It’s Monday!

And it’s the last week of October, which means it’s also the last week of daylight saving time. (Did you know it’s “saving,” singular? Not “savings”? I’ve been sounding like a dope for years now!) This time next week, we will be plunged into darkness, staggering around lamp-lit streets at 3PM or whatever. Isn’t that fun to look forward to, when the Seasonal Affective Disorder truck comes rolling through town, spraying its misery everywhere like a crop duster? Can’t wait! But, at least we’ll have this here Party to keep each other company. I mean, I’m mostly the only one talking at the party, but that’s not that new for me. 

I had quite a busy weekend, despite staying in on Friday night, when my partner and I caught up on all of our important programs: The Traitors: New Blood, The Challenge, and The Floor. Yes, folks, that is what I watch at home when I am not devouring things to cover in this newsletter, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The Traitors is genuinely fun, The Challenge provides some nice nostalgia and can be engagingly tense, and The Floor . . . Well, I actually am a little bit embarrassed about watching that one.

That really is most of the show: people yelling “Horse!” “Tent!” “Jungle gym!” as fast as they can. A contestant’s expert category (an idea stolen from Mastermind, of course) could be, like, Needlepoint and instead of identifying things used in that craft, it’s just needlepoint images of random objects. There is a floor on the show, so its title makes sense, but it could just as easily be called Stuff!. But, oh well. It’s still a good time, and can be actually suspenseful sometimes. Plus, this season is an “all champions” season—not past champions of The Floor, but winners of yo-yo contests, of beauty pageants, etc.—and one of the champions is Adam Larson from Road Rules and The Challenge. He hasn’t played yet, but it’s been funny to see him on the board from time to time, an improbable intersection in my media diet. 

The next day, I took my own recommendation (from Friday’s letter) and went to see Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love in theaters. It was my second time with the film, and I loved it just as much as the first viewing, maybe even more. It’s such a rich, satisfying film, full of neat literary devices and thematic rhyme and impassioned labor politics. I took a friend and we had a nice long chat afterward, the kind of conversation that keeps going even after you’ve parted ways—we texted follow-up thoughts for the rest of the day. You could do the same with a friend this week, or this weekend. Or, I suppose, in two weeks, after you’ve watched the film on Netflix. But watching Netflix at home doesn’t afford you the opportunity to enjoy a beautiful autumn day and drink a fountain soda at 11:00AM. Unless you open all the windows of your house and have a soda machine in your kitchen like Deborah Vance. But how many of you can that be true of? 

On Sunday, I went to see A Few Good Men at Lincoln Center, with Tom Blyth in the Tom Cruise role and Bradley Whitford in the Jack Nicholson part, because I am reviewing it for The Guardian on Thursday. Stay tuned for that . . . 

I also caught an early matinee of Wildwood, the new film from stop-motion studio Laika. We’ll be covering that on the Critical Darlings podcast this week, also on Thursday. But I’ll share some written thoughts about the movie with you now.

My biggest takeaway from Wildwood, directed by Laika founder (and Nike heir) Travis Knight, is that it’s a dazzling feat of animation, in all its meticulously crafted puppets and sets and effects. (There is some VFX massaging in the film, but it’s mostly practical, either stop-motion or hand-drawn.) Thinking about how films like this are actually pulled off is almost as impossible and mind-bending as trying to contemplate the universe. It seems like such hard, exacting work that I’m surprised anyone would ever bother to do it. That’s why I love creating with AI! So easy, and so satisfying. (If I ever actually say that, you’ll know it’s really Other Richie writing that day’s letter.) So, good on the production team for that. 

Past technical bravura, the most striking part of the film is how violent it is. The movie is rated PG-13, which is meant as a mark of caution for parents. But the marketing for the film has not really suggested that this is a picture in which people are fatally stabbed by vines, a child goes swan diving off a cliff, evil crows dig their talons into eyeballs, and a fascist coyote soldier is burned alive. I’m not exaggerating those details in any way. That is all stuff that happens in the film, which I saw with mostly adults and one child who screamed on and off for the duration. It’s possible that the kid wasn’t reacting to the gnarly stuff—maybe they were tired or bored or otherwise cranky—but I’d have to imagine that somewhere out there, a wee one is now a little traumatized by what Wildwood has shown them.

Maybe that trauma will fortify them in the long run, making them tougher and worldlier and more curious, or maybe they will collapse into a fetal position any time they hear a crow cawing nearby. (Which the crow will take notice of and remember, damning that child to a life of cold war with the ominous obsidian dinosaurs of the sky.) Anyway, if you were thinking of taking a kid who is under the age of . . . I dunno, maybe 8 or 9? . . . make sure that kid is emotionally ready for some carnage. If they are mature enough, why not! 

They may be a little confused, though. Perhaps so much diligent attention was paid to executing the visuals of the film that there wasn’t a ton of time to focus on story. While the film is adapted from a book, written by the lead singer of The Decemberists (really!), it often feels like new and half-baked mythology. The plot concerns three Portland, Oregon youngsters—13-year-old Prue, her baby brother Mac, and local nerd Curtis—who venture across a rail bridge and into a magical world full of talking animals, a grief-mad sorceress, and some wicked bureaucracy. It’s an interesting milieu, but a lot of the lore is not properly fleshed out. The film also tries to throw in some overarching themes at the end—about growing up, about liberal coalition building—that kinda slide right off the picture, hastily and lazily as they’re slapped on. As an action-fantasy, the movie is serviceable but scattershot. As anything deeper or more meaningful, Wildwood is a whiff.

There are plenty of highlights, though, from stunning sequences, to clever visual gags, to Jacob Tremblay’s utterly winning voice performance as Curtis. (Other acting standouts are Carey Mulligan as the film’s villain and, somewhat surprisingly, Awkwafina as a scrappy little rat sidekick.) I was by no means unhappy watching the movie, it just didn’t leave me with much of anything beyond, “wow, that musta taken a real long time to make” and, “remember when that coyote got set on fire?” But maybe that’s enough for you! I don’t know your life. 

Wildwood was not quite enticing enough to make a real dent at the box office. It placed third this weekend, with a not-so-hot $11.6 million. (The film cost $100 million to make, plus whatever the distributor, Fathom Entertainment, spent on marketing.) Perhaps the film will find its fans once it’s streaming somewhere, but for now it is not the dark-kid favorite of the fall. An older crowd, but probably not much older, flocked instead to Clayface, the new film in which a documentarian-comedian moves into Clay Aiken’s house for a month and tries to uncover the real person behind the persona. It’s a fascinating movie, and you won’t believe what Aiken’s husband is like, or when Aiken disappears from the movie and Paul Bettany plays him in reenactments. Clearly people were interested in all that, because Clayface—which might actually be a horror movie set in the Batman universe—raked in a cool, wet, moldable $24 million in North America. It also got an A- in CinemaScore exit polling, which either means the movie is good or that there are far more Claymates still active in the US than we’d ever dared to fear. Either way, I’m still not gonna see Clayface until it’s lulling me to sleep on a Delta flight to somewhere faraway. 

The most interesting box office story from this weekend is the ongoing success of You Can See Everything, which expanded to 2,655 theaters (an increase of 1,800 locations) and hauled in $19.5 million. This thing is a certified hit; not quite a runaway smash, but one that ought to keep performing well as word-of-mouth spreads. Which is wild enough as it is—a documentary doing such boffo business—but is really nuts when you consider that almost no one had any idea the movie existed just two months ago. The more money the film makes, the more its Oscar chances increase, I think. The financial metric is not always useful when it comes to awards prediction, but in this case, I think it makes You Can See Everything more undeniable, thus compelling Academy voters (or, at least, some Academy voters) to take the film seriously as a cultural phenomenon that is also being hailed for its invention and artistry. 

This windfall—or whatever is a tad smaller than a windfall; a breezebobble? A zephyrstumble?—is great news for A24, especially in light of the recent news that the studio’s upcoming video game adaptation Elden Ring, from Civil War director Alex Garland, cost almost $200 million to make. That’s by far A24’s most expensive film to date, dwarfing its second-costliest title, Minari, which racked up a high price tag because Youn Yuh-jung’s quote is $40 million (justifiably) and they had to build an entire life-size replica of the state of Arkansas, from De Queen to Paragould. (Incidentally, I saw De Queen open for Paragould at the Bowery Ballroom in 2010.) 

I don’t know that I love A24 shifting into $200 million video game adaptation mode, but if it means those blockbusters can keep funding smaller, more interesting movies—some of which can actually make money, as YCSE proves—then perhaps it’s a fair tradeoff. We’ll know they’ve gone too far, though, when Ari Aster announces his big-budget film version of Stardew Valley. (That is apparently a very popular video game. I got the title from googling “most popular video games of all time.” I chose between that title and It Takes Two, which I’m assuming was a Sega Genesis tie-in for the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movie.) 

Over the weekend, my partner went to see Spanish Civil War epic La Bola Negra on his own, and much to my relief, he loved it. (As did a skeptical friend. So maybe not as many gay guys are hating this movie as I once feared would??) Hopefully plenty of you have been going out to the theaters and having similar experiences with Los Javis’ grand cinematic wonderment. If you have seen the film and loved it, and are now hungry for even more gays-in-wartime stories, I want to warn you, slightly, about this new trailer. 

This is the other gay war movie that premiered at Cannes this year (on the same day, no less; both were moored way out at the end of the festival), and is from wunderkind Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont, who has already been showered with awards at Cannes for his previous two films, which are both terrible. (I know most people agree with me on Girl, but I’m sorry, Close is also wretched.) Coward continued that Cannes tradition, landing the best actor prize for its two leads.

As this trailer suggests, the film is the lushly shot story of young soldiers in love during World War I. But as this trailer might also demonstrate, it was basically assembled from a Star-Crossed Lovers in Difficult Times starter kit. Everything about it is bloodless and generic, save for one or two genuinely ravishing moments of swooning romance. And those moments are short-lived. I don’t hate Coward like I hate Dhont’s past work. I don’t hate it at all, in fact. But I just wanted to temper your expectations in case you’re hoping that the film will give you the same heady, dizzy feels that La Bola Negra did (if it gave you those feels, at least). I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but as you know this is mainly a consumer watchdog newsletter, and I would be derelict in my duty if I let you think that Coward is going to knock your little queer socks off. Because I really don’t think it will. 

All righty, that’s it for today. I’ll be back here on Wednesday with a writeup of the most important cultural object of the entire year: season four of The Gilded Age! Can you even fuckin’ believe it’s time for that carnival of scuzz and sleaze again? I hear there’s a snuff episode this season. I truly can’t wait. In the meantime, enjoy the last of the light before night comes and consumes us all for five months.