Venom: Let There Be Carnage is not a well-written movie where decisions the characters make have an impact on the outcome of the conflicts they face. Rather, it’s a movie where a filmmaker was allowed to do whatever he wanted as long as the result involved Black Alien and Red Alien fighting each other, and the filmmaker said to himself “whatever I want is real freakin gay.”

Eddie Brock is still living with his alien symbiote after the events of the first movie. They seem to have reached an uncomfortable, sweaty equilibrium, where Eddie is once again working at his job despite constant bickering with Venom. They can’t agree on anything.

Now that Eddie and Venom have gotten past the exciting hookup part of the relationship, Venom still wants to be a party gay wearing light-up jewelry at a college rave, while Eddie wants to be a domestic gay. “Just shut up and be my wifey,” says Eddie. But nay, Venom must party and eat heads. Worse, Eddie doesn’t acknowledge how tenderly Venom cares for him, already fulfilling his role as wifey without appreciation.

Needless to say, they break up. It’s a loud, messy process that victimizes Eddie’s motorcycle and leads to Venom’s many casual hookups with other hosts. But no host is as good as Eddie. The other ones keep dropping dead.

While they’re apart, the movie doesn’t really show that they’re better or worse for the absence. Venom gets to enjoy himself. Eddie gets to focus on his job. But gosh, they miss each other, so they hook back up in a heartbeat once Carnage provides a reason* and Eddie begs thoroughly. Briefly, Eddie and Venom’s ex-girlfriend joins them in another threesome, and she concedes she might do it again because it’s awesome.

* Carnage’s “plot” is “actor chews scenery while Carnage’s girlfriend Shriek enthuses about dating tentacles.”

Red and Black Alien fight each other once peril is appropriately established because of plotty stuffy reasons, serial killing Woody Harrelson, idk. The reason Black Alien succeeds is, apparently, because Eddie and Venom are meant to be, whereas Cletus and Carnage are not. (As proven by Carnage trying repeatedly to kill Shriek.)

Once the Good Gay Couple wins by eating the Bad Gay Couple, Eddie and Venom reach a happy medium in their relationship. They become Vacation Gays together and retire to a beach where Venom finally admits he’s been in love with Eddie the whole time.

Why did I love this movie? Because everything I wrote above is completely true. I can add no other commentary. Andy Serkis et al had a plan and that plan was real freakin gay and I’m happy I got to watch it.

(This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on 17 January 2022.)

(image credit: Sony Pictures)

If you’ve been aware of my existence for longer than five minutes, you know I’m a useless sapphic; if you’ve ever seen The Sweetest Thing, you know I’m going to complain that this isn’t a romcom where the best friends end up together. Christina Applegate and Cameron Diaz have the chemistry of two “straight” girls who are actually perfect for each other, madly in love, incessantly homoerotic, and I’m supposed to believe either of them have any need for men.

(Selma Blair can’t end up with Applegate or Diaz because she needs to end up with me.)

This movie has so much of this blessed trio frolicking around in states of partial dress, or no dress at all, and I just sort of sat around drooling and having zero thoughts. I’m convinced the volume of boobies was intended to disable people like me from having a single critical thought. Or a coherent thought, for that matter. Boobs.

~

By the way, I am a feminist.

~

In “The Sweetest Thing,” we spend a whole lot of time at a straight people breeding ground, which is the brightest, cleanest, quietest night club you’ve ever seen.

Here, we may observe heterosexual mating habits. Predatory behavior is observed in both genders, wherein gender is presumed to correlate closely to conformation of genitalia, and sexual dimorphism is high. Females of the species dress in flamboyant colors with dropped waists, tunic shirts, and weird big jewelry. Males of the species wear garish veneers and spare jewelry (wrist watches, chain necklaces) to indicate the wealth.

Interactions between prospective mates primarily occur on the dance floor and near the bar. Only in this communally gendered region are social interactions considered to have a sexual charge. Behavior in bathrooms cannot have sexual connotation, as demonstrated by the scene with many women fondling Christina Applegate’s breasts by the sinks. Like, am I, an innocent cinema anthropologist, supposed to be *not* gay about that?

The assertion that same-gender sexuality is intended for the consumption of men may be inferred by the fact that Applegate only turns a suggestive situation with Diaz sexual when observed by a man. As with the metaphoric tree falling unobserved in a forest, can one woman’s face in another woman’s lap truly be gay if there is no man to have a boner about it?

~

I love a good screwball comedy, honestly, and The Sweetest THing is a raunchy screwball sex comedy of the highest order. There is a romance, and it’s a comedy, so I suppose it’s also a raunchy screwball romcom. But the rom is the most boring part of it. My enjoyment peaked when something weird and gross was happening because my sibling and I got to shout at the TV. “No! Don’t scratch it! DON’T TASTE IT!”

Comedy is a communal experience, and this movie was meant to be seen in a group of your own dumbass friends. Which of your friends would drive three and a half hours in her underwear in case she might hook you up with the love of your life? If you know that girl, watch this movie with her.

The actresses deliver hilarious performances with outstanding chemistry. It’s gross and weird and genuinely sweet. Also, boobies.

~

On a tangential note, it seems like every new-to-me movie I’ve loved lately got terrible reviews in its time. What’s up with that? Is my taste that bad? Have tastes evolved? Is it easier to be generous in evaluation with the perspective of time? Or maybe is everyone wrong and I’m just that good at picking unappreciated gems at complete random off streaming websites? I’ll let you decide.

(Image credit: Columbia Pictures)

I haven’t made all the right decisions in my life. Not once have I been cockblocked by Jennifer Coolidge, nor was I interrupted in a breakup by Jennifer Coolidge hitting on my new ex. I can’t imagine anything gayer than these events happening. Jennifer Coolidge is a unicorn shaped sort of like a human. Rainbows spill forth when she staggers on screen and opens her mouth. Comic genius looks like Stiffler’s mom, but also, she is somehow the embodiment of gay camp, and she’s not in my life. I wish she’d spit on my shoes. I’m going to make a Task Rabbit where the only task I will take is being willing to let Jennifer Coolidge spit on my shoes.

Coolidge Cockblocking happens in Single All the Way, which is an hour and a half-ish sequence of the most incredibly gay things you can imagine in between Task Rabbit commercials.

Spontaneous fashion shoot in a wood pile giggling with your gay bff? Picking up extra gig work on vacation because you’re a poor-ass homo living between children’s book advances? Wearing sweaters with really long scarves? Taking over Jennifer Coolidge’s Christmas pageant to buff it like you’re Queer Eyeing your family? Secretly being mutually in love with your bff for years and never doing anything about it?

All so very, very gay.

I’d really like to thank Task Rabbit for sponsoring the gays.

Oh, did you ask me about Task Rabbit? Haha, so kind for you to ask.

Well, there’s this thing where movies require financing, and if your pitch is, “I want to make the homosexual version of a Hallmark small town romance,” you might have to make some odd compromises in order to see that through. Like promising a gig work app to have a significant amount of real estate in your story visually and in actual plot.

This is zero judgment. God, if this is what it takes to get my cozy gay small town shit, then fine! Fine. They can fall in love wearing Task Rabbit shirts. It’s not quite like that (okay, sometimes it’s like that) but the rest of the movie is so engrossing that I actually keep forgetting I’m actually watching a commercial.

When we aren’t learning how the hunkiest guy in the movie is *probably* this hunky and compassionate because he works with Task Rabbit, it’s a really good small town Hallmark-style romance! Wish fulfillment and comfortable feelings, like a six-pack nestled comfortably behind a designer chunky knit, are everything that I want from a Christmas watch, and we get wish fulfillment in spades. Do you have fantasies like My Family Understands The Gay Thing And Is Very Supportive? I mean, who doesn’t?

It’s a uniformly good thing when the family is all together. No sniping, no jabs, just love all around. The family’s mostly on the team where they want our lead to hook up with his best friend, but Mom wants him to hook up with her personal trainer, and it creates this playful atmosphere where everyone is too invested in the best way possible.

So yes, this is also another romcom where one of the people falls in love with the other romantic lead’s family. And it’s a friends to lovers. And it’s turning away from the big city life to embrace the dreams you were always too afraid to pursue, like opening a plant shop with your bff-turned-lover. (A plant store! I told you, Single All the Way is full of all the gayest things ever!)

But mostly it’s about Jennifer Coolidge’s cleavage, I think. I really can’t come up with a reason not to give this five stars.

Thanks Task Rabbit. This was a really nice extended commercial with homo kissing.

(Image credit: Netflix)

Normally, I’m the last person who would get into an inspirational romance, but tis the season for clicking on movie thumbnails that look vaguely like holiday romcoms. I went into Last Holiday knowing it’s only a Queen Latifah comedy. I was pleased to find a movie that fully embodies the holiday cozies that I seek during my yearly holiday movie thing. (art credit: me, Sara)

So here’s the sitch: Latifah has been working hard at a retail job for a decade, putting her trust in God that as long as she keeps herself right, everything will turn out right. She’s got a diary of potentials that includes a fabulous life full of vacations and love (with hunky coworker LL Cool J). But first she’s gotta work hard, help out her sister and neighbors, and keep going to church. Things have struck a sorta dull rhythm until our gorgeous heroine’s life gets shaken up by the misdiagnosis.

The idea has potential for getting depressing – I can ruminate on dying without help, thank you – but the emotional moments are strong without becoming overwhelming. It’s extremely fair for anyone to melt down a little bit over a terminal diagnosis. But Latifah’s character permits herself few moments of self-pity. Her relationship with herself is strong, as is her relationship with God, which doesn’t exactly waver but does often prompt Latifah to Give Him the Eye and ask, “Really?” The whole “Why me?” chorus she shares with her church community is heart-wrenching.

But still, it’s mostly light, and there’s a lot of quality class commentary going on. Retail’s a job with a lot of disrespect coming straight from the managers who don’t recognize you. Latifah’s main method of survivalism has been learning to keep her mouth shut. She’s totally lost her voice.

Once she realizes that being good in life hasn’t led to the best outcome, she decides to stop deferring her joy. Latifah cashes out on her assets to embark on a luxury European vacation. She also finds her voice. She meets everyone with complete honesty–but also complete compassion. And the world around her heals a little bit for it. Just a little. But oh boy does it feel good.

Bear in mind that this movie is loosely adapted from a 1950s flick starring Alec Guinness; this screenplay was originally intended for John Candy (with Carl Reiner directing no less!). I bet you can imagine the pure heart that is written into our hero/ine, then–along with strong physical comedy demands that Latifah meets wonderfully.

I mean it as the highest praise when I say that I think Latifah did as well as Candy could have in bringing her entire heart to the character, but she wears it on her outside more than I think Candy might have, and fairly so; this is a working class character who goes on vacation and immediately is forced to deal with her corporation’s boss. Like, can’t she relax before she dies?

If you’re familiar with the trope at play here, you know the movie’s going to have a happy ending. In fact, it’s pretty uniformly happy. I love it when romantic comedies take an opportunity to place us in a fantasyland that gives humanity some credit. People really are generally nice! Or at least, they want to be. Even the billionaire boss has his glimmering moments of humanity, and Latifah’s character is open-hearted enough to witness it, even if she’s got the boundaries of steel to protect herself too.

The romance here is an important relationship but not the most central one; I’d argue that’s between Latifah and God. But Hunky LL Cool J performs fabulously as a man whose job is to be head-over-heels for a woman as perfect as Latifah. That man faces a fear of flying to hike across an avalanche to make sure he can tell her that he loves her before she dies. Like, oof.

She also befriends an unexpected but charming Gerard Depardieu, and their chemistry is so good, I actually kinda wanted them to end up together. Can she have all of them? Giancarlo Esposito too. She’s way too good for him, and she’s right to turn him down, but also I argue that he is very cute and maybe she can fix him idk. This is a fantasy of hope, right?

I’m totally putting this on my yearly circulation, right with other ultra-cozies like While You Were Sleeping and When Harry Met Sally.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

“You know what movie is so funny but nobody talks about? Popstar by Andy Samberg,” say I, a Millennial, who tends to think SNL was the funniest when I was in my early twenties for some reason.

Ten years from now, we will hear a Z or Zennial saying, “You know what movie is so funny but nobody talks about?” and it will be this, in much the way this will be the funniest-ever era of SNL for them. “Will Farrell? I have no idea who that is. Marcelo Hernandez, on the other hand…”

Funny and well-paced, but somehow unremarkable, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is one of those comedies most likely to be adored by stoned teenagers for decades to come.

In interviews, the creators said “Treasure” is meant to feel like Goonies, but there’s a special distinction here: This is a view of Goonies that sees Goonies as an ancient classic predating their era, not a Goonies that originated from their childhood. Any of these guys might tell us about how much their parents loved Goonies as a kid, so they watched the DVD rerelease, or something like that.

It feels different.

It’s impressive to keep hold of the viral internet shorts feeling for an entire narrative without getting annoying. I think the pace would satisfy someone used to watching internet playlists for hours instead of movies. But the pacing also slows enough to avoid becoming intolerable for someone patient enough to wait two hours to download a 15mb video clip with the resolution of a potato.

My favorite Gen Z influence is how casually fat women are included in the cast. There is zero acknowledgment, textually or in the director’s vision, of the fact 2/3 of the lead women are fat, and not like Hollywood in the 90s fat where Hugh Grant is snogging a woman with a hint of butt. These two park rangers are just stupid assholes like the three nerdy weeds they’re chasing. Hot, horny, stupid, useless, fat girl park rangers? Have I ever been so represented in a movie before?

~

It kinda seems like this generation of creators are obsessed with cults.

In “Treasure” Bowen Yang is the cutest most flawless cult leader to walk the Earth, as Bowen Yang is the cutest most flawless anything to play anything any time he shows up. His cult is hilariously scary. This is not the only cult I’ve seen in recent culture, and the more I think about it, the more I can name.

Midsommar was one of the more enjoyable cult movies recently; I posited that Mandy was the nighttime-flavored version of Midsommar. Ready or Not and Get Out give us whole family cults too.

Cult of the Lamb has become a fabulously famous indie game, and I’ve been playing Cultist Simulator for years.

TV shows give us cults all the time, like in Yellowjackets, The Path, Big Love, and American Horror Story Season Whatever.

We live in a time where cults can be so mainstream, the highest grossing movies of the year might star An Actual Cultist, the president might be a cultist, your parents might have gotten turned into cultists, and we have all known multiple people who got sucked into a cult selling candles/soap/makeup/knives/whatever.

Obviously some of the groups I’m bringing to mind aren’t explicitly cults, but rather some kind of socially predatory system that makes folks toxic to be around and may endanger their lives (but almost always their bank accounts).

I’ve got a theory why cult-like presences are so common in America right now, and it’s pretty simple: Humans are social animals that need communities to survive. We are never meant to function independently, or even in small cells (like a couple with a child). We don’t have the tools to do it. But we’re all poor as hell and working way too much to build communities with our neighbors–not to mention, who’s getting along with their neighbors right now? So we just get lonely. Some very basic part of our soul gets sick. And then it’s really easy to take advantage of the sickness.

Predatory megachurches, pyramid schemes, fad gyms, extreme political discussion boards, and other places are happy to sell us a substitute to the communities we might naturally grow if we weren’t always running around playing survivalist games, working long hours to pay medical bills.

So even if we haven’t tripped into one of these cult-like settings, we know people who have, and all of us are curious about wtf that looks like.

That’s my theory anyway.

In The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, the cult exists in the story to replace one character’s sense of community. His friends are growing up and moving on. The one who looks drawn by Tim Burton is joining a church and getting a house with his girlfriend; the one who looks like Conan O’Brien’s son is trying to inherit Conan O’Brien’s business. With nobody else willing to put up with some guy whose penis occasionally escapes his pants in full public view, there is only the not-so-loving arms of a cult to turn to.

In the end, friendship wins, because that’s the whole theme of the movie. This is so explicit that they might have a random character beatbox about friendship and treasures to propel the plot onward. It’s not subtle, but subtlety is overrated.

I’ve wasted a lot more time watching movies with many fewer laughs per minute by SNL alums than this.

I avoided watching this one for a while because I was convinced I’d hate it. The concept is creepy to me. I’ll accept a horror movie where a woman claims to be a man’s fiancée and gaslights him and his family into accepting her. But a romance?

Turns out I was all wrong. A potentially ooky situation is played with such a deft, airy hand that it never gets weird. “Sleeping” shows how integral every element of a production is to setting the tone. Expressive music ranges from goofy slapstick to heartfelt, actors play situations lightly, Chicago is filmed with warmth like it’s a dream, and a few smart plot choices keep us on the heroine’s team.

This toes the line between Funny Enough To Not Take Seriously and Earnest Enough to Care. It does it really well.

As with many of my other favorite romances, Sandra Bullock’s character falls in love with the hero’s family first. She basically says herself toward the end that the whole romance here is between a very lonely, very sweet Bullock and the family she wished she could join. Gosh, who can’t sympathize with that?

I just watched My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Julia Roberts’s motivations weren’t sympathetic enough. We got a couple glances at insecurity and her humanity. But it wasn’t enough, especially when she had such a support system and was happy to use people. Bullock’s motivations are painted so sympathetically that you might actually be okay with her marriage to the coma dude after he wakes up and seems okay with it too.

Bullock’s secret becoming revealed to one of the elder family friends early on makes it so she has an adorable co-conspirator and also a plausible reason for continuing to lie. As a writer, I was kinda jealous of how smart that is. I’m not jealous anymore because I’m definitely doing that in a book later. (Hey, like they say, great artists steal.)

It takes a while for hero Bill Pullman to actually show up in the movie, and I barely remember a thing about him. The chemistry is very good. I understand a lot of people really love him as a character, but the romance didn’t do much for me. It speaks volumes that the rest of it was nice enough to keep me on the line.

When it comes to comfort movies, this one is so comfortable, I could imagine using it to drift off to sleep every night before bed. While You Were Sleeping indeed.

I do think it’s amazing how recognizable Pullman’s floppy hair is. If you want to talk about things that typify 1995, I’d put Pullman’s floppy hair on the list. And shout out to While You Were Sleeping for daring to spend so much time around working class people, which a lot of romcoms have zero interest in doing.

(image credit: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution)

I can give Save the Last Dance an impartial analysis about as much as I could impartially analyze one of my siblings. I was thirteen when this movie landed in my life; at exactly the right age, and the exact pallor, to love the many virtues this movie holds for its target audience.

There’s no doubt *plenty* to be said about the flaws in its approach to race. None of that could possibly come from me, on so many levels.

Here we have an adorable Julia Stiles (who looks nothing like a professional ballet dancer) doing dreadful, awkward choreography, and I love every moment of it. Who choreographed this movie? I think this might be the dance-oriented movie with the worst dancing in it. Let me know if there’s a worse one because I want to watch it.

Stiles lost her mother in a car accident. Because her mother was driving to reach Stiles’s dance audition, Stiles blames her love of dance for the death. It’s natural for young people to blame themselves for the foibles of adults. Learning that the whole world isn’t about “you” is an important part of coming of age. Stiles is taken out of her known world to live with a dad she barely knows somewhere new.

This is a classic 90s YA novel setup that immediately puts me into the most comfortable territory imaginable as a kid.

Throw in a romance that involves “sexy” dancing with Sean Patrick Thomas, and basically I was rabid about it. Frothing at the mouth. White-girl dancing in my living room to “Put Your Back Into It.”

Rewatching this immediately put me back into the body of a thirteen year old at the most awkward age of her life who thought that this movie could possibly have any relationship with reality. As a smallish-town kid who hadn’t been anywhere, all the shots of the Chicago inner city with a blue filter truly looked Stiles had gone through the looking glass into an MTV video.

This was some other world, an elevated Romeo and Juliet between a character who could easily be dropkicked out of the screen so that I could replace her and have my butt touched by Sean Patrick Thomas. Everyone at the club would be like, “Wow, that awkward white girl with braids really has a sense of rhythm.” And I would have a sense of rhythm. I really, truly would.

I gotta say, rewatching it as adult, even with the nostalgia, I could notice that the white lens of the movie is painfully strong. Parts of it don’t make sense without racist assumptions pre-installed. You need context on what white people thought about race in the year 2001 to get meaning out of some parts, like Julia Stiles sitting in a completely normal waiting room, as if it’s some high drama for a white ballerina to be in a public health clinic. It’s gotta be pretty bad if I noticed that while seeing how much bad choreography I remembered, awkwardly, swinging my middle aged butt and bouncing in place until Juilliard embraces me.

(Image credit: Paramount Pictures)