I moved to New York!

Also, A House of Dynamite sucks but you should still watch it with your dad

Hi darling dears,

Apologies for being MIA for an entire month, I was preparing to and then actually moving to what people are calling The Greatest City On Earth, or whatever. I am officially an NYC resident and already I am feeling like the sort of terrible quasi-tourist who walks around being like, this is where Harry and Sally walked!! I did this for real the other day at my friends’ apartment which is next to the Russian & Turkish Baths - it would have physically pained me not to point out that quite a bit of Black Rabbit, the pretty solid Netflix show I just watched most of with my dad, was filmed there. My eyes have been peeled for celebrities, naturally, but the only person of interest I’ve seen so far is a middling food influencer standing outside a bar looking depressed, so the hunt will have to continue.

me fr

As you would probably expect, I’ve been trying to check out every theater within a reasonable radius of my apartment and have managed to see quite a bit since I moved, but I’m going to save most of these for my end of November roundup. Today I’ll be discussing some of the most interesting and thorny things I read and watched pre-move!

A House of Dynamite (2025)

I was actually a little baffled by how badly Bigelow whiffed it on this one. Ostensibly starring Rebecca Ferguson and Idris Elba, A House of Dynamite sets out to be a tense, in-real-time control-room thriller about how the various interconnected bureaucratic and military groups respond to the increasingly dire threat of an unidentified nuclear missile heading towards the US. Intriguing!

But Bigelow insists upon a really interesting (poor) structural choice: following Rebecca Ferguson’s character, we witness the rising action at the White House Situation Room up until a certain crucial point, at which point the narrative cuts and loops back to where we started, now following a new set of characters with a slightly higher security clearance, all of whom we met on a Zoom meeting (I’m serious) in the first section. The setting is (slightly) different, but the conversations we’re watching play out are….largely the exact same ones we heard in the first section. (Over Zoom). And then the time loop happens AGAIN, this time to reveal the actor that’s playing the President (earlier, on Zoom, they make a big point of saying that the President’s webcam isn’t on). What are we DOING?? This layered structure can and has worked in plenty of other movies, but that’s only if each section reveals new information or otherwise raises the stakes. This…really does not. I can think of only one instance where what we’re shown in the first-person POV segment differs materially from what we heard earlier on the Zoom call. Is this not what we crucified Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds remake for? What am I supposed to take away from this? I’m not sure. Nuclear war would be bad, and our government is inept. The more you know!

I will give the movie this: the cast fucks. MVPs are Rebecca Ferguson (easily the film’s strongest performance, too bad she disappears after 30 minutes), Tracy Letts and Jason Clarke, but you would actually not believe how many B and C-list actors are here doing scenes they probably knocked out in a single afternoon. Greta Lee, with four lines! Kaitlyn Dever, one scene! Renée Elise Goldsberry is the First Lady, and she’s on a safari! Brittany O’Grady is somebody’s Pregnant Wife! Anthony Ramos is yelling at someone for eating Doritos! I will save my criticism for Jonah Hauer-King because it feels mean at this point, but he is here as well. These celebrity sightings were the most thrilling part of the last hour of the movie.

Should you watch it? I don’t know, it’s free if you have Netflix. I watched this with my dad on a Friday afternoon, which is probably how it’s meant to be viewed. In all seriousness I think a better movie about this sort of thing is Greenland starring Gerard Butler, which is also great to watch with your dad on a Friday afternoon, but at least it has a legible ending.

Spencer (2021)

I first watched this movie in the tiny State Theatre in Ann Arbor when it came out, and remember being 1) blown away by Kristen Stewart’s performance (particularly considering I knew her only in the vein of sulky, dead-eyed Bella Swan) and 2) transfixed by the level of visceral discomfort this film achieves, even in such beautiful surroundings.

In terms of scope, this is how all biopics should be - not resigned to showing the entire birth, ugly adolescence and death of a public figure, but instead zeroing in on a specific point in time. Spencer is set over three days of the Christmas holiday in 1991, at a time when Charles has already rather publicly taken another lover and Diana’s mental freefall is being increasingly scrutinized by the press and the British public. It being Christmas, the monarchy’s stuffy, inflexible traditions (“just a bit of fun!”) are in full force, including a mandatory weigh-in upon arrival. We feel the watchful eyes of the Queen and the servants alike on Diana before she’s even showed up at the country estate, all clucking their disapproval at her late arrival, disapproval that she’d rather play with her sons than eat mandatory sandwiches for lunch, more disapproval as she uncomfortably pushes food around her plate at dinner.

I’m sensitive to, and usually avoid, Eating Disorder Movies, given their tendency to skew towards the garish or the sanctimonious or the nooo babe ur so skinny! Not to be all I can’t believe a man made this but I really can’t believe a man made this - Pablo Larrain’s portrayal of Diana’s eating disorder is both subtle and harrowingly visceral. The sense of claustrophobia and the feeling of being watched is enough to make you want to crawl out of your skin - or to claw off the string of pearls around your neck (the same pearls your cheating husband also bought his mistress). Diana does exactly this at the dinner table, spilling the pearls into a bowl of mint-green soup (perfectly matching her dress) before gulping down the soup and, in a spectacular bit of body horror, crunching down on the pearls one by one.

she is so sad. but look at that tile

As a movie in which bulimia is a stubborn, ever-present side character, we spend a lot of time in bathrooms. And what bathrooms they are! Spencer’s production design is tremendous in its ability to create beautiful rooms you have no interest in entering. The estate serves as Diana’s gilded cage - with only a few exceptions (mostly involving Diana spending time with the boys), the extravagant, expansive grounds of Sandringham House are decorated and lit to feel stifling.

There are a few great supporting performances in here (namely Sally Hawkins), but Spencer is Kristen Stewart’s show. The way Stewart, iconic in her own regard, is able to slip so fully into Diana’s shoes is truly magnificent. As she gets further and further from her Twilight era I’ve loved the way her taste in projects has evolved (as mentioned in last year’s Best of 2024 roundup, I’m a Love Lies Bleeding diehard), and think she is just one of the most interesting actors we’ve got.

Warfare (2025)

I get the sensitivity to this sort of movie in this day and age. But in spite of the pre-credits “the real guys” reel, I didn’t find Warfare to be especially pro-military - I actually thought it was a pretty devastating depiction of a group of youngish guys who are trained to act tough and unsympathetic who, understandably, go into numb panic mode when something unexpected and terrible happens, particularly when confronted with the callous, brutal pressure from faceless higher-ups whose voices we hear only through crackly earpiece transmission. There is brotherhood, yes, but there is also cruelty and carelessness - there’s one particularly horrifying scene where a soldier, after tripping over Joseph Quinn’s character’s ruined legs, claps him on the back and gives him a sarcastic let’s get out there, buddy! in spite of his obviously devastating, life-threatening injuries. For all of those who are there because of good intentions, however misguided, there are just as many who get their kicks out of state-sanctioned, anonymous, casual violence.

Wisely, there is no “hero” in this story - there is only a group of men doing their best to accomplish their mission and, when that fails, get their friends to safety. These men are portrayed as mostly competent but very prone to fallibility in the face of chaos (forgotten backpacks, morphine shots administered backwards, etc.) The film is very impressive on a technical level - while the sound design is the highlight, the screenplay is also solid, establishing the quick, no-frills characterization necessary for a movie that charges immediately into the action. It’s not a movie I’d ever rewatch, probably, but I think it accomplished its goals. Also, inspired casting: what a damn roundup of B-list white boys of the moment. Will Poulter is a far better dramatic actor than anyone has given him credit for, and I have my eye on Cosmo Jarvis and Michael Gandolfini.

P.S.

• Other things I watched and adored in October: K-Pop Demon Hunters, Yeast (2008) by the incredible Mary Bronstein, and Gosford Park (2001).

• I haven’t finished them yet, but I’ve also been loving FX’s The Lowdown (I’m here for anything Ethan Hawke wants to do, ever) and Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family, a surprisingly solid true-crime entry starring the aforementioned Jason Clarke, a generally unsung hero and my weird DILF crush since I was 7 and first discovered Our Lips Are Sealed starring the Olsen twins.

• What the hell, including my entire playlist for the back half of October. (Those who know me know I’ve been doing monthly Spotify playlists for close to ten years, and they are some of the most cherished parts of my digital footprint).

Kisses!

XO, Lael