Hello again. 

It’s another glorious Monday, full of hope for the week to come, turkeys strolling around tragically blind to the doom rushing toward them. Yes, Thanksgiving is in just two and a half weeks, which means we’ll all soon be sitting down to tell our bored cousins what we are thankful for, which is that cousin Josh didn’t make it this year. Or, if you are reading this from some faraway outpost elsewhere on the planet, you will have a normal Thursday. 

I’m taking a little vacation before the holiday, which feels pretty indulgent, but I’m 25 years old and have earned the right to do what I want. I’d like to prepare some posts in advance so I’m not typing away on my soiled laptop while Paris buzzes along outside my hotel window without me. To that end, I’m doing yet another call for mailbag questions. Some of you dutiful readers have already submitted some great ones, but I require more! Feed Moloch! Questions can be about anything, really, as long as they’re not, “Wait you’re not actually 25, right?” Send them on over to [email protected] and I’ll get to answerin’.

I hope you all had restorative weekends, or weekends full of happily exhausting activity. I spent a night in Philadelphia, where I saw comedian/actor/speedy blue hedgehog Ben Schwartz perform his Ben Schwartz & Friends improv show. I know the term “improv show” might send shivers up your spine, and for good reason. As someone who endured several years of hauling up to the UCB Theater in Chelsea on Sunday afternoons to attend friends’ Level 1 graduation shows, I know all too well that improv is a frightening concept. But Schwartz and his friends—who on Saturday night were Mary Holland, Ryan Gaul, and Brandon Scott Jones—are mind-bogglingly good at the art form. It was a very funny, enjoyable evening. If you live in Austin or Phoenix (or both! I don’t know your life, or the life of your secret second family), the show will be rolling into those towns in December. I highly recommend it. 

Okay, let’s get into some miscellany. 

Do you remember the 1998 film City of Angels, the American remake of a Wim Wenders film about a woman who falls in love with an angel? It’s mostly memorable for its soundtrack, which featured Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” and Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited,” the latter of which would go on to become one of the most exciting songs to hear performed by an a cappella group. (A cappella? Improv? What am I, a college sophomore? No! I’m 25. I was a sophomore half a decade ago.) To me, though, the film is also notable for a line that has stuck in my head since I first heard it in the trailer. 

Meg Ryan’s character is trying to figure out who Nicolas Cage’s mysterious suitor actually is, and she asks him a series of questions. “Are you married?” “Are you homeless?” and then the punchline is, “Are you a drummer?” Forgetting the unpleasantness of the second question for the time being, that drummer joke was something I fixated on when I was 15. (I mean, uh, three years before I was born!) I guess it was my first encounter with the idea that “drummer” is a problematic profession for a man to have. It’s a weirdly “modern dating, ack” kind of gag to be in that otherwise solemn and lugubriously tragic movie, and yet it’s the main thing I remember from it. 

And thus imagine my disappointment when I realized that this weekend’s number-three movie at the box office, Drummer Boy, is not about that concept at all, finally exploring what has lingered in my brain for so long. It is instead an Angel Studios film—meaning, Christian and at least somewhat conservative—about a drummer teen during the American Revolution. The film is the brainchild of its co-director and star, an Australian Christian rocker whose name is Joel David Smallbone. So, I guess if you’re bullied relentlessly enough for your last name as a kid, you eventually turn into a Christian rock musician who makes war films. 

Anyway, the movie is a musical, and it made a solid $9.3 million over the weekend—a big hit for a Smallbone. It’s another strong number for Angel, which has had quite a lot of success drawing the Christian crowd to theaters. Me, I’d never even heard of the movie until this morning. But I’ve now seen the trailer. Here’s that:

Doesn’t that look like something? I’m half tempted to watch it. Yes, that is Melora Hardin you spotted there. The songs seem a little Greatest Showman-coded, which was probably to be expected, mixed with, y’know, the famous Christmas song “The Little Drummer Boy.” Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is for each of us to decide for ourselves. 

Drummer Boy was a bigger hit, albeit in more theaters, than was the other red-meat movie of the week, Jimmy, in which KJ Apa—who has his own Chris Gaines art project going—plays actor and conservative Jimmy Stewart. That Fathom event was in about half as many theaters as Drummer Boy, but only had half the per-screen average, which is the real number to pay attention to. Jimmy needs your help, Clarence!

Elsewhere at the box office, Godzilla Minus Zero is a big hit and You Can See Everything just might earn $100 million in North America by the time its run concludes. That, my little drummer bois, would be the real miracle of the season.  

Speaking of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, the film won every category it was nominated for at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards on Sunday night: best documentary feature, best cinematography, best editing, and best score. Does that mean it’s suddenly a lock for Oscars? 

No, I don’t think that the Critics Choice Documentary Awards are quite powerful enough precursors to make that grand declaration. But the wins certainly help bolster the film’s profile as an awards player; public victories help confer contender status, which is exactly what an on-the-bubble film like YCSE requires. Drive My Car needed the same kind of certification, as did Amy Madigan in Weapons, and so forth. I don’t know if the CCDAs (as everyone in the industry refers to them) are exactly that for You Can See Everything, but they are the beginning of something, certainly. 

A few weeks ago in these pages I swore off looking at the social media platform Twitter, so lest you think I’ve already betrayed my promise to myself, let me make clear that the following tweets were SENT to me by someone else. I did not find them on my own. Okay? Okay. 

So anyway, Twitter is in a big fight over the Jordan Firstman film Club Kid—which did very well in super-limited release this weekend—with two distinct criticisms lobbied against it. The first is from The New Yorker’s resident free-thinker Richard Brody, who wrote the following on Saturday:

This is probably just a case of “Brody gonna Brody.” I don’t want to call him a contrarian because I think that term would assign a sort of thoughtless knee-jerk quality to Brody’s often against-the-mainstream criticism that isn’t quite fair. Sometimes, yes, he does seem to lie in wait for people to love something so he can then correct the record, but I don’t know if that’s what’s happening here. I think he’s simply not on this movie’s wavelength, and expressed that sentiment in a . . . well, less than charitable way. Not my favorite tone of his, but oh well. 

To me the more galling critique is the following. If you are really spoiler-phobic, scroll past this section, but I think the basic plot of the film—as sketched out here—is pretty obvious from the trailers: 

That’s the take that has whipped up the most controversy, with one side arguing that, yes indeed, any depiction of supposedly heteronormative parental normalcy taking precedent over queer nightlife experience is conservative, and the other side arguing that, well, the movie is really only talking about one (fictional) person and also that’s not really what happens in the movie. The former read has been around for a little bit, but this tweeter/Letterboxd’r seems to have caught the most attention for it thus far. 

Not to position myself as some sort of prescient super intelligence, but I did anticipate a little of this blowback when I reviewed the film in May:

Peter might be matured, and humanized, by the imposition of fatherhood, but the movie doesn’t attach exactly the same moral weight to that shift as do movies like Raising Helen and Big Daddy, or the sneakily conservative urgings of some of Judd Apatow’s films. Club Kid doesn’t condemn the world that Peter is suddenly snatched out of, it just makes the more personal argument that it was an environment to which Peter had grown particularly ill-suited.

That’s my stance on the matter. To me it feels more than a little internet-brained to suggest that a movie in which a character has to weigh their . . . drug addiction . . . against the demands of unexpected fatherhood is pushing a pro-natalist, anti-queer agenda on its audience. But plenty of people seem willing to defend that point, which has then sparked others to claim those people are just jealous of Firstman’s success, and so on and so on. La Bola Negra has also been dragged into the fracas for no good reason. It all serves as yet another tiresome reminder that any time a gay movie attracts any kind of attention, some people will inevitably drive themselves mad trying to tear it down or viciously defend it. 

That inevitability has worn on me over the years, and the older I’ve gotten—again, I’m 25—the more I’ve wanted to take these movies in my little paws and retreat with them to some safe corner, like a dog running away from its food bowl to eat in private. Because the huddle around the trough is just too frenzied and unpleasant and has people making sweeping moral assessments of strangers based on their opinion about a movie. Yes, I do fall down on one side of this war, but that doesn’t mean I support the war’s existence. Have I turned into a conflict-averse basic in my old age? Maybe. But also—and I hate to repeat this often quite smug phrase—it’s really not that serious. 

Okay, that’s it for today. See you back here on Wednesday, when the topic will be . . . Well, actually I haven’t decided on that yet. Any suggestions?