#37: Jesse Eisenberg, you will be dealt with

Death By Consumption

1/14/25 - 1/20/25

I don't know about you, but I am loving how cheap eggs are today. It's just so good to know that finally power is back where it belongs: in the hands of white crypto scammers. Over the past week, I couldn't believe how many powerful people surgically removed their spines in real time, and desperately jostled to see who could shove their tongue farthest up Trump's rank asshole.

When asked about their previous stances on diversity, immigration, queer people, helping poor people, basically anything do with morals at all, this was the official statement of every single business leader and politician this week:

A lot of people are going to absolutely humiliate themselves over the next 4 years, but at least the shareholders will be happy!

As an extremely on-the-nose portentous icy wind descended on the country over the past week, I watched a lot of 2024 movies I hadn't yet seen — a few I loved, and one I hated — because despite the horrors, Oscar season approaches, and the consumption must not stop! I also did a fair amount of hate-reading: one acclaimed book I thought was a dud, and as many articles as I could find about why Elon Musk is so deeply, painfully pathetic.

Queer (2024) — bought on Apple

Luca Guadagnino is really into homosexual yearning, huh! This didn't do to me what Challengers did, but I still enjoyed it. It's gorgeous and strange, attempting to capture the drug-addled vibe of William S. Burroughs' writing, and mostly succeeding at it, I think. It all feels vaguely dreamlike, with characters drifting in and out, so I was thankful for Daniel Craig's performance, which keeps you with at least one foot on the ground. It's so fun to see James Bond like this, nervously giggling over a man, shoving his tongue in his throat, going down on him, etc. etc. etc. This won't enter the canon of Luca iconography, but it's stunning to look at — that set design! — and though I know it's not the woke opinion to have, I always have a good time gasping at straight actors playing gay. The sexy scandal of it all! Rachel Weisz is so blessed.

A Real Pain (2024) — on Hulu

Have you ever wanted a New Yorker cartoon to last 90 minutes? A Real Pain's title set itself up for an obvious joke review I won't make, but let me just say: wow, this was so annoying! Jesse Eisenberg has always made my skin crawl, and I think it's safe to say his writing and directing is not for me. If this movie were made 10 or 15 years earlier, you'd find it in a bin of $4.99 DVDs at Walmart alongside Little Miss Sunshine and 500 Days of Summer.

Jesse Eisenberg, I don't know who told you you could act, but someone lied to you several times. He gives a handful of dreadfully overwrought monologues, during which he tries to squeeze out a tear that never comes, and to make it worse, it never really makes sense why he's even giving these monologues. Kieran Culkin, meanwhile, is fine, but doing things we've all seen him do many times before. If you want to watch Kieran do this style of performance, there are far better film and TV options for you to choose from.

I was mostly left wondering what compelled Jesse Eisenberg to write this. For a film about death and loss and the Holocaust, one where the characters go to an actual concentration camp, I found it all strangely emotionless — the characters are definitely telling you they're having emotions, but I'm not sure they actually are! The only thing that got me through were the performances of Will Sharpe, finally able to unleash his very cute British accent, and Jennifer Grey, who felt like the only truly real character in the whole film. Can't some legacy media publication give Jesse Eisenberg an anodyne weekly "humor" column to write so we can be done with him?

A Different Man (2024) — on MAX

Unexpectedly, one of the best movies of 2024. It deals with its heavy themes — self-perception, disability, art — with such humor and intelligence, and is perfectly calibrated to fuck with the audience as the story twists in upon itself. Based on this single film, writer-director Aaron Schimberg feels like the second coming of Charlie Kaufman, someone who can take an original, specific premise and push it to its wacky limits, while somehow making these wild, surreal characters feel universal. Sebastian Stan is fantastic throughout, and then Adam Pearson comes in and rightfully upstages him in one of the funniest performances of the year. If nothing else, it's so good to see a movie that feels like a real New York City film again, and one that's a comedy with actually funny jokes (the John Wilkes Booth joke........ a stunning achievement in dumb humor). Out of everything I watched this week, this is the one I can't stop thinking about.

Evil Does Not Exist (2024) — on Criterion

This is such a quiet, haunting film. The plot is minimal — two reps from a Tokyo development company have tension with the locals of the rural area their company is trying to construct in — and the story unfolds at a near-glacial pace. It's a story of what happens when nature and humans collide, and how society values the environment. The message of the film isn't subtle, but it plays out so gradually and softly that it still sneaks up on you. I will admit, there were moments where I struggled to stay awake, with the long, languid shots of nature and the hypnotic soundtrack lulling me to sleep, so it's probably best to not start watching this at like 10 pm like we did.

To Die For (1995) — on Criterion

"You're not anybody in America if you're not on TV. Because what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching?"

It's wild that this movie predated the majority of reality TV, let alone social media, but somehow Gus Van Sant and Nicole Kidman captured this portrait of the uniquely American brand of narcissism before it fully took over society. Nicole straddles the line between naive and psychopathic with ease, and a baby-faced 20-year-old Joaquin Phoenix shows that, yep, he's just kind of always been like that. The perfect film for our Luigi-worshipping, true crime-obsessed, livestreaming modern world. I'm surprised but relieved no one has tried to remake this with a TikTok girly yet.

"Severance" season 2, episode 1 — on Apple TV+

Three years between seasons is criminal. Someone needs to look into what's going on with TV production these days, because something is deeply broken. Money laundering? It's probably money laundering.

Anyway, after finding a desperately needed 15-minute "what happened in season 1" explainer on YouTube, we dove into season 2, and I was pleased that Severance hadn't lost its stride in the 1/3 of a decade it took off. The show is still great, folks, what can I say! Like a Civil War veteran's wife, I'm furious it left me for so long, but when I saw it had returned I collapsed to my knees.

Real Americans, by Rachel Khong (2024) — hardcover

This book was a mega-bestseller (my copy shamefully displays the little "Read With Jenna!" sticker on it, letting people on the subway know I only read books recommended by the children of war criminals) and I'm a little baffled as to why. It deals with big themes — self-determination, immigration, death, Mao — but it doesn’t really explore them deeply, or have anything new to say. There’s a subplot about gene editing that kind of comes and goes. It dabbles in magical realism, but only when it feels like it. It feels like she wrote a very standard story about three generations of immigrants in America, and then realized it needed a hook so she sprinkled in a few sci-fi moments, but kept the sci-fi vague and unimportant enough to not turn off the Jenna Bushes of the world.

But what really bothered me was the writing, which was staggeringly basic. Nearly every page had at least one sentence that was so banal I couldn't believe it wasn't a stylistic choice, but I don't think it was. I read Rachel Khong's debut, Goodbye, Vitamin, but I don't remember a single thing that happened in it, so I suspect she might just be like that — a flat, toneless writer. Look at this:

"While a revolution happened all around us, it was in love that I felt most that I was experiencing it — revolution, I mean. The feeling that, together, the two of us could change the world."

The majority of the book is like this, slapping you across the face with its themes, as if Rachel Khong is paranoid that we won't understand the brilliant layers of her story. Don't you see? The real Americans were immigrants all along! Maybe I'm being too harsh; maybe a Bush getting this book into the hands of an "I'm not racist but..." MAGA lady will do some good, but this was not a book for me.

Sockeye Salmon Jerky — from Fable Fish Co.

My dear friend Meghan comes from a family of Alaskan fishers, so when she launched a new line of salmon jerky, I signed up to be a taste-tester. I was nervous about it, because the concept of salmon jerky made me feel a bit queasy. I'm not a jerky fan in general — it always smells like a bag of farts — let alone fish jerky, but the idea that I could support a friend simply by eating was too good an offer to pass up. And, you know what? I loved it! The jerky was way easier to bite into than typical leather-hard beef jerky, and it tasted more like salt and the sea than, like, fish. The craziest part was how much protein was packed into it — 31 grams for the tiniest amount of jerky you've ever seen. As I chewed, I pictured my pecs swelling to Chris Evans' D-cups.

I'll be honest, though: I don't think you can buy this yet, and I don't really know what the next steps would be to fix that. Write to your congressperson? Yell at a Whole Foods employee? Either way, whenever this is on a shelf near you, I suggest buying it for your next road trip over any other jerky, so you don't fill the car with that horrible fart smell. Your friends will thank you.

"I knew one day I'd have to watch powerful men burn the world down — I just didn't expect them to be such losers" by Rebecca Shaw — in the Guardian

This article went viral over the weekend, I think because we all needed a bit of catharsis after the parade of loser men kissing our loser President's feet. There's nothing overwhelmingly new in it, but it's always nice to read a quick, silly little post that you completely agree with. Sometimes being in my bubble is nice! At least the people in my bubble are actually funny. I can't imagine how bleak an existence it must be for the people who, to maintain their own self-delusion, have to try to find Elon Musk's attempts at humor funny. Anyway, for the rest of us, we have this:

Unfortunately, while you may be able to buy power, it’s impossible to buy a good personality. Watching his Nigel-no-friends attempts to be popular, his endless pathetic tweets that read as though they come from the brain of an 11-year-old poser, has made me start to believe we should bring back bullying. If yet another humiliating report in the last couple of days is to be believed, he appears even to have lost the respect of some of his gamer audience, who the report claims suspect that he may have been lying about his achievements in hardcore gaming (cursed sentence).

These men are going to try to control every aspect of our lives, but at least they're miserable with their own existence, too!

"The Musklash" by Max Read — on Read Max

For those who want to dive deeper into how pathetic Elon Musk is as a person, Max Read has a great explanation of how Elon got a huge amount of gamers — his core audience, really! — to turn on him. Basically, he got caught lying about how good he is at video games, like a child, and doubled-down by going to war against one of the most popular streamers in the gaming world. This man is always playing 4D chess, folks! This post is full of hilarious, baffling glimpses into a terrifying world I've mostly avoided, most notably this horrifying little fact about the main gamer Elon is feuding with:

There is something particularly funny about the world’s most prominent and successful weird reactionary nerd managing to be so weird that he alienates gamers, and there are few people more embarrassing to lose an argument with than Asmongold, a man known to stream while roaches climb over him.

Reading this and then seeing that Vivek has already been kicked out of DOGE (ugh) for being too annoying (and, let's face it, too Indian) is the only thing keeping me going as we kick off this new reign of terror. I hope these freaks eat each other alive.