If this movie’s production was a money laundering scheme, does that mean someone can be prosecuted for the existence of Red One?

I haven’t seen a movie with such ineffective dialogue in a long time. It’s an unending line of uncomplicated events with characters existing in one set piece after another. I sincerely wondered how much of this was written by AI.

It is madness to pay enough to get a charismatic talent like JK Simmons and then give him this dialogue.

There are shallow character arcs for Chris Evans (who grows during his plot ride-along, though it’s totally unearned) and for The Rock, who frowns a lot. I imagined gay stuff happening between them, and that carried me through about an hour of the absurdly unjustified two hour runtime. Bear in mind that I can imagine gay things happening between anyone. There was no vibes, warmth, or genuine connection going on. They showed up to collect paychecks. I’m just really good at making anything gay to entertain myself. I enjoyed Argylle.

Highlights in this cast of paycheck-collectors include Kiernan Shipka, whose casting as a witch was spit out by an AI casting director, and Lucy Liu, who is fearless in the face of trash ever since Ecks vs Sever. Both of them look extremely hot. Good for you, ladies.

On the bright side, forked-tongue daddy Krampus seems designed specifically to get middle aged monster-loving moms horny, and I can get behind that type of pandering.

It feels pointless to complain about the Christofascism of a Christmas fantasy movie. I saw “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” There’s such a precedent for this. You already can imagine Red One’s global hegemony supporting corpo-Christian mythology without seeing it. This is a world where myths range from “American capitalism” all the way to “German-themed scary woman” and “Puritan-era spooky spook.” We can assume from the figures presented (billions of Christmas-celebrating households!) mean this Christian mythology encompasses the planet.

Fine.

If you like mushy dark Marvel-esque visuals with an urban fantasy twist, fine!

It’s possible the score was actually the worst part of this movie. It was intrusive and lacked any character whatsoever, like everything else about Red One. The score somehow just…really drove home for me the soullessness of what I was watching.

I kinda wish I was more offended by Red One because it would have meant I had more feelings about it. I wish I felt like anyone had been passionate about it. If we’re going to compare CG-heavy action movies with overblown budgets, hot women, and thin stories from 2024, I still prefer Argylle. Isn’t that bananas?

The one star of this review goes entirely to Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Liu, and Krampus’s forked tongue.

(image credit: Amazon)

I decided chronistic should be in use as an antonym for anachronistic. Die Hard is intensely chronistic. It’s so 1988, it couldn’t have existed at any other time without dramatic differences.

A year later and the Berlin Wall fell — deeply relevant in regards to attitudes towards German characters.

Three years later, Rodney King faced police brutality; in the movie, a prominent Black police character has been working the desk beat, so to speak, for killing a child. Attitudes would shift.

Thirteen years later and terrorism is synonymous with 9/11, Al Qaida, etc. The fight up and down a tower would be different.

Witty, clever John McClane is also in conversation with earlier action heroes, meaning he wouldn’t have been the same at an earlier date. I mean, literally, he couldn’t have been the same – he was originally intended to be played by Frank Sinatra. But he also fundamentally inverts certain stoic hero tropes.

The technology in the movie – the novelty of early touch screens; Argylle’s car phone – is just so darn 1988.

Attitudes toward California and hero cops is perhaps a bit more timeless in America (or at least not as narrow). Demonizing the federal level police while lionizing local police is interesting. But the way McClane just laughed off a man kissing him as being gross gay California stuff (homophobic, but not violently so, very good-natured) is also a microcosm.

Of course this is probably my favorite Christmas movie, warts and all. It might be the very best example of traditional screenwriting. It’s executed like clockwork. Everything matters. Causal chains are incredible.

Alan Rickman is the most delicious villain. I wouldn’t have been mad if he won.

My sibling and I watch this every Christmas season. It’s a holiday essential. This year was the first time my teenager watched with us, and they didn’t say they especially liked it, but they were RIVETED. Die Hard is extremely not-boring. The one thing my teen said they liked was the intensity of the gay-ass vibes between McClane and Gruber (very much my child). You could write entire essays just about McClane and Gruber as foils, but if I tried to do it, it would quickly devolve into naughty fanfic, so I shall resist.

(image credit: 20th Century Fox)

I went through a phase where I became a male revue connoisseur. In my defense, going to male revues is a great way to see a lot of hot women dressed up for a night out, drunk and having a great time. I developed a hierarchy of male revue quality, from least to best: Thunder from Down Under, Chippendales, and Magic Mike in Vegas.

The thing about Thunder and Chipp is that these aren’t really interesting shows at all, period. A bunch of beefcakes wear costumes and take their shirts off and dispassionately thrust. They can’t really dance. (Bear in mind this opinion is from around 2017 and may no longer reflect reality.) It’s pretty well sexless, all things considered. At least Magic Mike has a narrative, the guys can dance, and there’s some excitement to it.

If I were to place the revue in The Merry Gentleman in those rankings, I’d put it dead last. The dudes barely dance, much like Thunder, but there are fewer of them, and they seem to be having even less fun. Or am I having no fun because I’m not drunk among a bunch of hot middle aged women?

There’s never any sense of fun in this, period. The romance is also not very romancey. The male lead is kinda wounded because…his girl left him to go back to the city. And the female lead wants to maybe…go back to the city. He is SO HURT and BETRAYED. She chooses to stay so he won’t be all hurt. That’s…kind of the whole thing.

It feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t actually understand how romances work. It’s not really enough for two ostensibly attractive people to coexist until they decide to Be Together. Not all conflicts are created equally. This genuinely would have benefited from being a lot more tropey and formulaic!

I won’t be revisiting this one on future Christmases. If I want to be bored watching shirtless men, I can just swipe TikTok for a few hours. At least they have some energy.

What Women Want was one of the three biggest movies of the year 2000, so it’s to be expected that I watched it a lot with my mum when it hit DVD. I used to really enjoy it! I stopped watching it when we learned Mel Gibson’s a trash fire of a human, and it’s skirted my romcom-watching periods since.

I’ve got a lotta work to do at my desk and Netflix is trying to push Hallmark romances on me, so I went for something familiar, easy, and old. What Women Want. I was prepared to loathe it. “This definitely aged badly,” I thought resentfully as I hit play.

Resentfully, I give it three stars because that’s all I can abide giving it. But I still pretty much enjoyed it.

This turns out to be one of those Stealth Queer movies I clung to in adolescence because of insufficient queer representation in media. Although it has extremely limited, binary ideas of what it is to be a Man and a Woman – and the whole movie hinges on “sociopath learns women are human” – the way that the main character moves through his understanding of gender is extremely queer.

At one point, he actually wishes aloud that he were a woman. If you hang out with trans people much, you’ll already know “I wish I were a woman” is enough to be a woman. Like…that’s it. If you want to be a woman, you can be. Gender is a social construct with different meanings at different times in different cultures with no basis in biology. Once you decide you want to be A Gender, you can Be The Gender.

Somehow this old romcom with Mel Gibson helped form my identity as a nonbinary afab. I always saw myself as a stereotypical masculine force, swaggering and aggressively sexual, but I also wanted to look like a hot woman. I was born into a rather blobby androgynous body. I look worse than Mel Gibson in pantyhose. Somehow Mel Gibson in pantyhose is getting pretty close to my personal visualization of my gender: someone who isn’t female enough messing around incompetently with the set dressing of femininity.

All the sexism in the movie – of which benevolent sexism upholding a specific form of femininity is narratively approved – still feels like the kind of silly genderfuckery that I just happen to love. I’d like to see a drag remake.

What Women Want is also interesting if you think about how neatly it fits into capitalism. It struck me how much studios must love movies about ad agencies because they get to do a lot of sponsored material in the movie. Half of this thing is a Nike ad appealing to third wave feminism. I’m gonna have to make a playlist of romcoms with different perspectives on American capitalism at this point – the way romcoms show success in capitalism as a failing (Pretty Woman), how capitalist success demands distancing from femininity (Kate & Leopold), and the inevitability of small business being crushed by corporations (You’ve Got Mail).

I’m glad I ended up appreciating this movie, warts and all. It’s easy to ignore all the crappy stuff when it gives me warm buzzy gender feelings. Now I’m going back to not watching Gibson movies anymore.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

We are so back, baby! Merry Christmas!

Normally I’ve watched about a thousand more Christmas movies and romcoms by this time of year. It’s nearly American Thanksgiving! But I watched Two Weeks Notice and was extremely lukewarm, then tried to watch another Lacey Chabert romcom (something Scottish Christmasy) and got bored out of finishing it. The struggle is real, y’all.

Thank you to Netflix for another marvelous Christmas miracle!

Hot Frosty is what it sounds like: Frosty the Snowman, except he’s a hot guy. Dustin Milligan plays an amazing himbo. For his sake, I hope the movie took two days to film. I can’t remember the last time I saw a beefcake as dehydrated as this one. It was funny how they were trying to get him to look sweaty when he looked like he’d had nothing but a couple sips of water for the duration of filming. The striations, y’all! Frosty is three layers of spray tan away from a physique competition. Somehow, even though he must have had nigh zero energy, he was an incredibly cute and charming example of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope.

I like 00s/10s sitcoms, so the appearance of Joe Lo Truglio (aka Charles Boyle from Brooklyn 99) and Craig Robinson (Doug Judy/B99 and Darryl Philbin/The Office) would have made the whole thing watchable if the main couple wasn’t. Honestly, every romcom should just grab a couple comedians and let them mess around on set for our entertainment. These two are evergreen.

Speaking of evergreen, does Lacey Chabert ever stop working? Although Lindsay Lohan has definitely earned a Holiday Romcom Queen crown of her own, she’ll never be able to touch Lacey’s intimidating IMDB page. Thirty Hallmark romcoms! I watched her being warm and sweet in this movie and had to wonder how many random guys she’s “fallen in love with” over the course of her career. What a dream.

I mention in my review for Two Weeks’ Notice that romcoms can be formulaic without being rote. Hot Frosty is a great example of this. It hits all the normal marks you expect, but it does it with joy and energy. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. It’s silly and fun. All the frisky older ladies cracked me up. Is that so much to ask for?

Five stars for another great Christmas romcom doing all we want and nothing we don’t.

(image credit: Netflix)

My spooky season starts in August every year. Halloween is my favorite aesthetic, I’m low-key goth anyway, and I never run out of horror movies to watch.

I’ve already been watching so many movies.

I used to be easy to scare: basically, if it had ghosts, I was terrified. This still works on me a little bit — I struggle in particular with the suspense leading up to a ghost reveal — but for the most part, nothing scares me anymore.

Being afraid isn’t the only emotional experience you can have with horror, though. There’s sad horror, like The Sixth Sense and Martyrs, and there’s exciting gory horror like Saw. You can experience dread and nostalgia and anger and a genuine self-questioning depression.

Yet there’s one movie that nails fear in a way that nothing else does — a primal fright that makes me feel small and helpless like when I was a child, unsafe in your own home, and where nothing is the way it seems.

That movie, of course, is Coraline.

It’s a classic setup: a young girl and her family move to a house away from the life she used to know. It’s an old, scary sort of house, where she lives in close company with total strangers. Her stressed, busy parents don’t have time for her.

When she explores, she finds herself in — essentially — the most horrible portal fantasy you can imagine. She has to overcome fable-like trials in order to save herself, her family, and her friends.

This story is familiar. You’ve read it in a lot of fairy tales and coming-of-age stories about that weird, difficult time in a kid’s life where they shed the last trappings of young childhood and start hurtling toward adulthood.

That familiarity is why it’s so effective, in part: we all read stories like this as a kid, and it takes you right back to childhood to read them again. More than that, growing up is a universal experience, and the metaphors at hand are terribly effective.

I was already a proper adult when Coraline came out, but I’m still not immune. Being a child was a scary experience. Far worse than being an adult, where my problems are much bigger, more tangible, and higher stakes. Childhood is a time of being very small with very little control. When your parents aren’t friendly, there’s nowhere safe to go.

There’s so much more to Coraline than its flawless execution of ancient tropes, though. It’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. The stop-motion animation is incredible. The art direction is unmatched. The eerie, lovely score matches the beauty-terror of the rest of the movie.

Coraline also pulls no punches. It knows kids can handle the worst of the worst, and at times, it savagely attacks with imagery that still chills me.

It might be a movie made for young people, but it’s great at any age. If you let it take you on the journey, you might find it’s one of the genuinely scariest movies you’ve ever seen.

(image credit: Focus Features)