#54: The Final Destination was the Friendship we made along the way
Death By Consumption
5/13/25 - 5/19/25
I guess I should mention up front that it is my birthday today, which always makes me feel like a child when I have to acknowledge it. I'm the princess today! Treat me as such. Anyway, I'm thirtywhatever, and this email is going to be a shorter one, because I'm not spending my precious birthday writing emails, are you insane?
This week, I saw two big stupid hilarious new movies, and read two mean-spirited and disgusting books.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
The new Final Destination is one of those perfect movies to watch in the theater — thank you once again to Tom Cruise for saving the theater industry! We screamed with laughter along with a packed crowd at each Looney Tunes-ass death. This is an instant camp classic, a knowingly stupid film that understands the grotesque magic of the Final Destination series. It excels at activating those nervous, anticipatory giggles that build as you watch, say, a screw pop loose from a mechanical device, or a sharp object teetering on the edge of something, as you eagerly wait for something horrible to happen to someone. (This is the only movie I've ever been to in which an audience of people cheered when a child died.)
The genius of this new installment is that it takes the premise of all the earlier movies in the series and ups the stakes, as a proper sequel/reboot should — in this one, the opening premonition of (spectacular, hilarious) mass death takes place in the 1960s, and hundreds of lives are saved. Death is pissed at missing out on his victims, as "he" often is in these films, so he spends the next few decades methodically hunting down the people who survived, and eliminating not only them, but their entire bloodlines, who should have never existed. It's a perfect way to add a new wrinkle to the series without overly complicating it, because the movie correctly knows that we don't care that much about the plot — just get it out of the way and start Rube Goldberging people to death!
This is, really, just a perfect early summer film, the theatrical equivalent of a ride at Coney Island. I screamed, I laughed, I practically threw my damn arms in the air. I had a great time! And after we left the theater, the wind had picked up, and it had become an extremely breezy day. Which meant we walked home while keeping a nervous eye on every swaying traffic light or passing car — surely, I thought, that traffic light could fall in front of a car, which would then swerve and hit a curb, which would pop its tire off, which could then fly through the air and decapitate me, no? It's possible! Stay vigilant out there!
Friendship (2025) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
The theme this week is perfect dumb movies, and Friendship might be the most perfectly dumb movie of the year. Anyone familiar with Tim Robinson's whole schtick from I Think You Should Leave will know what they're getting when they go into this, and clearly our audience did, bursting into laughter at merely the first glimpse of his face. Every time Tim appeared on screen, nervous ripples of laughter spread through the crowd, anticipating what sort of outrageous thing he might do next — a bit like the way we nervously anticipated the hilarious deaths in Final Destination, in fact.
While this is, technically, a movie, it's mostly a collection of comedy sketches that have been laundered into a film (this is a compliment). As a result, every scene holds that nervous, cringey feeling Tim Robinson's comedy gives you, where you're never sure where the jokes are going to come from, or what direction the scene is about to spin out into. You spend most of the movie at a low simmer, eager to see what stupid shit he's about to throw at you next.
That's not to say that there isn't a story to the movie; in fact, I was pleasantly surprised by its depth at times. (This is, to be clear, a film in which an ayahuasca journey takes place in a Subway restaurant.) The film could have simply been an exploration of the "male loneliness epidemic" that we all loooove to hear so much about lately, but it thankfully goes deeper than that one note — particularly with Paul Rudd's character, who begins the movie as the coolest guy you could ever meet (a local weatherman who plays in a band, of course), but gradually reveals much more interesting and complex layers.
Look, straight men are not okay right now, and in fact I kind of want most of them to stay away from me, but I'll give them this: they do sometimes know how to make good comedies.
The Coin, by Yasmin Zaher (2024) — library ebook
This book, the first novel by a Palestinian-American journalist, tells the story of an unnamed narrator, a Palestinian teacher living in New York, who starts to have an exceedingly strange mental breakdown. The book's plot is relatively aimless — at one point, she gets caught up in a complicated scheme to resell Birkins to unfashionable people, a plot that's dropped as quickly as it's picked up — but it moves along at a quick pace in short, fierce chapters. The narrator, who left Palestine thanks to an inheritance from her rich parents as well as the rich semi-boyfriend she takes advantage of, appears to be torn between her status as a displaced person and an American obsessed with consumerism. It's a brilliantly strange and satiric look at America from an insider with outsider's eyes, like when she observes:
The TV advertisements freaked me out, they were always on opposite ends of the spectrum, on one end the fast food and cars, on the other end the insurance and pharmaceuticals. No, I couldn't buy a TV, I was scared of American culture. When I say that, I don't mean the right to bear arms, I mean wedding dresses and obesity.
The narrator herself is spectacularly mean-spirited and often disgusting... so I loved her. At one point she observes: "I was sure that Paul was gay, his pelvis gave it away, it tilted backward." At another point, she says, "I told him I had decided to become vegan, that it was the best thing ever, and I whispered to him, it's like an anal orgasm first thing in the morning." This narrator is a freak, and it's equally disgusting and thrilling to be in her head for an entire book. It's all very Ottessa Moshfegh, which, speaking of....
Lapvona, by Ottessa Moshfegh (2022) — paperback
This week was all about reading disgusting female authors! Ottessa Moshfegh has always been one of those authors whose work I haven't necessarily loved, but one whose work I do compulsively need to read. And Lapvona may have been my favorite book of hers yet, even if it was extremely difficult to stomach at times. Set in a vaguely medieval period in a vaguely Northern European town, this is a book full of disgusting people acting disgustingly, as we've come to expect from our girl Ottessa.
Lapvona is filled with horrific images — a 100-year-old woman breastfeeding old men, a nun with her tongue cut out, rape, incest, people eating grapes out of people's asses...... it's, like, a lot. And while sometimes it feels graphic for the sake of graphicness, it's all in service of showing Ottessa's main point in, really, all of her work: that humans are grotesque creatures, no better than animals, and once things start going badly, we will always reveal our true selves. Just some light reading material, really!