it for granted because they were movie stars and besides didn’t you all see Romancing the Stone? I mean that’s chemistry!
But Ivy and Theo’s first meeting is instantly electric. You can see why there’s an immediate attraction: She’s charming and obviously talented, but so flippant and sardonic that you can tell that people have a hard time reading her. Meanwhile, he really is kind of a self-important wanker, but not so delicate that he can’t laugh at his own expense, and he can return her banter perfectly and effortlessly. They both seem to know exactly what they want, and what they want at the moment is exactly the same thing.
And that carries on throughout. There does seem to be a genuine connection between the two of them that never gets lost amidst their increasingly dysfunctional marriage.
There’s an interesting twist in this version, where Colman and Cumberbatch’s Britishness is used for maximum effect, instead of just “we wanted to cast these two.” All of Theo’s extremely awful American friends3 think it’s fun and fascinating and so British how Ivy and Theo can so casually say cruel things to each other without losing the affection that’s underneath. There’s a disastrous dinner party where they try it themselves, and they fail horrifically, both because they’re just not clever people, but because they’re all buried under tons of resentment for each other that they aren’t able to conceal.
It’s funny but also clever because it shows that there’s really nothing “British” about it; Ivy and Theo are unique because they understand each other, and might be the only people in the world who can genuinely understand each other. But they’re also so casually sardonic that they get the pressure release of feeling like their resentments are getting revealed and resolved, when they’re actually being dismissed as a joke. At one point, Ivy cheerfully tells Theo “I hate everyone besides us,” and it’s perfectly charming, but you can also tell how true it is.
Another thing I don’t remember from The War of the Roses is whether the problems with the relationship felt so one-sided. In The Roses, it feels as if literally everything in the movie is ultimately Theo’s fault. There’s a little bit of a 21st century gender swap here, where it’s Theo who’s resentful of having to take care of the kids while Ivy is occupied with work, but that arrangement is because of Theo’s arrogance which led to a very public failure, and Ivy did the same for years without complaining. She accuses him of a ton of faults, and they all seem evident4, but her only real flaw seems to be that she’s so flippant and sardonic that she fails to treat anything with their relationship seriously.
I’m still not sure whether I consider that to be a problem with the movie, though. Making their relationship feel more genuine, instead of just a vehicle for black comedy, means recognizing that adult relationships and adult arguments aren’t always about who’s right and who’s wrong, but about what’s really important.
Ultimately, the most shocking thing about The Roses is that it presents two characters designed just to be a ticking time bomb counting down until everything explodes in cruelty and violence, but I still cared about what happened to them.