Welcome to another What to Watch column! Congrats on it being Friday.

It seems like just Monday that the week started, and now it’s already over. It’s been a whirlwind five days here at Premiere Party HQ, where we basked in Spider-Man’s riches and went long on Ryan Murphy’s ongoing project of grafting his sexual pathology onto an entire group of people. (Well, I mean, it was a review of the dopey new show The Shards, but the sex thing is part of that!) I hope you’ll give those things a read if you haven’t already.

Anyway, on the Spider-Man front, I went to see the movie on Monday (so I could talk about it on this week’s episode of Critical Darlings, which you can listen to at any of these places) and I . . . liked it! If you are feeling a little out of step with the culture and are wondering if you should go see the biggest movie in the world just to be in sync with everyone else, I don’t think you need to worry so much about that, really. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not some earth-shaking bit of cultural realignment. It’s mostly just a competently made, charmingly performed superhero movie that eventually gets bogged down in too much synergistic franchise table-setting. 

It’s engaging, though, and performs the magic trick of making Glasgow sorta kinda look like an alternate-universe New York City. I have friends who’ve grumbled about the Glasgow of it all, and I understand why, especially when the end credits play over loving images of the real New York, as if to further trick us. But I like the look of this altered New York, its busy and narrow streets opening up into watery vistas. That’s kind of like the real thing, isn’t it? 

My sister is in town and I met her for dinner on Thursday night at Empire Diner in Chelsea, a place I’ve long avoided because it always seemed a little scene-y in the rich gays kind of way. And indeed it was a bit of that, but also the food was really good, and on the misty walk to and from the subway, I found myself doing a lot of “What a town” as I looked at the beautiful townhouses of 22nd street and the peek-a-boo view of the High Line. I think Brand New Day was partly responsible for that; though largely not shot here, the film does stoke a certain renewed affection for the city. 

But that was not the New York-iest movie I saw this week. Oh no, my friends, because I also went to a screening of One Night Only, the new sex movie that has been described as “The Purge but for sex,” which is interesting because I’ve only ever had sex during screenings of the Purge movies. But that’s a matter for another newsletter! Let’s go ahead and talk about One Night Only, a romcom that I kinda liked, but just about everyone else seems to have hated with a passion typically reserved for when the lights go down on a James DeMonaco picture.