This movie is pure vibe. I am *always* in the mood to play this movie and listen to it. The sound design, the soundtrack, the emotions I feel as everything plays out…it’s a nightmare on xanax where you’re too numb to feel how bad it is that these surreal things are happening.

I loved Donnie Darko as a kid. I was exactly the right age when it came out (thirteen and an edgelord). As an adult, I find myself thinking a lot more about how the movie feels irresponsible at its core, and maybe how that dangerous feeling is really the appeal of it. The titular character is a paranoid schizophrenic. The movie is essentially a paranoid episode if everything the voice in your head was telling you is true. And it glamorizes the tragedies that befall this sickly young man, bestowing him with attention and mystique and a degree of deranged coolness that resonates with damaged teenagers. “Your fantasies are true,” says the movie, “and you really do see the core of the way the universe works, and your untimely death fits into it aesthetically well.”

It would be easy for someone struggling with unreality to take Donnie Darko as a positive example. So it’s dangerous–evocative of sadness without being sad–and that sort of ferality is a lot of what makes it feel darkly delicious. Maybe that’s just me, as a frequent mental health patient.

It’s definitely a lot more relatable from a Millennial teen’s pov, but now as someone who has grown into something that vaguely resembles adulthood, I mostly enjoy it for the vibes. Donnie Darko makes emotional sense. Any rational analysis of the plot (and time travel/milieu) is going to fail to support the best qualities of the product, which is entirely vibes, the incredible cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal!!! my wife!!!!), and the sound design.

(This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on Feb 18 2023. Image credit Newmarket Films.)

The romance between Neo and Trinity makes the most sense to me if you don’t think of them as individuals. The two of them are sort of aspects of the same person.

Neo is the trans egg yet to crack. Trinity is his motivation to leave the Matrix, the love of his life, his soulmate, the reflection of his innermost truth: Trinity is the woman Neo must become.

Ask you local trans friend about aesthetic crushes. That’s where you think you’re in love with someone, but then you realize you just wish you looked exactly like them. You can spend a long time thinking you’re actually in love with a representation of your gender. It’s a heady, passionate affair, since there isn’t a real person on the other side, but the mental ideal of your authentic self.

She was almost The One. You could think of The One as being the whole self, the full identity encompassing Neo/Trinity/the transition/their real form. She was almost The One. Trinity really thought this was going to turn out for her, that she would get this authentic life where she starts out complete. The One wasn’t born into Trinity; The One was born into Neo. By following Trinity – the feminine ideal of Neo’s perfect aesthetic – down the rabbit hole, out of society, into a messier and more true place, Neo finally unites with The One. He is exactly who he is, and who he was always meant to be.

The Matrix isn’t just a trans narrative; it’s a story of true trans liberation inside self, regardless of what the system has done to you.

~

When I was a kid, mostly I just loved the action scenes.

You absolutely cannot beat the aesthetic of The Matrix. It landed solidly on my childhood when I’d already been frothing over Boomer Shooters for years. My siblings and I wanted trench coats, but I’m pretty sure we made do with those long cardigans popular in Y2K. We rehearsed the entire lobby gun sequence to the point we could reenact it without looking at the screen. My mom didn’t even let us have toy guns! We got scowled at for making gun shapes with our hands. We probably used books to shoot at each other or something.

Did you try to emulate Bullet Time too? The thing where the action slows and the camera swings around the actor? We did it by standing on one leg and hopping in a stupid little circle.

Morpheus and Neo’s training fight on the tatami was another favorite. As an extremely soft-bodied nerd whose mobility training was sitting in a computer chair, I still somehow taught myself to kick at sister head height. I don’t think I actually kicked my sister in the head. But I was ready for it.

They changed our goddamn lives, these action scenes. I had never seen anything so cool in my life.

~

I just can’t get over what an excellent metaphor red pill/blue pill is. I think about it all the time.

You are either complicit in the system and happy to live in its simulation of life, or you are on the other side of it and everything looks completely different.

When you blue pill, you choose to care about all the stuff inside the Matrix. Imagine living in the Matrix and you care about the presidential election. It doesn’t actually change anything fundamentally about the simulation, but it’s thorough enough that you can die without realizing that your actions changed nothing about the way the machines used you.

With the red pill, things like the USA president inside the Matrix don’t matter as much to you. You just want the machines to stop. Maybe you pity the people who have chosen to stay in the Matrix. Most of the people inside the Matrix don’t even know or care you exist. But you have a chance at something sloppy and real without any guarantees of safety and at least the machine isn’t eating you passively.

It’s hard to argue life is better outside the Matrix. It’s kinda not. But there’s plenty of people there, whether they wanted to be there or not, and you can’t really go back once you’ve gotten out. (Plus, once you care about the folks on the outside – actually care about them – you don’t want to leave them behind.)

It’s easy to imagine the Wachowski Sisters feeling themselves transitioning from blue to red pill; raised and regarded as white guys where that’s the hot demographic, only to start living as trans feminine – one of the most marginalized identities in America – would radically change everything about the world they knew. Everything about the lives they live must have changed transitioning that way.

I’m not trans. I can’t point to as obvious a moment where I started popping red pills. I’ve kinda microdosed my whole life, little by little, until a very blue (da ba dee) world has become very estrogen dominant. Uh, red. I said red. The two biggest turning points for me were the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 pandemic; only recently have I found myself incapable of squirming my way back into the simulation. So I think about red pills and blue pills a lot. There’s just whole swaths of humanity I don’t know how to interface with anymore.

But I remember being the other way, rather vividly. I even spent most of my adulthood there. I remember going to an anarchist meet-up and feeling like they were speaking a completely different language. They didn’t think any of the issues I cared about were issues. They were so polite to me, but seemed to feel bad for me, and didn’t trust me. I remember being *so confused*.

Now that I’m also starting to read machine code, it’s also easy to see why blue lumpen would be incredibly suspicious or dismissive of the rest. A lot of fringe stuff doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The blue/red pill metaphor has already been famously coopted by men’s rights. It’s hard to communicate a difference in philosophies that serve the system versus subvert it, particularly when you still believe the system well enough to stay in the blue. And as Cypher showed us, there are plenty of people who know what the machines are up to and totally fine with it, which further obfuscates any social proof element.

Whatever their strengths or flaws as filmmakers, The Wachowski Sisters truly caught something big in the net of their metaphor. The exact details of The Matrix, from its cyberpunk aesthetic to the awesome fight scenes, are extremely anachronistic, but the overarching story is a more timeless one about haves and have-nots, rulers and exploited, systematic versus disenfranchised. I wonder at other places in history where someone falling between castes might relate to Neo’s experience. Privilege lost in order to gain authenticity. Realizing how many lies you’ve believed in. I don’t think this is a modern experience, although the ubiquity of state control and media reach might make the transition more jarring than ever.

(image credit: Warner Bros.)

Plodding, static, and so derivative that Zack Snyder rips himself off repeatedly, Rebel Moon is a glorious piece of garbage fine-tuned to please the director’s boner for shredded people moving in slow motion. There can be no doubt Zack Snyder gets extremely bonerific over sexy hot fascism; it’s basically the elevator pitch for 300. The nice part here is that he seems to realize fascism is actually problematic while giving himself a boner about it. That wasn’t obvious watching 300. I’m pretty sure we call that personal growth!

Notoriously, Rebel Moon was supposed to be a Star Wars movie, but that didn’t work out for reasons I can’t possibly imagine. Netflix decided to let Zack Snyder have at it anyway. They gave him a budget and let him loose. I feel like saying “let loose” gives too lofty an impression of this flick’s aspirations. Snyder’s idea of creative liberation is to liberally rip off visuals and vibes from every other SFF property under the sun, including his own. I honestly can’t tell you how it all feels like ripping off instead of homages or well-worn tropes. It’s really like looking at a mosaic of formative cinema moments that gave teenage Zack Snyder a boner, peppered in with a few fascist bondage machines.

It feels mostly like Star Wars. The spirit is in the right place: little guys deserve not to be brutalized by the big fascist empire. Okay. We’ve given the traditional Hero Cycle to a woman, whose extraordinary power is self-awareness so she can monologue exposition like, “I’m a war orphan. I don’t feel like I deserve love.” Not a direct quote, mind you. It takes a few pages of script to get the same point across.

Sofia Boutella gets a SFF bingo by appearing in a Star Wars-like property, having already earned nerd boners through an excellent performance in my favorite of the NuTrek movies, the James Bond-like Kingsman property, and Tom Cruise’s inferior version of The Mummy. Honestly, someone give this woman a good screenplay. She’s so hot and she deserves it. Her earnest attempts to redeem Snyder & Co’s clunky dialogue is worth a slow clap. Imagine what she could do with real material.

Boutella’s Fascist Dyke haircut runs away with the movie. Every time they flash back to her Vico Ortiz-like undercut, I am reduced to zoo animal sounds.

Djimon Hounsou shows up as General Titus, the Tit-tastic Chunk of Rippling Man Meat who has gotten ripped as hell in his gray years. Zack Snyder said “I need Daddy Hotness” and Hounsou ripped off his shirt to soar to his rescue. I didn’t even recognize him at first because he’s so tanked and dusty in this movie. But once they oil him up, I’m like, omg it’s Djimon Hounsou. I want to motorboat his mitties.

Speaking of motorboatable mitties, this was my introduction to Staz Nair, whose primary role in Rebel Moon was featuring in the James Cameron’s Avatar portion. He befriends a hippogriff named Buckbeak in order to prove he shouldn’t be enslaved on Tattooine anymore, and flies away to have an exciting, tribally coded adventure connecting him with Buckbeak. The sequence concluded with Buckbeak slaughtering the slaver, so like I said, Snyder’s heart is in the right boner. I mean, right place. Did I mention Staz Nair earns a shirt with his freedom, but actually it’s some blanket thing he tosses around his shoulders to ensure his nipples always have a view of the action? C’mon Zack Snyder, we all see what you’re doing.

Meanwhile, Michiel Huisman is not Diego Luna from Rogue One; Ed Skrein in Nazi gear is not Domnhall Gleeson as Hux. The little town of horny Irish people is not on Tattooine. All the slow motion action scene jumps aren’t revisiting the glistening mantitties of 300. That spider lady is not a Drow. The scrappy team does not travel to the Prancing Pony. Hux’s rebirth is not The Matrix. Anthony Hopkins is not an assassin droid from The Mandalorian doing a Scavenger’s Reign subplot. The climactic battle on the floating structures is neither the end of Emperor Strikes Back nor the end of Disney’s Atlantis. Charlie Hunnam is not signing up for a two-movie contract. Etcetera.

It’s kind of a disaster of overlong clunky dialogue that actors *try* to make work, and when we all realize that it won’t, it can’t, it never will, you just have to sit back and muse on how many opportunities Zack Snyder created for a bunch of really hot people to be in sexy action/sexy torture situations. And then you have to love the bad aging makeup for the villain at the end. You have to! If you don’t love it, you don’t love fun. I bet you don’t even like it in k-dramas where they flash back to high school and put fully adult actors in a wig and school uniform.

I hope my tone makes it clear that I enjoyed the hell out of this, and I think it’s the kind of bad where it loops around to good and then back to bad, where it remains, simply terribly *bad*. My sibling and I had so much fun yelling at the movie. My husband felt like his time was *so* very wasted. I noticed in the trailer for the second movie that the Fascist Dyke Haircut is coming back so I’m definitely planning on watching it.

(image credit: Netflix)

I’m about to get real lecturey about a movie I love. I think that “it doesn’t have to be that deep” fully applies to Home Alone and a lot of flicks like it. My emotional review of Home Alone is mostly a lot of charmed gushing about a smartly written screenplay, the Extremely Adorable Brothers Culkin, and loving the random monologues from John Candy as the polka guy.

It’s still one of my favorite Christmas movies, so I’ve really taken it for granted these last thirty-four years. It’s fun for me to take a look with fresher eyes from the perspective of the more jaded adult I’ve become. But while I write this stuff out, it doesn’t change the fact I’ve grown up with Home Alone, and it’s absolutely iconic in my heart.

~

Back when Sara was a sweet little two-year-old sprog with more interest in the taste of carpet fluff than story analysis, John Hughes and Chris Columbus gave us a Christmas classic in Home Alone. Young Kevin McCallister’s family takes a vacation, accidentally leaving him behind, which means he’s the only one available to defend the house against invasion when a pair of robbers attack.

Recently, The New York Times did an analysis of the McCallisters’ wealth. It’s a fun read which concludes, rather neutrally, that this family belongs to the 1%. There’s a lot of speculation about the jobs of the parents, and the novelization reportedly lists them as a fashion designer and Business Guy.

Because the original screenwriters didn’t intend to look at the McCallister parents in this way, any speculation about criminality as a source of their wealth is just a mischievous reinterpretation of the story. It’s trying to tap into the unreality of the scenario (robbers like The Sticky Bandits aren’t really a thing) to come up with a plausible excuse and acknowledging that a lotta people get rich through criminal means, whether it’s Business Guy-flavored or Sticky Bandit flavored. I support this reading.

That said, I don’t think it’s possible the McCallisters could ever be criminal; the movie is too much a fantasy from the perspective of affluent white America, which constantly thinks it’s playing cops and robbers.

Kevin’s preparation shows how he can outsmart any trouble, and we know that a certain type of guy loves the fantasy of power from prepping. Prepping has taken hold in more communities during 21st century turmoil, but in the 90s, it was really only *one* kind of guy. Though Kevin is a child, he’s written by adult men, and it’s significant that Kevin regards himself as the Man of the House. He’s in control and prepared for disaster. Like home invasion.

If you google statistics about home invasion, you’ll see some alarmingly-tinted information from home security companies and insurance companies. We turn to the Bureau of Justice, with all its own biases, which shared in 2010 that fully 65% of home invasions happens between people who know each other previously. The most vulnerable people are single moms, those living in smaller apartment units, and rentals, especially occupied by nonwhite people. Places are it’s often targeted because a prior relationship let the burglar know there are guns or drugs there. Affluent family homes are among the least vulnerable.

Burglary statistics paint a rather expected picture of the economic situation in America. Property crime springs from hardship, and it’s something the lower class is mostly dealing with. Regardless of profession, the McCallisters are certainly not one of the more vulnerable targets.

Yet there is a certain attraction to this fear of home invasions among the affluent. You see it pop up in movies a lot, like The Strangers (the classic example), Panic Room, Hush, The Purge…

Actually, let’s talk The Purge. For every guy who understands its intent as a grim satire about the reality we live in, like WH40k, you get a guy who enjoys the fantasy of permissible brutality, like WH40k. The Purge is an appealing aesthetic to people who may also enjoy the whole zombie shooter genre, where the visuals of mass harm against human people is divested of genuine impact. You could compare 80s action movies stripping away the consequences of violence (like John McClane getting to fight ~terrorists~ in Die Hard) to the permissible violence of The Purge.

This is an awfully intense direction to go with analysis of a kids’ Christmas movie, especially when the violence is intended to be cartoony and goofy. But the traps that Kevin places to protect himself from burglars, and the matter of asymmetric power, makes Kevin’s plight pretty similar to John McClane’s. Not to mention that Kevin commits some real brutality against these guys: in reality, the first fall or two would have probably killed them.

I’m not taking the side of The Sticky Bandits here, even playfully. Kevin’s adorable. Team Kevin. But The Sticky Bandits don’t really have any sort of real-life analog. There isn’t a disaffected bear and his post-twink death twink rolling around in a van casing your local 1% neighborhood, especially since everyone and their mother now has a Ring camera. We don’t have a sense that these Bandits have any motive beyond Money and Pride, which is simply not where “crime” comes from in reality.

Really, “crime” comes from the places that police decide to police. As Slate noted, The McCallisters committed ample crimes without any risk of prosecution. The fantasy of their crimes is acceptable compared to the crimes committed by fantasy villains, who are simply caricatures of the lower class, and the lower class is much more acceptably labeled criminal.

(Let’s not discuss the incredibly shallow misunderstanding of poverty when they attempt to address it in Home Alone 2.)

Yes, Home Alone is a very particular kind of rich person fantasy, where you have an opportunity for justified violence without consequence, whether it is the severe brain damage either Bandit could have realistically suffered or the pursuit of the justice system.

The McCallisters are absolutely not criminals; this would not serve the fantasy.

But this movie may serve as a primer for a toxic fantasy that can grow out of control into something eldritch in certain populations, if you look at it sideways. It pumps its fist at a certain kind of paranoid power fantasy.

~

It’s interesting to note that John Hughes didn’t think of the McCallisters as really *rich,* even while writing a rich guy’s fantasy. The mansion setting was chosen by Chris Columbus because it created more space for the elaborate traps, and once you’ve put a family in a mansion, they’ve inherited a history of generational wealth that is preferentially given to white people as a caste in America. It’s simply how America works.

The set design of the mansion and composition of the family are meant to evoke Norman Rockwell, a painter born in 1894 who depicted an America which has changed notably since his peak. Rockwell is truly an embodiment of Americana for some. Nostalgia is often preyed upon in white nationalism and other extreme right-wing stances that benefit wealth inequality.

What I’m saying here is that someone who isn’t a rich white guy would simply have a different kind of fantasy than this one — it’s inseparable from his orientation in our world. Only a man of his perspective could imagine a neutral, nostalgic, pleasant American family that looked exactly like this, in this setting, with this pursuit of American fantasy-justice against a specter of criminality that shows cluelessness to the real structural inequity of the country which benefits him.

Chris Columbus and John Hughes aren’t the enemy; this isn’t a condemnation by any means. Hughes in particular comes from a working class background in an America where a one-income white family could live in suburbia (with all the associated real estate wealth). For his era and position, he came up as Just Some Guy.

His movies often did address class sensitively, and in favor of “the little guy.” Someone can be enfranchised and privileged and a beneficiary of a lot of dreadful things, but also a thoughtful and talented artist with good intentions who did his best with what he had. I think this is true of many great artists coming out of the higher caste in a caste system. We can only have our own perspective, and all of us are damaged and limited by hierarchy in different ways.

Still, we’ve had Home Alone for more than thirty years, and I think it’s interesting to come back to really see it. It’s easy to take an iconic classic for granted and label it a great without wondering who it’s great for.

~

The question I always ask about fantasy wish fulfillment movies is, “Who does the fantasy benefit?”

The fantasy of Home Alone is meant to be a small child getting one over on grownups, and it works so well on that level, it really can be that simple.

But the way that the child gets one over on grownups, the way the grownups are chosen and depicted, is specific to the perspective of wealthy whiteness–and a paranoid perspective.

I don’t feel prepared to evaluate the impact of this very narrow fantasy on culture. I’ll leave you, instead, with a story about a very young Sara who enjoyed this movie when she was younger than Kevin McCallister.

I remember lying on the floor of my family’s apartment with a piece of construction paper, trying to draw the layout of our home. The complex probably had fifty units across five buildings (or something like that). The carpet was twenty years old and smelled like it. We had always rented, and always would. When I drew the apartment, I blew up the scale really big and imagined each room thrice its size to make more room for traps.

There simply wasn’t much to trap: in about nine hundred square feet, the bedrooms were clustered around the end of a short hall, and the kitchen and living room bracketed the opposite end. But also, The Sticky Bandits would never want to attack us, my mom reassured me. We didn’t have anything worth stealing. That’s the kind of thing you should tell a child, not that she is statistically much more vulnerable than the kid in the movie.

I wanted to break Adult Guy feet on toys and bash their heads with bans of green beans and burn their hands with my doorknobs. Blissful, paranoid Christmas fantasy in the middle of a small town apartment complex. I still love watching it. Does that need to mean anything at all?

(image credit: Disney)

IN A WORLD where nobody on Letterboxd appreciates two hot people with good chemistry (an average of 1.9 stars on this one!),

where the Netflix royal families all somehow ended up around Aldovia because of The Silk Road,

an extremely hot Italian-American hairdresser bullies the extremely hot prince of Lavania into loving her midriff as much as I do.

Yet again, a producer pulled off the coup of convincing a production company to pay for a vacation to New Zealand, where two super hot young people have vastly superior chemistry to any other Netflix romcom couple. Honestly, I sometimes think location shoots are like summer camp for frisky young actors, and GOOD FOR THEM. I believe the chemistry so much that I feel I might have been violating their privacy. Good. For. Them. Need a middle aged nutbag to be your unicorn? *phone hand gesture* Call me.

Mena Massoud has been on my “makes me insensate and babbling” shortlist of actors since I saw the live action adaptation of Aladdin for the first time. When I lost two hours to the haze of thirsty fantasies about Mena Massoud for the first time, I was convinced Aladdin was actually a good remake. Then I tried watching the movie again and realized it wasn’t actually good. No, Mena Massoud is just incredibly hot. He’d probably have chemistry with a pillar. Or the concept of Kantian philosophy. Like he just exists and he’s got chemistry with existence.

I’m so happy that someone saw his hotness and thought “let’s make a movie where it’s more like he’s Princess Jasmine falling in love with a commoner.” I just want him doing romcoms with other beautiful people for the rest of his career, if that’s okay with him. I understand if that isn’t his ambition. BUT! If that’s what he wants to do, I’m here for it! I will watch it. I flew out of my chair when the two of them finally made out. I was monster-growling “just fuck already” at them about halfway through the movie.

Our heroine had so much personality, warmth, and charm, and she came along with a hilarious set of friends whose job was to mostly have sizzling lesbian chemistry with the caricature of a mean French lady. I laughed a lot.

The woman the prince is supposed to marry is perfect, and I’m so happy the credits animation showed her fulfilling her dream of opening a store with Purses for Dogs.

11/10 no notes, had a great time with the whole thing.

(image credit: Netflix)