2025-08-20 01:30:00
This week’s tunes were initially going to be in honor of Universal City Walk, the two songs I hear most often being blasted at full volume while I’m just trying to walk to see a movie. But honestly, I can’t bear to listen to “My Universe” by Coldplay and BTS again. So I’ll just start with the other one:
The thing that makes me think I might be just homosexual instead of full-on gay is that I’m mostly unmoved by “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga.
Don’t get me wrong; that performance on SNL (YouTube link just above) is phenomenal. As was her stumbling-through-the-hallways-of-30-Rock performance of “Killah” in the same episode. She’s amazing, and she never seems to give less than a superstar performance of anything.
But the music itself just doesn’t connect with me. “Abracadabra” in particular just sounds to me like a Lady Gaga sampler: a little bit of the “Bad Romance” thing mixed with maybe “Paparazzi” or “Poker Face?” If she’s not dressed up in red and hopping around like a cartoon demon, I’m not into it.
Maybe it’s a generational thing. When I was a kid, I thought “Abracadabra” by the Steve Miller Band was really catchy.
It was a simpler time, and our pop stars were more relatable. There’s no way in hell I’d ever in a million years be able to do a fraction of a percentage of the stuff that Lady Gaga did live, twice, on top of appearing in multiple sketches and a digital short. But I could totally have written and sung this version of “Abracadabra.” I bet when Steve Miller came up with “reach out and grab ya,” he thought “nailed it!” and called it a day.
2025-08-19 08:51:29
Last weekend, I had a really nice day at Disneyland with a group of friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, or was getting to hang out with for the first time. Over the past few weeks and ongoing to the end of the month, I’ve been trying to cram in as many trips to the parks as I can tolerate, until I can no longer get in for free.
My attitude towards the parks has been gradually shifting over the last few years, as a result of getting older, of being in a position to go more often, and frankly just the value proposition of not having to pay to get in. It’s meant taking things at a more leisurely pace, not focused as much (or occasionally, at all) on cramming in as many rides as possible, and enjoying the spaces not so much as theme parks, but as parks.
But there’s diminishing returns on that. I like to think I’m about as self-aware as a Disney adult can get, so I’ve heard and considered most of the common complaints re: hanging out in spaces meant for children (they’re meant for families, not just children). Or how everything is “fake” (I’m interested in theme park design, so the “fakeness” is a plus). Or how people like me keep visiting familiar parks instead of “real” places (I value comfort over adventure in my vacations, and I suspect that’s common and people are just embarrassed to admit it). Or how everything is so expensive (okay, yes).
And I’m also aware that a huge part of going to theme parks over and over again is just chasing nostalgia. Associating happy memories with a place, and going back to that place in an attempt to recreate that feeling. Even though that’s all but impossible, because that feeling depended not just on the place, but that specific time in your life, and the people you were with.
When you spend all your time either in the parks, seeing advertising for the parks, seeing unpaid advertising in the form of YouTubers visiting the parks, seeing people on social media talking about the parks, and, on rare occasions, working in or for the parks, it’s easy to forget that the point isn’t the parks.
And I don’t think that’s a completely fatuous observation, but it’s also not controversial, the One Secret About Theme Parks That Disney Doesn’t Want You To Know About. It’s part of their history and part of their marketing. They just opened an attraction quoting Walt Disney as saying he wanted Disneyland as a place he could enjoy with his daughters. And every ad campaign I’m aware of has sold the parks as unique destinations with experiences you won’t find anywhere else, but they almost always show guests enjoying them with friends and family.
For my birthday this year, my husband and I had a weekend staycation at Disneyland. The hotel room was really, really nice, all the cast members we interacted with were really friendly, we got some time in the pools, and it was a very nice weekend overall. But my favorite memory of the entire time was standing in Downtown Disney listening to a cover band singing Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and the two of us singing along with the chorus. It could’ve happened anywhere, and it’s not something you could recreate even if you tried; in fact, the harder you tried, the less likely you’d be able to recreate it.
I think it’s useful for anybody — not just Disney adults, by any means — to engage in a little introspection every now and then, to consider exactly why you love your hobbies and remember what really makes them special. To consider whether the appeal is the thing itself, or if it’s really just a backdrop for the things you truly value.
2025-08-19 03:05:46
Book
Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak
Synopsis
Mallory is a recovering drug addict working to get her life back on track, and through her sponsor, she manages to land a dream job as live-in nanny for a wealthy family in an affluent neighborhood. Teddy, the bright and imaginative child in her care, loves to draw and is constantly sharing his happy pictures with his parents and new friend Mallory. But the pictures often include Anya, his imaginary friend. And as he gets closer to Mallory, he shares increasingly unsettling pictures suggesting a violent crime and a vengeful spirit that lives inside the house.
Notes
I can’t say for sure whether the cover blurb from Stephen King stuck the idea in my head, but I got very strong vibes of classic King stories from this one. The writing is confident and straightforward in a way that compels you to keep reading, but it’s also good at establishing mood and getting you into the mindset of its main character, so it never feels like it’s just skipping along the surface of a shallow page-turner.
And like the best (imo) King stories, there’s the suggestion of mildly supernatural abilities on the part of the protagonist that make her uniquely suited to driving the story.
The inclusion of Teddy’s drawings could have been a gimmick, but I thought they were so well done that they’re crucial to the book. Reading this at night gave me a jump scare in a way that felt cinematic. An appendix in my version has an interesting interview between the author and his artist friends who created the drawings, and it talks about their process and includes some of their work on the way to settling on the final versions. It was a nice touch to acknowledge how much they’re an essential part of the novel.
The author also acknowledges that he was influenced by The Turn of the Screw, which isn’t surprising but made me happy to see the explicit acknowledgment. Maybe it’s just that my bar has been lowered too far by “the hot new New York Times bestseller!” marketing, but I just appreciated seeing an author approach popular fiction with a literary mindset, even if it doesn’t have the pretense of being literary fiction.
This is definitely more of a thriller than a horror story, and I thought it was excellent at maintaining an oppressively creepy mood and ratcheting up the tension in believable ways. The conceit of the protagonist being in recovery is outstanding, since there’s a baseline sense of dread and tension before it even layers on the ghost story mystery: this job is so important to her, and she knows that she’ll be perceived as untrustworthy, so she’s in constant fear not just of the ghost, but of how she’ll lose everything if she dares to tell anyone what’s happening. And it’s threatening not just her, but an innocent child she’s gotten attached to.
And not really related to the book, but something I thought was interesting: I was googling to get an idea of the book, to find out whether I should barrel through as fast as I could before my library loan ran out. At least at the time I’m writing this, the top non-professional reviews on Reddit and Goodreads both seem to be written by the same person, and they each trash the book for being “right-wing propaganda.” It was interesting because it seemed like a willful attempt to misinterpret everything in the book, and it’s so couched in “terminally online” speak that it reads like a parody.
I feel like it says something about the current “trust nothing you read” state of the internet that I’m suspicious it’s even real, since its prominent placement in search results makes it seem like viral marketing to keep conversation about the book alive.
Verdict
Surprisingly solid, and the first half is excellently tense and creepy. The conclusion is very implausible but still satisfying enough, and the author is careful to show his work and explain the significance of all the clues he’d set up along the way, but even if it didn’t go a little off the rails (again, in the manner of classic Stephen King), it couldn’t live up to the mood and tension of the first half. I really enjoyed it, and I think it works well as a supernatural thriller, a creepy ghost story, and a murder mystery.
2025-08-17 01:00:00
The whole point of my doing the “One Thing I Like” thing is to try1 to prevent my natural tendency to write thousands of words to sum up everything a movie is about, which is ultimately unnecessary because that’s what the movie is for.
But it turns out that Drive-Away Dolls is perfectly suited for this format. Because there’s quite a bit of stuff to like in it, even though the movie as a whole didn’t really work for me. Occasionally to the point of making me uncomfortable.
Not in the ways that it’s probably supposed to make me uncomfortable, inventing a new genre of Lesbian Slapstick Neo-Noir Rom-Com.2 It’s not all the dildos and oral sex that made me cringe, although it did at times seem like it was trying too hard to push the uptight normies out of their comfort zones. Instead, it was the slapstick.
Pedro Pascal gets pretty high billing in the movie, even though he’s only in one scene3 right at the beginning. In that scene, he’s really playing up the “fey, skittish, weirdo completely out of his element” angle, and he does it well enough that you can read all of those ideas even from limited screen time and a few lines of dialogue, mostly from his mannerisms. But it’s frustrating, because he’s playing it like he’s in a screwball comedy, and it feels like the right choice, and it feels like the other characters are making the right choices, but none of it really works together.
That’s true throughout. I’m reluctant to make a point of the fact that it was directed and co-written by Ethan Coen, because that’s kind of lazy, and it doesn’t seem fair to compare a movie to the filmmakers’ other work instead of considering it on its own merits. But there’s just no getting around it: this feels like someone trying to assemble a Coen Brothers movie, and they’ve got all the necessary components, but somehow they’ve lost the instructions.
There are flashes here and there. Like when Curlie is lying beaten on the floor of his office, papers falling onto his face, and he laments, “Won’t anybody save Curlie?”
And Beanie Feldstein’s character of a perpetually (and justifiably) angry cop. She just seems to understand exactly the kind of movie she’s in, and she hits the right level throughout.
But the standout for me was, unsurprisingly, Margaret Qualley’s performance. “Unsurprisingly” because I just think she’s great, and she repeatedly throws herself completely into projects that she thinks are cool4, even though she honestly could get away with a lot less effort just coasting on her own natural charisma.
In Drive-Away Dolls, she has to play what is essentially a cartoon, a chaotic and chaotically sex-positive free spirit who talks a lot and says everything and anything that is on her mind. It’s meant to contrast her against her more uptight and repressed friend — and again, Geraldine Viswanathan makes the right choices, but is stuck with being more or less the straight man (extremely ironically). Qualley’s character seems to exist entirely on the surface, with nothing to ground her and nothing to suggest layers.
But there’s one scene while the two of them are driving, and a conversation about the work of Henry James and a graphic description of cunnilingus turns into her having to acknowledge that she was careless and to apologize.
It’s not that it’s a particularly deep scene; the movie itself isn’t that deep. It tosses out a lot of ideas about repression and authenticity and performative morality, mocking hypocritical Republican identity politics in a way that’s not just unsubtle but explicit. But the scene’s interesting because it’s the first indication we get that Qualley’s character Jamie doesn’t actually say everything that’s on her mind, that there is a person underneath the cartoon.
I feel like I know at this point how to “read” a Coen Brothers movie, and a lot of that same language is in this movie. Characters are either cartoonishly over-the-top, or comically reserved and under-played, and the humor comes from seeing the extremes play off against each other. It’s rare to see a performance that manages to be both cartoonish and (relatively) understated in the same scene.
I watched this movie in anticipation of seeing Honey Don’t, which seems to be another case of Qualley throwing herself completely into a noir comedy from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. (According to the internet, it’s the second film in a planned trilogy?) Even though Drive-Away Dolls didn’t totally work for me, I’m still on board. Seeing all the right components can still be fun and interesting, even when they don’t quite come together.
2025-08-14 03:47:27
One thing I like about K-Pop Demon Hunters is that there’s so much stuff in it that I hate.
I can’t imagine that there were a lot of discussions during the making of this movie where they were trying to figure out how best to make it appeal to childless white American men in their 50s1, but there was still a lot for me to latch onto, making me want to find out what all the buzz was about.
I’m a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a modern spin on fighting demons will never fail to interest me. I’m far too ignorant of Korean culture to know exactly what is informed by traditional art and mythology, and what was created for the movie, but the designs of the demons are awesome. And there are a magical tiger and three-eyed (six-eyed?) magpie with an awesome hat, that certainly feel like they’re referencing something far older.
Plus, Sony Animation has been absolutely killing it for several years now, cranking out movies that hit exactly the right balance between artistically masterful and distinctive, and solid, accessible storytelling.2
But no matter how much I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to get into anime or manga beyond the predictable, universally beloved entry points like Cowboy Bebop or Escaflowne. And beyond the “not my thing, but whatever” aspects, K-Pop Demon Hunters comes right out with a lot that’s on my “actively dislike” list:
So I was kind of primed for this one to throw me off, to hit the one false note that made it feel insincere and factory-generated, or the one flourish that made it feel as if it were just capitalizing on a popular style instead of being an authentic expression. And it just couldn’t lose me. It’s simply too fun, too charming, and its characters are too appealing that it feels near impossible not to enjoy it.
One of the recurring images that I like a lot is when the movie would cut to reactions from super-fans of the main band Huntrix. It would almost always include a tight-knit trio of aunties or grandmas, and a separate trio of young men freaking out over the band.
So much of the plot revolves around the band’s popularity, with the idea that their popularity is how they get their power, so I thought it was a cute gag to show how universally beloved they’d become. It wasn’t just the girls and young women you’d expect, but everybody loves Huntrix.
But as the story develops, the idea is shown to have a little more nuance: it’s not just the popularity that’s giving them power, but the genuine connection with their fans. This is made more and more explicit as the story goes on; the rival boy band that’s become popular not just because of their surface appeal, but because their music feeds and then feeds off of the audience’s negativity. Angering Huntrix into making a diss track that doesn’t feel right3, and later taking advantage of listeners’ insecurities, self-doubt, and self-loathing.
And we see reactions from the elderly women and the young men throughout, and it drives home that distinction between shallow fandom — “I like this because I’m supposed to” or “I like this because it’s in the category of stuff that’s made for me” — and genuine connection.
I’m a big fan of accessibility and approachability in art and entertainment, and I’m always banging the drum of art that meets people where they’re at. The obvious risk is that art that doesn’t challenge your preconceived notions, and doesn’t demand that you put real thought into analyzing what it’s saying or how it works, will leave you with no opportunity to grow or change or expand how you see the world and see yourself.
But as it turns out, there’s more than one way to challenge your own preconceived notions, and even a fairly simple and straightforward story can expand your horizons a little bit. Just by inviting you to engage with it, completely ignoring any silly questions like “is this even meant for me?”
2025-08-13 01:00:00
Love Story came out the year before I was born, and it was extremely popular, so I’ve been hearing its theme song for most of my life. It was so ubiquitous, in fact, that I just started thinking of it as shorthand for “schmaltzy elevator music” and stopped paying attention the second I recognized it.
I even forgot that it has lyrics. Shirley Bassey’s version does the thing she does the absolute best, which is make any lyrics, no matter how insipid or shallow, sound as if they are the most profound and powerful poetry.
But because I never paid attention to the lyrics, I just assumed what the gist was from the title: being so deeply in love with someone that you can no longer tell where you end and they begin. (Or vice versa).
As it turns out, it’s more prosaic than that. More “I’m so much in love with this dude that I don’t know how to even start talking about it.” Which I guess is less codependent, but is a little disappointing after spending so long thinking it was more existentially romantic.
So I think ultimately I prefer the Chemical Brothers’ take on “Where Do I Begin.” Which could be an account of an existential crisis, or it could just be about waking up with a hangover after a one-night stand. Either way, it builds to a pretty spectacular drum break. And love means never having to say you’re sorry for appreciating a good drum break.