#66: Wait... when did movies get good again???
Death By Consumption
8/5/25 - 8/11/25
It's the dog days of summer, and Martial Law is coming to a city near you! I can't wait to get shot in the head by a Marine patrol for jaywalking. But, really, none of us should worry: we can rest easy knowing Hakeem Jeffries is on the case! If 1930s Germans had had the ability to donate $5 to ActBlue, surely that whole mess could have been avoided. The Democratic party leadership's plan to stop fascism seems to be following Tinkerbell's playbook: just put your hands together and believe really really hard! I don't know about you, but I reallllllly need whatever vascular problems are making that man's ankles grotesquely swollen to start progressing to a more serious stage........ We just need the White House air conditioning to break for a few brutal hours in this heat wave, and this whole decade-long nightmare could be wrapped up by September. A boy can dream! (To the FBI agent reading this email: lol jk)
This week, I raced to see Weapons before the internet spoiled it for me, I had my faith in Hollywood restored with the incredibly stupid comedy of The Naked Gun, I watched a gay camp classic I had shamefully neglected, I found solace in my hatred of tyrants with an HBO classic series, and I read two new gay and tragically middling books.
Weapons (2025) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
How do you write about a movie that should be best seen with minimal information going in? All I knew before we saw Weapons was that the script set off a massive bidding war that resulted in Jordan Peele firing his entire team for not getting him the rights to it, which seems to be some of the best marketing a horror movie could ever ask for. Once it had opened I tried my best to quickly scroll past any reviews, but I saw enough to know that people were praising it as the best film of the year. So I knew I had to see it before it was completely buried under the typical pop cultural avalanche of memes, discourse, and, inevitably, some sort of forced conservative freakout (seems like they're still not aligned on what to panic about, but as always I'm sure they'll find a way to make it randomly about trans people).
The thing is, I'm not sure there's much to say about Weapons, other than: I had fun! It's similar to The Substance for me: I screamed, I laughed, I had a great time, and I'm not interested in any discourse about it. It's just a big, completely crazy spectacle, one that I suspect many people will hate for its discordant tones, but far more people (gays) will love. One of the main characters (you'll know which one) is destined to be the homosexual Halloween costume of the year — 2025's Demi Moore's yellow coat. The whole film is already becoming memed within an inch of its life on social media. By the end of the week, I'm sure you'll be able to find practically every frame of it on Twitter, posted with some comment like "enough people aren't talking about this diva" or whatever. Why does everyone want to ruin everyone else's fun?
It honestly feels like a spoiler to even talk about the tone of the movie too much, so I will just say that so many films these days try to straddle multiple tones or genres and fail spectacularly, but Weapons nails it. My entire theater was screaming, laughing, and reacting as one, all of us on the deeply insane journey together. (My favorite moment was, near the end, when the tension was reaching a fever pitch, a woman near the front of the theater stressfully groaning, "Oh my gawwwd.....", which made the entire theater laugh.) Forgive me for sounding like Tom Cruise for a moment, but this is why I love going to the theater — for movies that feel like a roller coaster you and a bunch of strangers are all riding together. (Also, for Nitehawk Theater's queso. For me, the absolute peak luxury experience is enjoying a new big-budget film while eating surprisingly delicious movie theater queso in the pitch black, dripping all over my shirt. It only sounds disgusting until you try it for yourself!)
My advice is: if you want to see Weapons, and you spend a fair amount of time online, see it soon, because already by the end of opening weekend I was seeing stills from the movie (like the one above! Sorry!) that threaten to spoil it. So much of the fun of the movie is the pace with which it all unfolds, but these days everyone is in an arms race to turn everything into a meme before anyone else. If The Sixth Sense was released today, within 30 minutes of it hitting theaters you'd somehow already have some idiot posting Bruce Willis's face with "me when i'm dead the whole time" on your timeline. Everyone is annoying! Not me, though, thankfully :)
The Naked Gun (2025) — at Regal Essex
I genuinely thought they had forgotten how to make comedies like this. And it's a franchise reboot, of all things? This movie has done the impossible, and, to quote those old clunky spam article headlines from the mid-2000s: My Faith In Humanity Is Restored. The Naked Gun is one of those movies where, after a joke, first you laugh, and then you shake your head at how dumb it all is. I mean, this movie is so, so, so, so, so dumb. Absurdly idiotic. It's spectacularly fucking stupid. And it's all so genuinely refreshing, a perfect comedy that just wants to make you laugh in the stupidest ways possible. There are so many jokes packed into this short film that it feels like one you could rewatch for years and years, just like the original — there's simply no way to even remember all the bits you laughed at. There must be a joke every 30 seconds, for 90 minutes straight! It's, honestly, the perfect film for mid-August, when the last thing you ever want to do is use your brain.
Liam Neeson is surprisingly hilarious in the role, spoofing a character he's played 200 times now, but Pam Anderson steals the show with her absolute comedic genius. She's always been criminally underused, and I hope this role gets her in a wider range of stuff — we failed Demi Moore, but let's get Pamela an Oscar! If nothing else, it's genuinely heartwarming seeing how great her chemistry is with Liam Neeson, considering the rumors they're dating. Meryl Streep and Martin Short are panicking that they're no longer the hottest rumored Hollywood AARP couple! The Naked Gun somehow restored my faith in Hollywood, in comedy, and in love. If they were capable of making movies like this all along, why haven't they? I need three more Naked Guns on my desk by Monday.
Velvet Goldmine (1998) — on Criterion
I know, I know, as a gay man I should have seen this much sooner. First of all, no one told me Ewan McGregor does full frontal, dancing naked on stage covered in glitter, okay? That would have had me hitting play on this way earlier! But now I have seen the light, and I am forever changed by this insane, campy, beautiful David Bowie/Iggy Pop gay fanfic.
The music is obviously a standout, but the entire production is delightfully over-the-top. Right off the bat, beginning in the 1800s with the birth of Oscar Wilde... such a wild choice! I was hooked instantly. I loved the glam bisexuality of this film's 1970s, and the way it's contrasted with the 1990s, where everyone is a heterosexual businessperson in a boring suit. The film careens wildly between decades, and real and imaginary sequences, but it never feels deliberately confusing or obtuse.
The most brilliant moment in the entire film is when a teenaged Christian Bale is watching TV with his conservative parents when Jonathan Rhys Meyers' glam rockstar comes out as bisexual, and we cut to a quick moment in Christian Bale's imagination in which he's pointing at the screen and screaming at his parents, "That's me! That's me!" The "queer representation" conversation can often be flattening or overdone these days, but that was the most striking, touching, and pure encapsulation of that experience I've ever seen. (My version of that scene would be much more pathetic, a 13-year-old me screaming, "That's me! That's me!" while pointing at Richard Hatch on Survivor.)
Ewan and Jonathan Rhys Meyers are both electric, and I loved seeing a baby-faced Christian Bale as a deeply yearning queer kid. Toni Collette steals every scene she's in, with her ever-shifting accent, doing an impression of Mia Goth before Mia Goth was even, like, born. This whole film is a gorgeous gay fever dream, a beautifully messy ride through Todd Haynes' id, and instantly became one of my favorite 90s films. I'm sorry I hadn't seen it before, but I'm here now!
Rome, season 1 — on HBOMax
Justin had never seen HBO's Rome, one of my all-time favorite series, so we've been slowly making our way through the 2 seasons the world was lucky enough to get. Nearly 20 years later, it's still such a beautiful, brilliant show. I love the way it's structured around two made-up characters, whose stories are woven perfectly and often comically into the larger historical narrative. But watching it in 2025 makes me sad about the fall of HBO. We used to have it so good!
The characters are emotionally true to what we know about them from the historical record, but made much more dramatic in service of television. Atia vs. Servilia is still one of the all-time greatest TV rivalries, two middle-aged divas trying to flat-out murder each other in increasingly awful ways. And I will remain forever attracted to James Purefoy as Mark Antony, one of the most charmingly brutal characters HBO has ever created. If you're in the mood to watch a tyrant get stabbed to death (not sure why you'd be in the mood to watch that these days...), might I recommend streaming Rome?
Harriet Tubman: Live In Concert, by Bob the Drag Queen (2025) — library ebook
I was bummed out by how flat this book left me. Bob the Drag Queen is an all-time favorite (he obviously killed it on Drag Race, but his true star turn was his face-off with Boston Rob on The Traitors), and I love the idea that he took a joke he told on Ziwe's show about Harriet Tubman and kind of made it into a full novel. And yet, I have to say this: it's a very mediocre book!
The concept is a good and funny one (dead historical figures have "returned" for undisclosed reasons, and a resurrected Harriet Tubman has decided to record an album), and the book is very, very short – it took me a little under 2 hours to read. But the writing is surprisingly childish, for someone as intelligent as Bob the Drag Queen. There are some great, classic Bob jokes (a character is described as "looking like Michael Clarke Duncan ate Michael Clarke Duncan"), but the overall tone is actually quite sentimental and serious. Which is fine — no one says that Bob needs to write a funny book just because he's funny in real life! — but the story and style were simply too straightforward for me. I hate to say it, but a lot of the writing was so plain that it was giving ChatGPT. I'm sure this is significantly more enjoyable if you listen to Bob reading the audiobook, but I only realized that too late into the book, and I wasn't about to get the book in two different formats. But, look, Bob wrote a book that's sure to be a bestseller, and I didn't, so what do I know? He'll be fine.
Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, by Jeremy Atherton Lin (2025) — hardcover
I'm not sure this was "the gayest love story ever told," but I respect the bold subtitle. The follow-up to Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar (a history of — you got it, gay bars!), this genre-bending book intertwines the story of Jeremy's own love story with his husband, and the history of the fight for gay marriage. The writing is gorgeous throughout, and he unearths some very interesting historical moments and figures in the history of gay rights, but overall the book fell a bit flat for me.
It all feels too piecemeal — the chapters are short and quick, like a pile of glittering objects that are pretty to look at, and feel beautiful together, but don't add up to anything more than a nice little collection. The memoir sections are written so poetically that it kept me at arm's length, removed from the real emotions, only letting me in for briefly graphic sex scenes that felt like they were included mostly to shock readers with the sudden intrusion of a word like "cock". Scandalous! And the historic sections felt even more rammed in, and frustratingly straightforward, as if Wikipedia entries were randomly inserted throughout the personal narrative. It's a big, brassy swing of a book, but one that only works in bits and pieces, not as a whole.
That said, his husband must have loved this — imagine someone writing an entire book about how much they love you! So, you know, that's great for them. And, of course, it's a painfully timely book, with the Supreme Court now considering whether they should get rid of gay marriage. In a better world a book like this would feel outdated and self-indulgent, but, unfortunately, we still have to tell stories like this. I didn't love this book, but I liked it, and found it tragically necessary — if only the people who we need to convince to join our side ever bothered to read :(