October the 5th be with you!

Last week I asked you if there should be a nickname for Premiere Party readers, with which I might greet you at the top of every letter. Many thanks to all who have already submitted their ideas! We’ll eventually put your suggestions to a public vote (because I like to maintain the appearance of democracy), but I’ll tip the scales now and say that, so far, my favorite might be “Preminions,” which implies that everyone reading this will someday become a small yellow pill creature. Which at this point in the human experiment is probably accurate. But please keep your suggestions coming! [email protected]. 

I hope you all had pleasant weekends, and that at least some of you spent your downtime like I did: happily reading mean comments about the guy who fired you from your job last year getting bodied by a playwright during an interview. 

Well, okay, to be honest I only did that for like 45 minutes. I otherwise did manage to scrape myself off the couch on Sunday to see a three-hour, largely plotless movie set in France and Guinea-Bissau, a Berlin premiere that is now playing at the New York Film Festival. I felt quite sophisticated indeed, venturing to the Upper West Side to see a challenging international art film, the headlights of taxis and an early-autumn drizzle giving the streets a moody, chiaroscuro shimmer. The movie, called Dao, was certainly interesting, but when a colleague asked me afterward, “Didja take a little nap?” I sadly had to say yes—but just the tiniest one! 

But I now know a lot more about memorial rituals in Guinea-Bissau than I did before, information I am glad to have, and it was good to be out of the house and opening my mind, after I’d spent so much of the previous couple days at home rewatching seasons of The Simpsons, particular 9 and 10, which is when the show began its sad, steady decline in quality. Well, actually, 9 is pretty good; I’d forgotten how many endlessly quotable lines and memetic images came from that season: “Lobsters stuffed with tacos,” the crazy cat-throwing lady, etc. Season 10 takes a steep dive from there, though. In one episode, Grampa Simpson says about his ex-wife, “But she was a real demon in the sack!” and that’s it, that’s the whole joke, an old man saying something randy like you’d find on any shitty sitcom of the era. So, that’s a shame. After the gruesome Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger episode, I decided to call it quits, because little else bums me out, in terms of culture, than watching bad Simpsons episodes. 

Though, this new Ebenezer trailer put me in a funk, too. It’s funny that the movie, from horror director Ti West, seems to just be another pretty straightforward retelling of A Christmas Carol, only with more ghouls and jokes? There appears to be no other real invention to the film, though I suppose the trailers might be obscuring something. 

I’ve been debating whether or not I have to see this movie. On the one hand, it’s Johnny Depp and I don’t exactly want to go out of my way to support his work. But on the other, there’s a decent chance the movie will be big, so would it be a dereliction of duty to outright skip it? Let me know! I crave assignment and instruction and unignorable mandates handed down to me by the great editor that is collective moral judgment. Whatever ends up happening on my Ebenezer journey, though, this YouTube comment will continue to amuse me:

It’s true! We see it in this Ebenezer trailer and, of course, it famously happens in Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?. Say what you will about Depp, but he likes his mattress sucking.

The news out of the box office this weekend was double-edged. Verity, the new sex picture from the mind of Anne Hathaway (well, I mean, she had something to do with it), performed healthily, raking in some $32 million in North America and $30 million on other shores. I love that domestic thrillers are back in the black, though I do wish they were, y’know, a little more sophisticated. Alas, while I was at a birthday shindig on Saturday night, I spoke with someone who works in the book-to-film adaptation industry, and they told me that Colleen Hoover/Freida McFadden-level stuff is all anyone is really interested in buying these days, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing an uptick in source-material quality any time soon. We’ll just have to rely on the right screenwriters and directors to elevate the material. Which, I’m afraid, Verity does not have. 

And then there was Digger, the new Tom Cruise vehicle that was savaged by critics (though, some of us saw something of value in there) and largely dismissed by audiences the world over. The movie, which reportedly cost as much as $180 million to make, pulled in a paltry global sum of $20 million, the worst opening of a Cruise film since 2007’s talky, post-9/11 political treatise Lions for Lambs. That’s really not good for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most pressing is that this is a big, ambitious Warner Bros. flop happening right as David “Flyboys” Ellison seizes control of that company. Will he see this dismal return and decide, more than he already has, that swings like Digger aren’t worth taking anymore? That’s a terrifying, and terrifyingly plausible, possibility—though, to be fair, we have no real idea what Ellison’s vision is for his new super-studio. (But, eh, we can probably guess that it’s bad.) 

Over on Bluesky, the sanitarium where I and several other former Twitter addicts spend our time wandering the manicured grounds and muttering to ourselves, the great culture writer Mark Harris made a blunt, salient point in a mini-thread about the failure of Digger.

We are certainly well past the era in which it was safe or prudent to cheer on the failure of a movie—unless that movie is, you know, produced by Ben Shapiro or whatever. Those can go to hell. (And yes, I know I’ve expressed sentiment here that I quietly hope for Marvel movies to fail these days, but I always do it with a touch of queasiness and chagrin.) Because the fuckers running things now will use every opportunity they can to streamline and standardize their output into the most banally commercial product they can, and the only truly daring, interesting stuff will be happening in the gasping-for-air indie world, on the international scene (and even that often grant-funded enterprise is getting more difficult, I hear), and maybe horror. So, it is now your civic obligation to go see Digger, I’m afraid.

Get it? Because the actual name of the show is Saturday Night Live, but this season has been kind of lame so far, so I said “Dead” instead? This is why SNL should hire me to write for them, because I’m very good at making topical jokes like that. 

Anyway, I watched a bunch of sketches from this weekend’s Dakota Johnson episode, and there is a curious off-ness to almost all of them. For a moment, I wondered if it’s just that I’m now a fair deal older than a lot of the performers (and, presumably, at least some of the writers), so maybe I’m merely out of step with the humor of the day. But I don’t think that’s really the problem (I’m not old! You’re old!)—or, at least, the main problem. It’s that the writing has been kinda basic and bland this season. This sketch, for example, is a fun idea, I suppose, and tries to be edgy and relevant—and I think Johnson is doing a good job in it—but it nonetheless doesn’t really connect. 

It’s maybe less “I’m too old for this” than it is the show itself feeling self-conscious about an age gap and trying to pander to a younger audience. It’s possible that they have some internal demographic data that suggests an appeal to Gen Z would be wise, but aren’t really sure how to implement that. (And then they go and do a wheezy House of the Dragon parody. Are any young people watching that show?) Here’s a pre-taped bit that has a clever-enough, TikTok-friendly concept, and is perfect for Johnson’s brand of chilly deadpan, but falls just shy of funny.

Maybe it’s silly to expect SNL to do anything with real bite or surprise this far into its run, and so close to its smug victory lap last year. But the voice of the show seems especially muted and tame this season, and last season’s breakout star, Ashley Padilla, has not quite taken flight in the last two episodes. Granted, it has only been those two installments so far, so maybe everyone is simply getting their sea legs as they adjust the show to accommodate a handful of freshman and sophomore cast members. It could still hit a stride in the coming weeks. I know many people wrote off SNL years ago, often for good and principled reasons, but it has been a staple of my media diet for so long that it feels strange to, all of a sudden, not be terribly compelled to watch it. Like, I turned this sketch off before it was over. I get the joke and all, but doesn’t it all feel so strangely plain?

That said, Kenan Thompson forever. He really can brighten up even the dullest of bits.

My partner is out of town on a long trip, and I was feeling glum and lonely on Sunday night, so I ventured out of the apartment to see the suspense drama Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which I missed in Toronto. I’d heard positive things about the movie from people I trust, and was intrigued by the lore surrounding its development. Star Mahershala Ali and writer-director Bassam Tariq were once supposed to make a Blade movie together—Blade as in the sword-wielding half-vampire played in three films by Wesley Snipes—but that project stalled out and fell apart. They made this movie instead, in which Ali gets to show off the sword skills he acquired for Blade and Tariq can be a lot weirder and more inventive than Marvel likely would have allowed.

Ali plays Latif, a grieving widower who is trying to hold his family together and stay true to his Muslim faith while navigating a sea of dangerous obstacles. Latif does some contract work as a hitman (of sorts), and finds himself caught in the middle of a strange, religiously tinged local skirmish, between a lapsed Muslim playboy heir (Abubakr Ali) who makes Muslim-themed porn in an enormous mansion outside of Houston and a Korean-American Christian zealot-cum-armed cult leader (John Cho) on a mission to violently cleanse the world of sin and sinners. But Latif’s chief mission is, quite simply and profoundly, to secure breast milk for his infant daughter, while trying to keep his older children safe from the ravages of the modern age. 

So, a familiar lone-warrior plot has been complicated and enriched by matters of faith, all done with an intriguing blend of deep earnestness and wry humor. Tariq has built a vivid, unique world out of seedy and humid corners of suburban Texas and populated it with colorful, slightly outsized characters. But his tone and pacing is tricky to get in step with. The film favors the family drama more than I expected, and while that part is mostly well-executed, I did find myself craving more action. When that action does come, Tariq shoots it in sometimes hard-to-parse fashion. The ending of the film is also a bit of a whimper, a climax that never quite climaxes. 

But, it is interesting filmmaking, and Ali is terrific. The movie is expanding to more theaters this week and I’d recommend you go see it if you’re craving a modern-day update of Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, or are nostalgic for the post-Pulp Fiction days when so many odd little crime movies came flooding into the marketplace. And wouldn’t it be fun if more innovative indies were born out of a Marvel project’s scuttled birth? So, go see this one and thus encourage other filmmaking teams to take their broken superhero dreams and repurpose them into something new and singular. Maybe that is the way forward, out of this mess.

Okay, that’s it for today. I’m off to take in a doozy of a tech-movie double-header: I’m seeing The Social Reckoning this afternoon, and then this evening I’ll be at the premiere of Artificial—about new Vanity Fair cover boi Sam Altman (gag). I’ll report back about both of those later this week. In the meantime, get back to work. You’re not getting paid to read this nonsense!