Oh hi!

It’s come to my attention that a lot of you readers have the day off of work today, for the national holiday celebrating the town of Columbus, Ohio. Every year since 1907, people across these great United States take a pause from their labor—from the automobile assembly lines of Detroit, to the textile mills of Fall River, to the hidden marijuana fields of Humboldt County—to acknowledge the many wonders of the largest city in the Buckeye State. Folks the land over proudly crack open a Seventh Son Brewing Co. “Goo Goo Muck” IPA and dress up like How I Met Your Mother actor Josh Radnor or Beverly D’Angelo—both children of that mighty metropolis—and sing rousing renditions of “Hang On Sloopy.” 

At least I think that’s what the holiday is? I can’t imagine that it’s a celebration of anything darker or more troubling than that. The point is, a lot of you have the day off, but there’s no rest for the newsletter writer, I’m afraid. So here I am, talking to nobody because you’re all too busy scarfing down Schmidt’s Bahama Mama sausages and fried bologna sandwiches to read a dang email. 

I hope everyone had a good weekend, either lively or restful or some perfect mix of the two. It was rainy all day Sunday here in New York City, so I spent many a cozy hour on the couch finishing my somewhat inexplicable rewatch of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass and then moving on to a rewatch of the movie Margin Call, followed by the the end of season three of Lioness. 

Yes, once I was done with Flanagan’s alternately affecting and turgid vampire drama, I decided to spend some time with Kevin Spacey and the grim jingoism of Taylor Sheridan. I’m not a perfect person, you see. Sometimes I watch things I maybe shouldn’t. In my defense, Margin Call is a pretty good movie, and Lioness is . . . Well, I don’t know what’s to defend there, other than steely performances from Zoe Saldaña and, especially this season, Nicole Kidman. There’s also a fun, stupid, soapy cliffhanger twist that makes me embarrassingly eager for what I’m assuming will be the final season of the show. Yes, yes, the politics on Lioness are pretty vile—Sheridan seems convinced that Gen Z progressivism is all the product of a decades-long sabotaging of American values done by the Chinese and the Russians—but there is maybe something instructive about understanding what someone of Sheridan’s influence is putting out in the world. Or that’s just a cop-out justification and I should be put in the stocks for giving any attention to him and his bile. And on Columbus Day Eve, no less! 

But yes, as I mentioned above, I revisited Midnight Mass this weekend, no doubt inspired by having just watched Flanagan’s new Carrie series. Midnight Mass is the superior show, a sad and bleak parable about a remote island community succumbing to something like religious mania as they try to make sense of the awful cards life has dealt them. It’s a show about economic anxiety and social isolation and the dangerous comforts of magical thinking. 

I really like its thematic ambition, I admire Flanagan’s steadfast commitment to casting interesting actors rather than blandly filling roles with bold names, and some of the show’s writing is elegant in an oddball way. But it does get seriously bogged down in lugubrious, unnecessary monologues—and I love a monologue! Just ask my old playwriting professor!—that feel more like wheel-spinning than anything else. One gets pretty frustrated with the show’s heavy-handed verbosity as it nears its conclusion, but then the ending is a real wallop that I’ve been really transfixed by since I first saw it. 

I guess I’m recommending the show, then, if you want something spooky and Halloween-y that’s also contemplative and metaphysical. You will have to deal with the, uh, let’s say limited acting abilities of Flanagan’s wife, Kate Siegel—who has the defining monologue of the whole series and buckles under that burden—but that’s manageable. You get to look at sad Zach Gilford for a while, and that makes up for a lot of the bad stuff. 

All right, let’s get to some other topics. 

Aaron Sorkin’s new Facebook movie The Social Reckoning came out on Friday and had a really rough go of it at the box office. The wide-release film made only $5.5 million over the weekend, lower than the projected $7 million. Even that projection was dire, considering The Social Network earned $22 million in its opening weekend in 2010. Yes, yes, times have changed and talky dramas aren’t really raking in the big bucks at movie theaters anymore. But one would think that a film about tech evils is relevant enough to attract a few more people, and to send those people out of the theater more energized than the movie’s B- exit polling score would suggest. I guess Facebook is just not a compelling topic these days, and the movie’s lack of real star power probably didn’t help either. The movie only cost about $30 million to make—which means it’s eligible for the Independent Spirit Awards, I think!—so this is not some huge disaster for the studio. But this failure does make one wonder what the future holds for Mr. Sorkin, who hasn’t had anything approaching a hit, in film or on TV, in a long time. 

I’d love it if he did another wind-bag television series, because those are always a lark, but his heart seems to lie with movies these days. If that’s the case, he should just write another romantic political fantasy like The American President, rather than trying to be so pointed and topical. (Even Being the Ricardos turned a Lucille Ball biopic into a treatise—with a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover as the deus ex machina.) Who wouldn’t want to watch a movie called, like, The Junior, about a junior senator played by Jennifer Lawrence who falls in love with, I dunno, the prime minister of the UK or something?

Elsewhere at the box office, the new demon picture Other Mommy got the lowest Cinemascore since Megalopolis, a dismal D+, but still made a lot of money. The film, which is about Susan Dell’s children realizing something is very wrong, made nearly $30 million in North America, which is more than this newsletter makes in a whole year! (Though, that could change if more people became paid subscribers . . . ) I suspect we will see that number drop steeply next weekend, as tends to happen with horror movies that aren’t directed by 20somethings who cut their teeth on YouTube. Still, it’s a win for Jessica Chastain, who was really good in Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game and should probably team up with him again. She can be the junior senator! And she falls in love with Matthew Rhys! And it’s basically The Diplomat but with Sorkin speeches about culture war stuff that bothers him in an old-school liberal way! Ohh, doesn’t that sound so good?? Come on, you have to admit you would watch the hell out of that movie. You all have the exact same taste as me, right?? 

When I went to see Other Mommy last week, I saw this trailer for Mike Flanagan’s (him again!) upcoming movie The Exorcist: Martyrs, a continuation of the Exorcist mythology that probably conveniently ignores the Exorcist movie from a few years ago, the one with Ann Dowd as a mystic and Ellen Burstyn’s character getting blinded for no good reason. Rather than staging another possession of a young girl, this Exorcist stars Scarlett Johansson as a detective on the hunt for a serial killer who is maybe, just maybe, doing the Devil’s work. I’m all for the return of murky detective thrillers, of the sort that flooded the market in the post-Silence of the Lambs ’90s, but I don’t really want them attached to 53-year-old IP. Maybe that’s the only way such a thing can get made these days, though. 

It will be interesting to see Johansson in this particular mode, as she’s never really done a proper horror movie before. (Ghost World is not actually about what its title suggests.) I mean, would you count Under the Skin as a horror movie? I wouldn’t. He’s Just Not That Into You is about the horrors of heterosexuality, but it’s light on jump scares. So I think Exorcist: Martyrs will be her first true foray into the genre, and I’m curious to see how she handles that. 

You know when fighter jets fly over a football game or soldiers take the field to do soldier marches or whatever and you think, “Gee, it’s very strange how football has become so yoked to the military, almost as if there is some sinister plot to intertwine a treasured (and dangerous) American pastime with violent imperialism”? Well here’s a Peter Berg movie that says: imagine if football players became soldiers. It’s about WWII—because any war past that gets tangled up in thorny geopolitics and of course calls to mind the Pat Tillman affair—and stars several young hunks as real-life college football stars who put down the pigskin and picked up a rifle to take on the Japanese. The trailer literally cuts between football tackles and people being blown up on the battlefield, because what’s the difference, really? Truly gross stuff!

But that’s not what today should be about. Today is about celebrating Columbus! Go enjoy yourselves. See you Wednesday.