#61: The Survivor card game will ruin your family gathering
Death By Consumption
7/1/25 - 7/7/25
I’m writing this on a plane, swaddled in the loving bosom of Delta’s very last row, returning to NY after a week in Wisconsin. Going straight from Fire Island to my parents’ house was a rough transition — seeing straight people again felt like landing on the moon. So forgive another short one this week, as my brain is still somewhat on summer break. Will it ever return? I hope not!
This week, I snoozed through the big new movie, I backstabbed family members in the Survivor card game, and I read a lot of short stories.
Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) — at Marcus Oshkosh Cinema
I’ll give Jurassic World Rebirth this: it finally got me to meditate, by making me sit quietly for over 2 hours while feeling absolutely nothing. This was nearly two and a half hours of flat, boring, unoriginal slop that, much like its mutant dino creations, should have been aborted for the sake of the planet.
Intentionally positioned as a throwback to the original Jurassic Park, this new worthless sequel basically does all the things that we loved in the first movie, but worse. Remember the iconic scene where the raptors hunt the kids in the kitchen? What if we did it again, but with less-memorable dinosaurs, in a more boring setting, with zero tension or visual flair? Wouldn’t that be fun? Oh, and remember when Sam Neill and Laura Dern are awestruck by the herd of dinosaurs for the first time? What if we did that again, but with dumber-looking dinosaurs and forced emotions from one-dimensional characters? As the famous film critic Tony Soprano said: “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation,” and this movie is 2.5 hours of “remember when.”
The longer it went on, the more irritated I got (and not just because the people next to us had brought their four-year-old, who was running around in the aisles while these worthless parents futilely shushed their own daughter — why are you shushing your toddler instead of just taking her home!). This is such a waste of a good cast, and it’s unfortunate that, in a major blockbuster that was led exclusively by a woman, gay man, and Black and Latino actors, they were all given absolutely nothing of value to work with. The entire script is as flat as Scarlett Johansson’s acting.
Plot-wise, would you be surprised to learn that dinosaurs have run amok on a South American island, and a ragtag group of mercenaries, scientists, and one nefarious businessman need to go to the island to retrieve something important? I know, it’s shocking! What’s most infuriating about this tired plot is that the beginning of the movie hints at a wider, more interesting world, 30 years after Jurassic Park. We see a dinosaur randomly dying (I think? Or maybe just getting tranquilized?? It’s unclear, and I don’t really care) in the middle of Brooklyn, and I thought: oh, fun! Dinosaurs are taking over the world! Maybe we’d get a movie in which humanity has to fight for the planet against dinosaurs — I was picturing ranchers in Montana fighting velociraptors on horseback. Instead, nope, we’re back on a stupid pointless island, watching people get picked off in a jungle as they hunt some stupid pointless item. We’ve literally seen this like 5 times already. If a news story breaks that this entire movie was made entirely with AI and not a single real person, I wouldn’t be shocked. Does Scarlett Johansson even know she's in this?
The only thing more tired than recycled plots as a pure money grab is complaining about when Hollywood does it (especially when I just financially rewarded them for having done it), so I won’t belabor the point, but, really, what are we doing here? The second the credits rolled, I immediately forgot anything that had happened in this movie, and if you ask me in a month if I’ve seen it, I’ll probably honestly tell you I have not. The only good thing I can say about it is that, by seeing it in Wisconsin, at least I didn’t pay NY ticket prices. (And please don't quote any of this at me when I see the next one. I'm trash and I love supporting trash!)
The Official Survivor Card Game — played at my parents’ house
The “Designed by Jeff Probst!” sticker on the front of the box of the “Official Survivor card game” had me a little worried — this man knows a lot about wearing khakis, but I'm not sure how much he knows about card games. But, on the last night of our family’s 4th of July gathering, I kept an open mind as I sat down to play with Justin, my sister Nikki, my brother-in-law Tim, my cousin Eric, and my cousin’s wife Jamie (is she my cousin-in-law? No, that sounds too formal and dynastic, like we’re Hapsburgs). Within a matter of minutes, we were eagerly stabbing each other in the back, boyfriends turning on boyfriends and wives turning on husbands, and I had to admit: okay, Jeffrey Probst might have designed a good little game here!
The game is surprisingly conniving and malicious, seemingly structured specifically to instigate fights and betrayals and hurt feelings. It didn't take long for Justin and I to be swearing at each other while parents covered their children's ears, or for my cousin and I to look each other dead in the eyes while blatantly telling each other lies with zero guilt. This game is going to tear families apart! It's an atomic bomb Jeff Probst has launched at nuclear families across America. And I, for one, support Jeff's mission to destroy heterosexual society via card game.
Granted, it is one of those games that requires about 20 minutes of rule-reading before you even get started, which is probably enough to turn off most people, unfortunately. And I know everyone says this about those types of games, but with this one it’s true: once you get going it’s pretty easy to pick up. Behind all the rules, the majority of the game is somewhat close to what actually happens on Survivor: voting people out while trying not to get voted out yourself.
And, if I can brag, I was proud of the game I managed to play! I got my cousin to play an idol on me (when no one had even voted for me, plus I had voted for him, whoops!), I then got his wife to play another idol on me (which actually saved me from getting voted out), I lied and schemed while trying to orchestrate a 2-1-1 vote split at the final 4, and I was ultimately voted out in 3rd place, when Jamie took Eric to the final 2. (I think my game was somewhat undone by their daughter, watching from the sidelines, who said, “Are you going to take Dad to the end or some random guy you met on the street?” which is yet another reason why I celebrate falling birth rates. Kids can fuck off!) Cousin-in-law Jamie ultimately ended up the winner after playing a dominant-yet-chaotic game, and if everything I just said was absolute gibberish to you: congrats on having a healthy brain! What’s that like?
Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters (2025) — hardcover
I enjoyed Detransition, Baby when it came out, and even though I found it didn’t stick with me, I respected it as a very smart debut novel, and was interested to see what Torrey Peters did next. So I was excited to see that Stag Dance, a collection of 3 short stories and 1 novella, is her much weirder and much less mainstream-friendly follow-up.
The stories are all “about” gender identity, though that’s putting it broadly — we’ve got a Manhunt-esque future where hormones have to be harvested, a twisted psychosexual relationship between two boys at school, and an even more twisted psychosexual relationship between a self-identified cross dresser and a “masker” who wears a latex female body suit and mask.
But the main focus of the book is on “Stag Dance,” the titular novella, in which a group of 19th century loggers playact as women to pass the long, cold nights. The story is written largely in dialect of the time, which makes it slow-going at first, but the way Torrey inhabits the mind of the narrator — the largest and “manliest” logger, who secretly longs to play the part of the woman — and contrasts him with, essentially, the 1800s version of a demon twink, was spectacular. I loved the rich and delicate push-pull between these two characters — our narrator learning how to be womanly, while resenting how easily it comes to the one teaching him — and would be shocked if someone isn’t already adapting this. If A24 plays this one right, Stag Dance can be Gen Z’s Brokeback Mountain…
Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata (2019) — paperback
From one fucked-up short story collection to another! Sayaka Murata, author of Earthlings and the iconic Convenience Store Woman, is queen of the freaks, and this collection of short stories is full of more of her trademark weirdos, potential sociopaths, and body horror. Some of the short stories are reminiscent of her first two novels to be translated into English, but some take it to a much darker place, with stories about making furniture and jewelry out of your loved ones, or even cooking and eating them as a sign of respect.
And yet, even though it’s all fairly disgusting and horrifying, it’s all done with the signature humor and heart I’ve come to expect from my girl Murata, like in this description of preparing a loved one’s body to be eaten in a stew:
The professionals had done a good amount of the work for us, but you could still make out the form of Yamamoto in the meat. He and I had often gone out drinking together, and now, as I stripped the flesh from the bone, I remembered his strong, hairy arms lifting his beer glass. These very arms had patted me on the back when I was down, and had dragged me out of the road when I was unsteady on my feet after drinking too much. Once, in the smoking room, I'd dropped ash on his arm, and he'd blown on the red patch and said reproachfully, "Ouch, that's hot." And just last Monday this hand had given me an encouraging pat on the back. His big, gentle arms were now meat on the bone, lying quietly on the chopping board.
Isn’t that so nauseating but also kind of sweet??? Sayaka Murata is quickly becoming mother to me, but I’m going to need her translator to start working faster. I need more Murata!
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White (1978) — paperback
After the beloved gay writer Edmund White died last month, I picked up this book I had never heard of — one of his less-famous early works, apparently — and read it over the course of a long, slow, hot day at my parents’ house. It’s very short, and one of those books that are described as “elegaic” or “poetic” or “lyrical,” which could also mean: boring. There isn’t really a plot, nor are there any real characters — it’s all vague, drifting memories, told from an older man’s perspective, about a long-ago relationship he had with an older man. But even describing it like that makes it sound too linear and clear; the book drifts like memories or dreams, changing from past tense to present in the same sentence, with the narrator becoming less reliable as it goes along. I can’t say any of it will really stick with me, but it was all very beautiful — like a Call Me By Your Name for weepy poetry MFA queers.