It's Just Like The Movies

More or less what it says, though all of these reviews have been touched up or embellished from their original versions. Reposting here felt like a decent way to begin collecting my 2025 activity under one roof, especially as I try to make myself write and post on here more consistently. I’m also updating the site in some places, but that deserves its own post.

Mickey 17 (C)

As a fan of sauces I’ve never felt more attacked. Promise I’m not trying to be a hater per se but like, Bong’s pulpy thrillers are so much better than his sci-fi outings. His talents for making a story simultaneously layered and blunt, hard to pin down in moment-to-moment action even as he builds to an inevitable confrontation, is not diminished at its base, but it feels misserved in these contexts. The clones, the class allegory, the political lampooning, the giant tardigrades, all of these concerns feel as though they’re fighting hard for Mickey 17’s attention, turning a film that could register as sprawling into something distracted.

Mark Ruffalo’s performance is so garishly awful and misguided, I think we can use this as grounds to rescind his already suspect nomination for Poor Things. Mickey 17 is automatically a better movie if he’s playing Marshall as a guy on his own terms, or a larger critique of fascist blowhards, rather than a blatant Trump riff. Hell, Ruffalo could at least try to convey this without getting lost in Trumpy vocal and physical stims. Naomie Ackie, on the other hand, is pretty fab at carving out an individual person inside her righteous speeches and human desires. I love how full-bodied her anger and her happiness are, to a degree that fits Bong’s outsized personalities without every reading as cartoonishly one-dimensional. Ackie makes this read as yet more proof of how deeply this woman cares, and it’s so moving. Sad she never got the DP of her dreams. Pattinson’s oeuvre of weird dudes is so fun, and he’s very easily the best of the many twincest star turns 2025 has already given us. Patsy Ferran is quite engaging on the sidelines, in a role I’d have liked to see get more screen time. Also, what a fun score.

With all respect to this talented performer, and not to overlook other ways this script could have reshaped itself into much more thematically risky or unique ends, I would greatly appreciate if someone could explain why we couldn’t leave Vartolomei’s entire character on the cutting room floor. We get enough feints towards her pushing the plot – her lesbian-zesty sadness for her dead friend, the homewrecker angle, the threat of her blowing a pretty big whistle – but she keeps getting cut off from actually moving the needle in a real way. I don’t think streamlining would necessarily fix whatever issues I have here, but it’s annoying how Mickey 17 feels like it’s saying what it wants to say REALLY LOUD AT ALL TIMES while also just not enriching or fleshing out its arguments as much as I’d want it to. All of the politics around Mickey as an expendable slave class all his own roundly beats the Starship Troopers redux this becomes for the last third(?), and I really wish we’d just stayed in that film.

M3GAN 2.0 (C)

Would benefit enormously from real gore, smarter characters, better dialogue and plotting, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy myself. Yes, I’m one of thousands of faggot queers who the pointed at directly through the screen to say “You are being pandered to, diva! Yas!” and sometimes it was slay boots of them to do so. Thank you. Frankly, any impulse to making this actively fun (the dance-off, the impromptu solo) was desperately needed, given how often M3GAN 2.0 was bogged down by its plot. If anything, the movie should’ve gone further in these silly pleasures. They also could’ve given Allison Williams any opportunities to express joy, or let her be correct about any one thing she decided on, but maybe I should just as for one thing at a time. Baby steps. Needed way more of Amelia, and at least one of the performers at the convention should’ve been a drag queen. Empty calories, but cunt was served, and the meal was worth the price.

Jurassic World Rebirth (C+)

Even more boilerplate than M3GAN 2.0, but Rebirth‘s central trio of Names are far more charismatic than necessary and get to actually lead the action (sorry Allison). ScarJo might even be said to find a character here, finding a baseline of supreme competence while leaning on the comedic bits, the obligatory sad backstory, and the sentimentality just enough to make them land without overdoing any of it. Jonathan Bailey’s hot, but he’d be hotter if they let him use his real accent.

Rebirth’s good at theme park scares where you know exactly which characters will die the moment we meet them. The T-Rex bit is so easily the film’s best set piece, though the boat attack is a close second. Love how the prologue has to start with some Final Destination bullshit to introduce a big bad who we will not see again for two hours, and who remains perpetually smothered by a fog machine despite looking ugly in a cool way. Rupert Friend takes a nice swig of jungle water and all I think of was the American Dad bit where Francine kept dying of dysentery in Oklahoma Trail.

Wish the kills were more fucked up tho. Nothing here is as scary as realizing we could’ve gotten six years of Mahershala Ali being beautiful and talented in movies instead of sitting around while his Blade reboot died again and again. You know these Hollywood freak idiots aren’t watching Barry Jenkins movies because he keeps casting folks who just blossom for the camera and then they don’t get to keep headlining movies!! Why!!! Fuck!!!!

Surviving Ohio State (B+)

Really clear-eyes presentation by Eva Orner of the dynamics around masculinity, sports fealty, institutional corruption, and predatory grooming that enabled Strauss to thrive at OSU despite literally thousands of complaints levied against him over years. Disgusting. The courage of the players going on record and describe their experiences is really tremendous. Insane how this scandal has not stopped Jim Jordan from holding onto his congressional seat, but we gotta talk about gerrymandering if we’re really gonna go there. Maybe this is the alumni in me talking but Will Knight’s unanswered “O-H” was so gutting, even after two hours of so many indignities and betrayals. I need everyone involved in this cover-up and the ongoing efforts to dismiss the student’s lawsuits to suffer painfully, and for a protracted period of time.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (B-)

Diverting all the money I’ve saved for nipple piercings towards lobbying a ban on all buildings taller than four floors. Clearly the real villain across this whole series is American manufacturing, and lord knows no one in office right now is gonna advocate for stricter regulations on anything.

Anyways! Really fun! Very sad. Amazing how much this understands the psychic remit of generational trauma better than the Halloween reboot – anyone could do it better, but still! Real win here. So skilled at highlighting key elements of an upcoming death puzzle without being stupidly obvious, and for a instilling a sense of paranoia around every insert shot, cutaway, and close-up we get. . If the closing kills are the weakest for me, it has more to do with the impressive work done before to really set up these diabolical puzzles. The closing kills have some plotting but are much more jump scare-oriented, which loses some power if they’re used in too-close succession of each other. Okay, and the last ones had more CGI seams to me, I dunno. But even if it looked a little iffy, the building of tension is spectacular throughout. The editing (a series strength) and plotting (not a series strength) really elevate themselves this time, aided by some solid ensemble work to make this land emotionally. Hard to imagine a better farewell to Tony Todd than this.

Presence (C)

Sort of coward’s C rating, because what I admire about Presence weighs about equally with the choices I flat-out dislike. What makes thematic sense for this film’s audiovisual choices, namely the fluid mobility of the camera and the refusal to conventionally light the character’s faces in most scenes, reflects the ghost’s omniscience but also falls quite easily in Soderbergh’s recent track record of formal experimentation at the cost of his own film’s internal coherence. 

Yes, the camera does a lot to make this script seem almost streamlined instead of just boilerplate. Now here’s a director interested in having two actors interacting with each other in the frame. Then again, we also got the body-melting fisheye lensing of No Sudden Move and the overexposed light sources of Black Bag simply because, so who can say. I would better appreciate his willingness to let actors share the frame if we could see their faces and their body language, elevating them at least to archetype or totems instead of stereotypes smeared across the living room. Scenes in the daughter’s bedroom are consistently the best-looking, especially by the last 20 or so minutes. This absolutely doesn’t mean the actress is flattered for most of Presence – I don’t think I could describe any characteristics of her face for the first half of this at least – but it’s so much better compared to how every visual choice in regards to the mother seems designed to box Liu out of giving a performance legible to the audience. Maybe the actors are doing bad work, but Soderbergh keeps it a mystery by not showcasing them almost at all.

I’ll say this though: Zack Ryan’s score is just gorgeous, full of lush feeling and classical orchestrations. This could not be more oppositional to the digital photography and muted humanity onscreen, and thank God. As with the music in Black Bag, I like how this gives us something straightforwardly pleasurable that’s still in sync with Soderbergh’s own games.