Summing Up 2025

1. What did you do in 2025 that you'd never done before? 

Lots of small things and not too many big things. But I think that's good. Small changes eventually make for drastic life alterations. Going to Ciudad de México in February was probably the biggest highlight in terms of things I've never done before, but I also made many new dishes, went to St. George Island Brewfest for the first time, fasted for 72 hours, and learned a lot about what I am capable of doing.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year? 

At the new year last year I made a deal with myself that I would do less work for my employer, that I would work out more regularly, and that I would spend more time traveling and visiting friends. I did all of these except for the part where I work less for my employer. Somehow I seem even to have increased that amount of work. I don't think this will happen next year—I'm on sabbatical for five months—but I need to get better at that work–life balance everyone talks about.

For 2026 I resolve simply to say yes to more things. When people invite me to do things, I need to start saying yes more and more often.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? 

No.

4. Did anyone close to you die? 

No.

5. What countries did you visit? 

Mexico City in February was absolutely amazing. And in September I went to Vega Baja in Puerto Rico, which was also amazingly restful. (Yes, I know that Puerto Rico is a colony in the United States empire.) 

6. What would you like to have in 2026 that you lacked in 2025? 

Greater peace of mind and more of an ability to relax.

7. What dates from 2025 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? 

October 15—The Violate Man: Male/Male Rape in the American Imagination was published by Vanderbilt University Press.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Really nothing can compare to having The Violate Man come out this year. It's an enormous personal achievement, and in many ways it's a huge weight off of my shoulders. I've been working on the research published in The Violate Man since some time around 2008 or 2009. Perhaps a third of this was written as my dissertation in 2012. Since then I've worked at shaping my thinking on the topic of male/male rape into a book manuscript. I've probably told many people this story, but the book has had a lot of trouble finding an editor willing to work with me on publishing it. Its subject matter has been difficult for a lot of people. Gianna Mosser, my editor at Vanderbilt has been a true collaborator and mentor on this book, and I feel extremely grateful to have her working with me on this book.

The book won a publication subvention award from the American Society for Theatre Research this year, and I'm excited for any awards that might come its way, but mostly I just want people to be able to read this book, into which I've put so much energy, time, and care.

9. What was your biggest failure?

I am decidedly a failure at romance at the moment. I am a very introverted and private person, and I just am not interested in letting anyone else in further than a friend. I really like friendship, actually! Maybe I don't want anything more. This has been disappointing for others in my life, including—occasionally—me. I have definitely tried, though, which is why it counts as a failure.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

I did not.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

At a farmer's market in Northampton this summer I bought a fig tree. Hopefully it survives while I'm in California for three weeks, but I expect it will. The woman I bought it from said "It could live in your trunk for two weeks!"

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

New Yorkers came through this year and elected Zohran Mamdani to be their mayor. It was maybe the most hopeful thing to happen in 2025.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Another appalling and depressing year in US American politics. I don't understand how most of these people live with themselves or look themselves in the mirror. The people who made me the most embarrassed this year were the craven Republicans in Congress, who seem to operate without any principles whatsoever aside from racism and the prospect of achieving personal wealth and power.

14. Which charitable organizations did you give to?

The Tallahassee Bail Fund, an organization doing amazing work in North Florida.

I also donated money to help some students and former students in need.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? 

Katie and Nick's wedding in May. 

Cookie week at the New York Times.

Being able to do the doctoral hooding for my student Rebecca Curran.

The American Society for Theatre Research annual meeting in Denver.

Doing a 72-hour water fast with Dayne and Garrett.

16. What song will always remind you of 2025? 

"Golden" from K-Pop Demon Hunters, of course, though it's definitely not my favorite song from the movie. That would be:

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: 

a) happier or sadder? Happier.

b) thinner or fatter? Thicker but not fatter.

c) richer or poorer? Richer. 

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Writing, honestly. My job right now—especially as the editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism—means reading the writing of other scholars multiple times. This just doesn't leave much time for me to be doing the writing I'd like to be doing.

 

19. What do you wish you'd done less of? 

I spent way too much time on Snapchat in 2025. But I am not quite sure if I wish I were spending less time doing it, so this is an oblique answer to the question. I'm getting something out of Snapchat, I guess...

This Snapchat thing is super weird. Somehow, in the last 5 months, I've amassed more than 15,000 Snapchat followers. They're mostly there for teacher–student fantasies, I think. There is also just an enormous contingent of people who compliment me on my physique and my chest. This feels good. I've been self-conscious about my body forever—I think this has a lot to do with Christianity and shame and "the mortification of the flesh" and all that. (Christianity really really fucked me up. I don't recommend it.) But back to Snapchat: I think the weird thing is that I try to be genuine and honest with everyone, but with the number of people messaging me, that's just not really possible. Anyway, it's a new, weird world for me. I've even considered doing OnlyFans and trying to make a little money at it.

20. How did you spend the Winter holidays? 

I've been in Southern California for the last week or so, and I'll be here until January 6. It's been very, very relaxing.

21. Did you fall in love in 2025?

I did not.

22. How many one-night stands? 

Only a couple. This was a real fail this year.

23. What was your favorite TV program? 

I did not watch Heated Rivalry, but I will, I will; it's too gayportant not to. The problem is that this is the time when I need to catch up on movies. I will check out these hockey pucks in the new year. 

I try to avoid tv as much as possible. 

There was a lot less of it on tv this year, but—as with 2024—I kept current with all seasons of Drag Race. This year that meant: Canada's Drag Race season 5, RuPaul's Drag Race season 17, RuPaul's Drag Race: Tournament of All Stars (season 10), Drag Race France: All Stars, Drag Race Brasil season 2, Drag Race Philippines: Slaysian Royale, RuPaul's Drag Race UK series 7, and Drag Race España temporada 5. The best of these were All Stars France and Slaysian Royale. Unfortunately, both US seasons were a bust this year, despite there being some amazing drag on them. The worst of these seasons, though, was decidedly Brasil—what a mess.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? 

Not really. But if you don't return your shopping carts at the grocery store, you are jumping to the top of that list. And I truly believe there is a special place in Hell for the people who are listening to stuff or watching videos on their phones without headphones in shared public spaces. 

25. What was the best book you read? 

Two different novels by Álvaro Enrigue: You Dreamed of Empires, an amazing retelling of the first encounter between Moctezuma, Malintizin, and Cortés that I flat-out adored; and then because I loved that so much I got his earlier book Sudden Death, which is a kind of insane tennis match involving Caravaggio, the history of tennis, the conquest of México, the execution of Anne Boleyn, and a clear path between Mexican artists working with feathers and Baroque chiaroscuro.

Pascal Quignard's gorgeous All the World's Mornings, which was recommended to me by my friend Joe. I also loved Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings.

I also read some great plays this year: Nick Green's Casey and Diana and Cliff Cardinal's play William Shakespeare's As You Like It: a Radical Retelling. And I read about 20 French tragedies from the 17th and 18th centuries. I didn't love all of those, but it was very exciting to read to the side of the usual French canon.

I usually post about what I'm reading on GoodReads.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery? 

Lola Young! This whole album is great.

27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw? 

It wasn't a great year for theatregoing for me...

28. What did you want and get? 

So many fun times with my friends in Tallahassee. A brilliant new colleague who joined me teaching our PhD students (honestly it's so hard to get good people; I can't tell you how happy I am).

29. What did you want and not get?

A mandoline. I'll buy one soon.

But honestly it's worth saying that I have most of what I want. I think part of what it means to be happy is to want what you have. There is a great deal I could complain about, but I would rather delight in the things I have been given.

30. What was your favorite film of this year? 

This is still likely to change—I have about 60 films on my list to see—but as of the December 30 and until I see tonight's movie, my top ten is:

It Was Just an Accident

The Secret Agent

One Battle after Another

Parthenope

Sinners

Sorry, Baby

The History of Sound

Sentimental Value

K-Pop Demon Hunters

After the Hunt

You can follow my movie-watching on Letterboxd. I kind of love Letterboxd, and I post there now much more than I do on this blog. 

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? 

I turned 44. My friend Matt met me in Clearwater Beach, FL and we drank and relaxed on the beach and talked and ate crab. Matt had also set up a surprise where our friend Walter walked into the bar we were in on my actual birthday, and we all had dinner and lots of laughs and nonsense. It was glorious, and I had the best time.

32. What new recipes did you make this year?

The best cookie recipe of the year was Dan Pelosi's Dark 'n' Stormy Cookies, which are amazing. I'm so happy he invented them and I made them (twice).

I've been cooking a lot from Ixta Belfrage's book Fusão, it's a Brazilian fusion cookbook. And I've been making a ton of different bean dishes, as I work toward eating less meat.

I post a lot of food content on Instagram. I am not sure what I'll be making more of in this next year, but I look forward to more East Asian and South Asian food I think.

33. What were your cocktail obsessions? 

I drink a lot of Manhattans still. I think it's just so much easier—no lemon juice to squeeze and no shaking. Just a perfect Filthy cherry and that excellent mix of bitters, Whiskey, and Vermouth.

34. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? 

An H-Mart in Tallahassee.

35. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2025? 

Polo after polo.

36. What kept you sane?

I have two standing dates every week now. My bar trivia team (Michael, Meredith, and Jason) meets for Professor Jim's Trivia every Tuesday. And my movie club (I call it Unseen Movie Club but I don't know what everyone else calls it) meets every Thursday to watch something none of us has seen before. This is a real recipe for sanity.

37. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Gianmarco Soresi

38. What political issue stirred you the most?

Ongoing genocide in Palestine. The ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The resurgence of fascism in the United States.

This is the same as last year because this is what voters everywhere overwhelmingly seem to like. It's horrible.

This year we can add: the federal government sending military troops into US cities, the US committing piracy in international waters, the bombing of Venezuelan boats, and the Supreme Court's truly criminal and lawless shadow docket.

39. Whom did you miss?

My friend John, who I didn't get to see in 2025 because he's over in Spain while I'm in Los Angeles.

40. Who was the best new person you met?

Not the first time I met him, but it was my first time really getting to hang out with Jonathan Shandell this year, and he's great.

41. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2025:

I think most of what I learned this year is about teaching. With the crazy advancements in Large Language Models, teaching has become a very new business. I can no longer really trust that students have written what they say they've written, which means I can no longer trust that they've read what they've said they've read or learned any of what I was hoping they might take away from the lessons I've planned. At least at home—in the classroom I can mostly trust that they're there with me, thinking alongside of me. But this has really pushed me in new directions in terms of thinking about why I teach, and why I want them to learn. I've been doing this a long time, so this isn't completely new, but I've realized more and more that this is for them and what I'm working to do is give them tools and ideas and new ways to think about things. It's my responsibility to do that. It's also my responsibility to make learning enticing so that they might want to learn what I have to teach them. The challenge here is that I have to know very, very well why it is that I think they need what I have to give them. We can't take anything for granted any more. This has made me even more confident about my teaching, because I have also had to reckon with and be quite sure about the value of what I have to offer.

42. Share an important quotation from 2025:

This is from Avgi Saketopoulou's book Sexuality Beyond Consent.

"If the perverse underwrites all sexuality, rather than ask perversity to account for itself, we might, instead, ask after docile, tame, and subdued sexualities that may suffer from having lost their footing in the perverse."

I've been thinking a lot this year about what we don't know about each other and about ourselves. I was watching the movie Weapons recently with my sister and my niece (who loves horror movies and talked me into this), and I was struck by a scene in which Josh Brolin's character is dreaming and he begs his mute son to talk to him. 

It's the queer child, I said to my relatives who looked at me quizzically. We demand that the child tell us what's going on with him because we cannot fathom what is happening inside the child. We cannot understand his thought processes or desires. This is all children, of course, not only the queer child. And the reason Weapons works so well is that it is indeed very possible that a group of children made some sinister (or indeed harmless) plan to all go do something that the adults in their lives simply cannot fathom. The desires of the child are opaque.

But also this is true of all of us, even ourselves. We don't actually understand ourselves either. In Sexuality Beyond Consent Saketoupoluou writes, "I do not know you. And neither do you." and I think about that all the time. I don't actually know myself very well at all, despite all the navel-gazing I've done (including these annual blogs!). I think this line of thinking has underwritten most of my intellectual work this year. I want to think more about what I am capable of that I haven't yet discovered, and this means also pushing myself toward doing things that I have decided are "not me". Docility and rootedness have worked for me for a while, but I wonder what else there is to discover or put pressure on within the opacity of the self (that is, my self).

P.S. If you have your own annual report or if you have anything to say about this one, shoot me a text or a DM. I'd love to hear from you.

The Anderson Tapes (1972)

Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes is a satire of the surveillance state, perhaps more in conversation with Lumet’s own 1976 satire of television, Network, than with its more obvious companions, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Brian De Palma's Blowout (1981). 

Coppola’s version of the surveillance state, for example, is one of terror and darkness, a descent into madness brought on by the panopticon. Lumet’s version is much, much lighter. He sees all of this collecting of audio and video as so much wasted manpower, so much squandered money, and so much ill-spent time. Six people in a room talking about a video tape and trying to gain information about what's happening between a 90-year-old man and his son when nothing at all is happening! Lumet’s movie thinks the police state is absurd—like Kafka but comic. 

I think this comic quality is relatively hard to see from the perspective of 2025—and so Lumet's film feels weird from this vantage. We are used to thinking of surveillance as an evil, malicious, signifier of unstoppable state power. (The key 2025 example is, I suppose, Edgar Wright's The Running Man.) In The Anderson Tapes, though, all this recording is petty and stupid, and the agencies aren’t talking to one another, and no one knows anything about anything, even though everything is being recorded. The key to this is the truly insane sequence where the cops jump from roof to roof in act three, and the hilarious scene a bit later in which they try to talk to one another on walkie-talkies but can’t get a signal. The robbery is, of course, uncovered by a HAM radio—not any of the new surveillance devices from the 70s. In fact, even that discovery is nearly hampered by the bureaucracy at the telephone switchboard. (If you doubt my argument here look again at the film’s finale, in which all the agencies are obliged to erase their recordings.) 

All of this is to say that The Anderson Tapes works as a thriller (I watched it as part of a Criterion Channel series called 70s Thrillers), but it’s more of a scathing satire than it is anything else: a mockery of the 1970s surveillance state and the grotesque waste it involves.

Plainclothes (2025)

Plainclothes is baffling. Carmen Emmi has made a movie about the closet and the virtues of coming out of the closet in the year of our lord 2025? Why? Who is this for? 

Tom Blyth is quite good in this, but the direction and screenplay are very bad. And I am truly confused by the photography decisions. The images consistently—in the middle of scenes—switch to a grainy VHS version of the same shot. I think this is supposed to be a kind of visual cue for the main character’s anxiety, but it never felt like that while watching the movie. 

The other truly baffling choice is to tell the story in two different time sequences. The movie begins and ends at a New Year’s Eve party and then basically everything else is a very long flashback that moves in more-or-less sequential order. But the movie would have made a great deal more sense if it actually just moved in sequence without the consistent jumps to the party in the present. Instead, the viewer spends nearly a third of the movie’s running time trying to figure out what’s going on. And the tension of the party itself—which should actually be very, very high—feels like just another episode in this man’s anxious everyday life. 

 The real issue, though, is the subject matter. I fail to understand how the very important issues surrounding men who have sex with men in the 1990s (this film is interested in homophobia, AIDS, cruising, and the closet) relate to 2025. It's not that that wasn't an important period; it was. But this is a movie that's interested in moralizing about that time period, and in telling a story about a man working through those issues. In this way, Plainclothes refuses almost completely to relate to issues facing men who have sex with men in the present day, and the issues of the 1990s feel almost completely irrelevant.

At least there was this man to stare at:

Dylan O'Brien Double Feature (Including One with Double Dylans)

Twinless, directed by and starring James Sweeney is very funny and also creepy and strange and a bit troubling. I liked it. 

Dylan O’Brien gives a stellar performance. 

The more I think about it the smarter I think this screenplay is. In many ways it’s structured like other romantic comedies, but I think Sweeney just goes about all of this in a really, really smart way. It’s a very clever bit of writing. Like, compared to other recent gay romantic comedies, this is head and shoulders above the desperately generic Things like This, which even Joey Pollari couldn’t save. 

Another thing to say about Twinless, and one of the reasons I liked it so much, is that it is really unapologetically gay. It has a sensibility to it that is gay in its very construction and point of view rather than being simply a story about a gay man. I appreciated this a great deal. It feels very rare right now.

I really really wish this Esteban Arango's Ponyboi were better, but it’s mired in a kind of overly sentimental Sundance vibe that takes itself way too seriously and insistently stresses its own self importance. 

This movie is also way too slow, with long sections of neon-lit slow-motion fantasies that don’t work and undermine the gritty realism for which the screenplay is actually aiming. The movie can't decide on its own tone, really, and so we get dreamy, colorful, neon fantasy (like the poster) and then we contrast that with serious crime film.

Dylan O’Brien is predictably wonderful in this—he understands what he’s doing perfectly, giving us a villain who’s also a sort of comic buffoon who we want to care about even though he’s an unredeemable idiot asshole. 

I loved Indya Moore, too. She shines in her one scene, a sequence that actually makes very little sense in the film’s narrative structure but which works very well because of Moore’s assured and confident performance.

Miguel Gomes's Grand Tour

Gomes's brilliant film exists in three time periods simultaneously. 

A man in 1917 gets cold feet and flees his fiancée following the route of the Grand Tour: Rangoon, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai, and then up the Yangtze River. But while Edward travels, he encounters those cities in the present day, the cities’ current inhabitants showing us those vibrant cities now (sometimes in monochrome, sometimes in color). It’s a strikingly brilliant device, and it refuses to look at those cities through old early twentieth century orientalist modes of tourism. 

(Amazingly, Edward and Molly’s two journeys are narrated in Burmese, then Thai, then Vietnamese, Tagalog, Japanese, Mandarin. This is a film where all the English characters speak Portuguese as if that’s their native language, but sometimes carry on conversations in flawless French without even remarking on the difference. It’s very very clever.) 

 First as tragedy, then as farce. For the film’s second half (and if you’ve seen a Gomes film before, you were probably expecting this) we switch to Molly, as she chases her fiancé through these cities and finally up the Yangtze. Her story is completely different, and she has an extraordinarily different approach. Her trip also takes much, much, longer. 

This is fascinating from start to finish. It is (as some have noted) difficult to attach emotionally to the two central characters, but this is about cities and Asia and colonialism and life, not about story. It’s about the journey, as a self-help guru might say.

Sorry, Baby

Damn Sorry, Baby is good. It’s so fucking smart, and so sensitively, carefully made. It’s also very funny. (Although the other people in the theatre didn’t seem to laugh at the jokes as much as I did.) 

This is a film about sexual violence, but its focus (and this is fairly rare at the movies) is on the experience of the person who has survived the sexual violence. The way Eva Victor handles every part of this is just expertly crafted.

What I found especially wonderful about this was the portrait of the world that Victor has to offer us. It’s a world with dangers and injustices, certainly. And also small, stupid insensitivities and aggressions. But then, unobtrusively, surprisingly, there is gentleness and generosity, a squeeze of a hand, a sandwich with Calabrian chilis, a neighbor who knows how to start a fire.

Special shout out to Hettienne Park, whose small performance in this film is wonderful. She gives us an extraordinary moment of recognition in a courtroom sequence that felt almost overwhelming to watch. 

P.S. Lucas Hedges, I love you.

Mission: Impossible – the Final Reckoning

What to say about The Final Reckoning? 

The sound is cool. The sound, in fact, is the best part. There’s also a very good sequence on a Russian submarine. But mostly this is just soooo serious. Every line is delivered ponderously, as if we won’t know that the entirety of humanity, the lives of billions of people, perhaps the future of all life on this planet is at stake. 

Like… ok. But lighten up a bit. Everyone is so fucking intense in this. Also, this movie brings back Dead Reckoning Part One’s truly hilarious method of exposition, where four or more people (sometimes in completely different scenes and time sequences) tell us important plot information seamlessly. Instead of one voice, we get multiple! It makes no literal sense whatsoever, and it’s so funny.

As far as I am concerned, this was kind of a disaster.

28 Years Later... (2025)

Zombies are scary in general. They are living reminders of death, they are death on its way to kill you, stalking you, hunting you. (Which is, of course, what death is doing.) 

28 Years Later... has some good scares, too. The film’s main intertext is Hamlet, I think (despite all the clips of Olivier’s Henry V throughout the film). Not that 28 Years Later... is a revenge tale or a search for a murdered father, but the central character here has a mother whom he loves, as well as a stepfather and a missing father. More important is the memento mori aspect that is so essential to Hamlet: the respect for the dead and the reminder always that we too must die. This devotion to Hamlet (and Hamlet's stoicism) explains, too, the wry stoic quality that is essential to the way 28 Years Later… works. 

The Danny Boyle flourishes in this movie really make it sing, I think. I liked the “Jimmy” puzzle and I am very curious about the WWI references. I’ll wait for the sequel.

How to Train Your Dragon Redux

We probably didn’t need a "live-action" (i.e. mostly-CGI) remake of How to Train Your Dragon in the year of our lord 2025. The original three movies are already so good! Why mess with them? But it’s impossible to be mad at this new How to Train Your Dragon. The cast is great, the story still rocks, and there are so many lovely dragons. The whole thing is a bit more sentimental than I would have liked, but John Powell's new score is great. And Toothless continues to be the coolest dragon in the world. 

Some additional thoughts: 

1. I am so sick of movies in which parents refuse to listen to the young people in their lives. It’s almost unforgivable. Like… just listen. It can’t be that hard. 
2.  The 3D made this whole thing feel a bit like a ride. 
3.  This movie is in favor of a free Palestine.

F1 (2025)

Joseph Kosinski does it again. F1 is great. It hits every beat it needs to. The sound is amazing. The script is perfect Hollywood nonsense, but it cleverly avoids most of the worst traps. And this movie has Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon, so the acting is just fuckin stellar. All three are absolutely pitch perfect. Damson Idris is great in the Miles Teller part. Sarah Niles is wonderful. The whole thing just sings. 

And, sure, it’s a retread of Maverick. I mean, yeah fine. It’s mostly about the same thing and it’s mostly a similar script, and the director’s the same, and it’s giving "older guy bucks the system and blesses the young people with his wisdom". But I didn’t care one bit. I saw this on a gigantic screen and it felt like I was on a ride the whole time, and this rocked. Great score, great soundtrack, great editing. I was into it.

(PS. Why did they sell this as F1: the Movie? That makes no sense to me.)

From the New York Times Top 100

 

William Tell (2024)

Nick Hamm's William Tell has no right to be as boring as it is. It's a shame, too: I love me a good medieval tale.

I think the real issue with this movie is that it’s, like, about politics and freedom, but in this movie there is no real sense of “the Swiss” as a nation or who the Hapsburg villains are or what the difference is between an “Austrian” and a “Swiss”. It’s all so general here, and it's not like anyone is visually different from anyone else. The scenery is gorgeous, of course—it may, indeed, be the movie's chief advantage. But I found it pretty difficult to identify with the struggle for “freedom” here. This is not helped by the complete lack of any geographical specificity whatsoever. For example, it takes no time for anyone to get anywhere in this movie. Little titles pop up at the beginning. We’re in x city or y town. Fine. But where is that in relation to where these troops are garrisoned? What on earth is happening? 

Also… William Tell purports to be an anti-war film—the central character legitimately has war trauma and considers deeply whether or not he should go to war again—but, like almost all anti-war films, William Tell is a pro-war film after all, delighting in violence and celebrating its clever execution (but only, of course, when the “good” people are violence’s perpetrators). 

The boredom is the worst part though. That’s the cardinal sin. One can forgive everything else, but this is boring.

On Swift Horses (2024)

Sigh. Everyone in On Swift Horses is pretty, and the movie itself is pretty, as well. But this is one of those candy coated mid-century tales where a whole bunch of actors born after 1990 who can't imagine what it might have been like to live in the middle of the twentieth century dress up and play people they don't understand at all. No one involved in this seems to understand much about life in the 1950s, and they didn't help me understand the period any better either.

This has a few good moments that feel true—some flashes of good acting and a few good lines of dialogue—but mostly what happens in this movie is just a whole bunch of stuff that you already thought about the period. And the people in the movie behave just the way you'd expect them to behave. And no one surprises anyone, so nothing will surprise a viewer. I was quite bored, despite the purported sensitivity with which the filmmakers approached the material.

Jacob Elordi is good in this only fleetingly. One gets the sense once or twice in the film's two hours of a boyishness, a need to be loved. But mostly he plays it wrong. Diego Calva is a different story. He approaches his character with a wildness that seems at odd with the director's vision but worked for me. Daisy Edgar-Jones... I'm afraid I just didn't believe her for a second.

One of the things that frustrates me about these twenty-first century retellings of the mid-twentieth century is that they aren't interested in the feel of prejudice, of hiding, of rejection, of a disinterest in the family. So it's oh-so-sad that "people like us" can't xyz, can't hold hands in public, aren't free to love who we want, or whatever, but films like On Swift Horses approach that idea as a fact rather than an experience of the world. I find this approach vaguely condescending. It's just all so facile. None of the people is a real person with real thoughts or desires or fears. Everyone is an idea of a person who might have lived back there in the bad old days of the past. Part of the problem is that the whole thing is a kind of chamber piece; all of the scenes are with one or two people, and no one ever really interacts with contemporary society. No one in the movie interacts with a cop or a sergeant or a bartender or a coworker or even a homophobe, really. There are two or three hustlers with lines in the movie—and these characters work to portray the "gay world" as a dangerous milieu of betrayal and violence. In On Swift Horses it isn't mainstream society that is treacherous and violent, it's the underground world of nightclubs, bars, seedy casinos, and the closet. No one in this movie ever meets anyone in the real world: no employers, no realtors, no local paperboys, no nosy neighbors. In this way the movie is never about people who live in the real world. It's always just about people and their interpersonal dramas. The characters in On Swift Horses aren't fighting the world; they are fighting only themselves.

Oscar Nominations 2024: 11 of 11 (with Final Predictions)

Final predictions for 2024 after our last three movies of the year:

A Different Man

1 nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Aaron Schimberg

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, Renate Reinsve, Miles G. Jackson, Patrick Wang, Neal Davidson

Not to be confused with Better Man, the Robbie-Williams-as-a-chimpanzee biopic, although I've been confusing their titles until today and probably will continue to confuse their titles. One is nominated for makeup and one for visual effects. But... I didn’t get A Different Man. I think it's badly directed. I spent most of this movie unsure how I felt and as though I had absolutely no access to what was going on with the central character. For me this was a huge problem, because the movie is about the protagonist, but it's never on his side. In fact, I would say that the entire film operates through a vague hostility toward its protagonist, rather like the terrible off-Broadway play that they're rehearsing within the movie. Exemplifying this problem—and contributing to it—is that the score is all wrong for this movie. Umberto Smerilli has given A Different Man a kind of haunting horror-score that builds tension insistently. Except that I think the movie wants to be a comedy. I’m very puzzled. I want to add to all of this that I think Coralie Fargeat's The Substance covers many of the same themes as A Different Man, with perhaps a similar outlook on those themes. And The Substance is a more enjoyable film than this—and I say that as someone who wasn't crazy about that movie either.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #85 out of 99

Elton John: Never Too Late

1 nomination

• Original Song – "Never Too Late": Elton John (Rocketman, The Lion King, The Lion King, The Lion King) & Bernie Taupin (Rocketman) & Brandi Carlile & Andrew Watt (1st time nominees)

Director: R.J. Cutler, David Furnish

The problem with Elton John: Never Too Late is that we have all already seen Rocketman, and this hagiographical film doesn’t feel like new territory at all. in fact, this whole movie feels very PG, and very earnest about its toothlessness. It's as if it’s a movie made for families about a family—indeed it is a movie co-directed by David Furnish, who has been in a relationship with Elton John since the early 1990s. Elton’s husband, kids, nephew, and mother, all make appearances. The entire operation is all quite wholesome, and I mean that derogatorily if that isn’t quite clear. It makes for an uninteresting portrait of the singer, or at least certainly one that is a lot less interesting than the one in Rocketman. The film's bright spot for me is a section about Elton’s friendship with John Lennon, and it was cool to learn about how Lennon’s last appearance onstage (with Elton!) brought him and Yoko back together. Could this win the Original Song award? I think maybe it could.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Original Song

My rating: Unranked (I don't rank documentaries)

The Six Triple Eight

1 nomination

• Original Song – "The Journey": Diane Warren (Flamin' Hot, Tell It like a Woman, Four Good Days, The Life Ahead, Breakthrough, RBG, Marshall, The Hunting Ground, Beyond the Lights, Pearl Harbor, Music of the Heart, Armageddon, Con Air, Up Close & Personal, Mannequin)

Director: Tyler Perry

Cast: Ebony Obsidian, Kerry Washington, Milauna Jackson, Kylie Jefferson, Shanice Shantay, Sarah Jeffery, Pepi Sonuga, Moriah Brown, Jeanté Godlock, Gregg Sulkin, Donna Biscoe, Baadja-Lyne Odums, Susan Sarandon, Sam Waterston, Dean Norris

Here we are with the annual Diane Warren nomination. Usually Diane Warren manages to write a song for one of the worst movies of the year, but I gotta say: this isn't nearly as bad as I expected. The script is horrible, the politics are questionable, and the historiography is inaccurate, but The Six Triple Eight is not without its pleasures. My problem with this is that I am not interested in these candy-coated movies about segregation. Ever since The Help we have had these movies, and I hate the way they serve a kind of US nationalist project by making the argument that Black folks fought for the country and did amazing things in service of the nation. It’s just crazy to me that these films have no critique of that same nation; in fact, they wind up celebrating the nation. It’s so annoying to learn in a movie like The Six Triple Eight that racism isn’t actually a structural issue: there are so many good white folks; racism is just the result of a few (powerful) bad apples. I think this is one of the reasons I liked Nickel Boys so much—it’s about this same period of time, but it tries to get at what was going on in the country in a much more realistic way. The Six Triple Eight instead is a kind of highlight reel of this battalion, with so many overt fictionalizations (those salutes in the train station!) that the movie occasionally just feels absurd. Will Diane Warren win her Oscar this year? I hope she wins soon, honestly, because saving a slot in the nominations for her ever year is silly. Warren has been nominated ten of the last eleven years (2015-2025)—and another six times before that between 1988 and 2002.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #86 out of 99

More 2024 posts:

1. Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Wicked

2. A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Anora

3. The Substance, Dune: Part Two, Nosferatu

4. I'm Still Here, Sing Sing, The Wild Robot

5. Nickel Boys, The Apprentice, A Real Pain

6. Flow, September 5, Maria

7. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Girl with the Needle, Gladiator II

8. Inside Out 2, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Memoir of a Snail

9. Animated Short Films

10. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Alien: Romulus, Better Man

This has been a very volatile Oscar season, and I have had to switch up many of my final predictions. Things keep changing, and it feels like even Best Picture is a toss-up, really...

Final Oscar Predictions:

Best Picture – Anora

Director – Sean Baker, Anora

Actor – Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

Actress – Demi Moore, The Substance

Adapted Screenplay – Conclave

Original Screenplay – Anora

Supporting Actor – Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

Supporting Actress – Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez

Film Editing – The Brutalist

Cinematography – Dune: Part Two

International Feature – I'm Still Here

Documentary Feature – Porcelain War

Production Design – Conclave

Original Score – The Brutalist

Costume Design – Wicked

Sound – A Complete Unknown

Animated Feature – The Wild Robot

Visual Effects – Dune: Part Two

Makeup & Hairstyling – The Substance

Original Song – "Never Too Late", Elton John: Never Too Late

Animated Short – Yuck!

Documentary Short – Incident

Live-action Short – Anuja

Oscar Nominations 2024: 10 of 11

And now for the remaining three movies nominated for visual effects:

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

1 nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Wes Ball

Cast: Owen Teague, Freya Allen, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, William H. Macy, Eka Darville, Travis Jeffery, Lydia Peckham

This was pretty strong. It had lots of good surprises and the main character is great. But act two is kinda boring, I’m afraid, and I frequently felt ahead of our protagonist, Noa. Still, I had lots of fun, there was much good action, and the visual effects were very good. I am ok with them continuing to nominate the Planet of the Apes movies in this category—even if they don't win. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was nominated in 2012, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in 2015, and War for the Planet of the Apes in 2018. This movie doesn't really live up to the greatness of those three movies, but they were really good, so I can't be too mad. This had a lot to live up to, and if the pacing of Kingdom wasn't quite great, the effects were still absolutely top notch.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #57 out of 99

Alien: Romulus

1 nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Fede Álvarez

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Aileen Wu, Spike Fearn, Robert Bobroczkyi, and a CGI version of Ian Holm voiced by Daniel Betts

I am not really into this kind of movie, but this works. It’s just so fucking gross. I know that's part of the appeal of this kind of horror—the fluids and the sheer disgust of it all—and I guess it's not for me. I also find the Alien universe’s interest in babies and pregnancy to be really nasty, as well. Like, as soon as one of the cast of characters in this film (played entirely by models, apparently) told us she was preggers I thought uh oh here we go: it’s Alien: Prometheus all over again. This movie’s third act is pretty great though. I was enjoying myself a lot... while also screaming about how nasty everything was. I felt gross for hours afterward. This is why I don’t watch stuff like this. Yuck. In other words, Alien: Romulus does what it promises it will do.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #73 out of 99

Better Man

1 nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Michael Gracey

Cast: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton, Raechelle Banno, Kate Mulvaney, Frazer Hadfield, Damon Herriman, Jake Simmance, Alison Steadman

This movie is a conventional musical biopic that is made insanely, amazingly unconventional—to the point of being deranged—by the fact that Robbie Williams, the musician in question, is portrayed for the entire length of the film as a chimpanzee. He is a very realistic looking chimpanzee, too! The effects are great. The musical numbers here are really the highlight, though. Gracey had a movie musical hit with The Greatest Showman, and this is just as much of a musical. “Rock DJ” is insanely good; it's a total blast. “She’s the One” is excellent too. In fact, the whole thing really works. The reason I didn't love this movie is that Better Man's plot is just so conventional. You've seen this story a hundred times. And this makes its overly long running time—140 minutes—very silly indeed. For me, the chimpanzee gimmick really doesn't run out of steam; it keeps working for the entirety of the movie's length. But the story the movie has to tell is not nearly as cool as the style in which it is told, and for the last twenty minutes of this film, I was impatient for it to end..

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #63 out of 99

More 2024 posts:

1. Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Wicked

2. A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Anora

3. The Substance, Dune: Part Two, Nosferatu

4. I'm Still Here, Sing Sing, The Wild Robot

5. Nickel Boys, The Apprentice, A Real Pain

6. Flow, September 5, Maria

7. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Girl with the Needle, Gladiator II

8. Inside Out 2, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Memoir of a Snail

9. Animated Short Films

11. A Different Man, Elton John: Never Too Late, The Six Triple Eight