So. We’ve got to start with an apology.
Due to my lifetime of aggressive abandonment issues, I really don’t seem to get it through my thick Italian hair skull that my words are hot little knives that can cut the shit out of you. And obviously, of course the person last week’s post was written about read it, and sent me a voice memo that made me break down sobbing at a metal show where I wound up sniffling on the (goddamn Disney prince) arm of the hot drummer I would have otherwise been lasciviously flirting with (I’m a sticklicker until the day I die, I’m sorry) and going home before seeing my friends, the headliners. I, with one phrase in last week’s post, went low and tapped into this person I love’s worst trauma, and despite not meaning it…meanly, it wasn’t my place, and I wrote it publicly, so I’m apologizing publicly too. I’m sorry, and I don’t want to be a person whose hurt hurts others, and I was here. I have put too many years and copays into therapy to have thought I was shooting blanks but wasn’t.
Alright. That’s not what we’re talking about this week. This week is about all of the movies I have watched in bed with the curtains drawn over the last few weeks.
Oh also my dad got me matzo to make sure I *felt included* at my first Easter since beginning my Judaism journey:
Saint Maud (2016, dir. Rose Glass)
This film came as the recommendation of my Substacking pal and deep inspiration
What Sarah wrote is far more adroit than what I could come up with, which is: I wanted more of Jennifer Ehle’s Amanda. And as a fireman’s daughter, the final frame is why I do not purchase candles. I think this is an incredibly dignified first effort, but tonally I would have preferred heightened or weakened dramá, either melodrama or something more somnambulant and sinister.
Problemista (2024, dir. Julio Torres)
I “discovered” Julio Torres nearly a decade ago in the basement of a Brooklyn comedy club, doing a set in his known muted monotone, playing at being a nervous young man forced to do standup as part of his ESL training, shedding that skin with each joke, rise in inflection, and gradually niche reference. I adored his subversive work right away, approaching him with my long-gone best friend to take down his social media channels on a PIECE OF PAPER that’s-how-long-ago-this-was and tell him that in a few years he was going to be a goddamn star. To others. I knew he was right away. What a pleasure being right.
Years later, lovesick with a boy who loved my validation but not me, I approached Julio at a fundraiser he emceed for a friend of a friend who would later succumb to his cancer. Julio auctioned signed copies of his children’s book, and comedians like Problemista star Spike Einbinder1 performed and encouraged donations. As I texted furiously with the boy asking why he didn’t come out to see his own personal Fran Drescher, I had an idea. At the end of the show, I approached Julio and offered to donate 100 dollars on the spot if he would record a greeting video. Julio did, which I am *very exclusively* including below with the name edited out…and then Julio gave me a little Cuties orange, and flounced away.
I love this man and will until I die. His movie is an extension of his many great projects - his HBO special My Favorite Shapes, which features Julio narrating a conveyor belt that summons forth, you guessed it, some of his favorite shapes, and the surrealist and magically realist HBO show Los Espookys, about a gang of friends who construct elaborate haunted hoaxes. Problemista follows an aspiring toy designer and immigrant who takes a job with an erratic, roots-showing, grieving Tilda Swinton to keep his working visa. What emerges is a transcendent mix of Lost In Translation, The Little Mermaid (please cast Larry Owens as Ursula IMMEDIATELY), Barbie’s best qualities, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the job-hunting foibles of Muppets Take Manhattan. What a blissful screed of hope and sorrow and hope again. Go see it. Read nothing. Go. See. It.
A Quiet Place II (2020, dir. John Krasinski)
This sequel is by no means a great movie. Without a planned third piece, we leave our Abbotts displaced and separate - three in a bank vault, one kicking around with Cillian Murphy, the least American-looking man of all time, playing a guy from like…Danbury. Like, take a minute to imagine Cillian Murphy saying “Honey, do we need to pick up more hot dog buns at Shop-Rite?” You can’t. I can’t. What next, Ben Affleck playing a Starbucks consumer or a Steelers fan? Get real.
I could have done with the entire movie continuing the prequel that comprises the first fifteen or so minutes of the film. For some reason, I just love CIA Superoperative John Krasinski in these damn movies. I cried watching the first one on a date-we-didn’t-realize-was-a-date with a beloved old partner (hi Mike, love you) over Lee’s romantic dance with his (real-life) wife, and his ending sacrifice, a scene that would not have felt out of place in an 80’s horror or a 50’s horror or a 30’s horror. It was a timeless choice, acted beautifully, and a cataclysmic act of love. I don’t know how you can’t cry at the end of the first one.
Krasinski is great at composing a tender moment, and II needed either a teary happy ending or a tragic error to ground it in dystopic reality if it was not getting a trilogic treatment in which the chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off sound heathens are vanquished. Honestly, I would love a trilogy where the film begins with the evil defeated, and concludes with the evil that emerged in those who survived this earthwide trauma. The topic was touched upon in this sequel, but a character study would dovetail nicely with Kransinki’s interest in telling human stories.
X (2022, dir. Ti West)
Brittany Snow is a goddamned scream queen. She was fabulous in this movie, funny, campy, so so sexy, sympathetic, and so deserving of the sublime slasher experience she was given here. Tyler Stanaland2, you’re a clown!!!
Pearl (2022, dir. Ti West)
I think Pearl is the better film compared to its first, X. I loved the color grading. I loved it! The red was so sumptuous, the color of passion, the color of murder, Eve’s bitten apple. David Corenswet, our future Superman, as the bohemian, mustachioed wannabe producer who isn’t what he first made himself out to be is stupendous in this, full of charm and smarm…then fear. And Pearl isn’t who she made herself out to be either, as her story gets jammed like dust in a projector and Mia Goth makes a maggot-ridden meal out of Pearl’s desperate ploys for love, validation, stardom, escape. Goth’s collapsing, tearing face during the end credits is a stronger contention for a lifetime achievement award on its own than many actors can muster with 120 credits. She breaks, she bolsters, she breaks again. It is a grueling, painful, uncomfortable performance and I could have watched another entire film of Pearl and her murderous madness.
Suspiria (2018, dir. Luca Guadagnino)
There is little I can say about this film other than: my god, Tilda Swinton is a chameleon, I desperately need that little flimsy pubic-ass slip Dakota Johnson wears at the end, and I was delighted that
wrote about both Suspiria treatments (I prefer 2018! I am shocked to say so!) just a few days after I watched it:Piss fetishists will love this movie. I had a deeply somber blast, somehow.
And now…
To read:
“On October 20, 2023, the Knight Institute host(ed) a closed convening to explore the question of jawboning: informal government efforts to persuade, cajole, or strong-arm private platforms to change their content-moderation policies.” A long read about what is still my favorite social media platform even though I will deadname it until the day I die, Twitter, written by Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter's trust and safety department.
This is the shit I read about: The Mormon Mountain Meadows Massacre.
I found weighted-blanket comfort in the second poem written here, by
:
“‘Having a sense of control and predictability over our world’ is hugely important… Perhaps so much so that it can feel easier to repeat bad patterns than to have our ideas about partners—and love, and relating to others—shattered.”
This…incredibly darksided poem by Donald Hall, “Prophecy,” sung to me this week. Oops.
“So, from now on, the flowers that I insist upon keeping fresh in the vase I bought for a quarter at a 3pm garage sale are no longer a disguise I wear so that people I invite over will think I am an adult. They are, rather, my declaration of self; my evidence of occasional steadiness in the stormy weather that makes up most of being human.” -
on adulting, an older but far more relevant than ever read.Sophie’s book Many Love has been recommended here at least once before, and as I once got to share with her in a note she graciously received, helped me realize that I was in a deeply abusive relationship. I love that book, which not only explores polyamory and ethical non-monogamy but just discusses the fluidity and spectrum of relationships, how lovers can safely transition to loving friends or family, how friendships can be romantic, and how all of it if done with consent and kindness is okay.
She wrote this essay I was deathly afraid to read recently because of the loss of my best friend of a decade and how that is still the one thing I do not talk about, but I felt comforted in these words, and validated in the silent grief I carry every day of my life, which has shouted louder within me during this current time of trauma and tears:
To listen:
I guested on two episodes of my lovely new buddy
’s podcast, Set Lusting Bruce, each recorded a month apart. In one I am clearly in a time of joy and the more recent one…lmao, how the TURN TABLES!!!Also available on Spotify, et al. Thank you ,Jesse!!
I made a playlist about said trauma and tears. Also available on Apple.
The Indigo Girls, who I got to see for free thanks to my beloved Michael Dale:
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This is literally just Simone:
(when I attempt to kiss her father before she has done 2-7 kisses with him first)
This is literally just Lugosi:
(and suddenly, Seymour!)
A bonus:
Actually my babies:
Very much my children, also:
Various and sundry:
This is also Matt and I (I am the little weird guy):
Deeply aspirational content:
I have the best in-laws:
Thank you to Julie of
for bringing this to my attention:
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My friend Rob’s son, Otto:
I hope next week finds you, and me3, like this:
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Love you bitches,
TG
Also, it seems not many people know this, but Spike is the sibling of Hacks actress Hannah Einbinder…and they are both the children of SNL’s Laraine Newman!
Ohhh Black Betty, Stanaland, whoa-oh Black Betty…
(for fuck’s sake, please)
P.S. Oh and Robyn always cures everything.
The only movie I saw was the quiet place, very scary!! As always a good read. 👏👏👏