2025-11-15 10:45:19
At the start of Act 3 of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t — the third in a series of movies about super-hero stage magicians who use their skills to pull off social justice heists — we get establishing shots of a flashy event in Abu Dhabi that our villain is holding in honor of her F1 car. It’s all set to “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga, and you know the person in charge of music must’ve been practically peeing themselves the whole movie, desperate to finally be able to let loose and let the needle drop. We see our heroes happily walking together towards the event, and one of them wise-cracks: “Yas Island: the Orlando of the Middle East!” End scene.
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. It’s not even the most ridiculous thing in the movie, by far. But it felt like the past hour and a half of raw, unfiltered absurdity had finally overwhelmed me. I’d come out the other side a changed person, my last impulse to fight back defeated, leaving me with nothing to do but laugh as it all washed o’er me.
The movie is shamelessly corny, even more than the acts of the magicians it claims to idolize (at one point, a guy driving the aforementioned race car says to himself, “Help me, Ricky Jay!”). I haven’t seen either of the first two, so I did briefly wonder if I’d be at a disadvantage, having missed out on all the lore-building. But it opens with an “underground” magic show serving as a reunion performance for the returning cast, where each one of them introduces themselves by essentially reading out a description of their characters from a synopsis of the first two movies.
Then they perform an illusion designed to rob a cartoonishly gross crypto-bro and give his ill-gained money back to the audience, and it was so blatantly a parade of visual effects that would never work outside of a movie, that I was wondering what was the baseline for this movie’s version of reality. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wonder for too long, because they quickly pull back the curtain and reveal that it was all holograms, projected onto clear sheets of acrylic.
In other words, it had all the realistic rigor of a Scooby-Doo episode, where we see a full-on glowing skeleton astronaut chasing teenagers around an abandoned air field, and then we discover it was all pulled off by one guy with a closed-circuit television and some glow-in-the-dark paint.
Actually, more than Scooby-Doo, it feels about as subtle and realistic as an episode of Captain Planet, given the villain. Rosamund Pike plays a ruthless diamond heiress who murdered her housekeeper, and having gotten a taste for blood, continues to brutally murder a German (?) accent. It’s the kind of performance that usually makes you say, “Well at least she was having fun!” But I’m not convinced any of the actors were genuinely having fun. There’s a sense that the light has gone out behind all of their eyes, not just Jesse Eisenberg’s as you’d expect. There’s nothing outright wrong with any of it, just the sense that you can see them all hitting their marks and exchanging their quips while their thoughts are preoccupied by how they’re going to spend the paycheck.
And yet, in its most amazing feat, it actually ends up being kind of fun? None of the cast feels legit, or even a tiny bit sincere, but the movie’s assembled a bunch of inherently charismatic people who could easily do all of this with their eyes closed. When Lizzy Caplan — who I think is physically incapable of not being appealing and magnetic — shows up, it gives a jolt of energy to the thing that makes it seem like things are getting good… and then it kind of peters out. But even when she’s having to deliver blandly corny quips about Yas Island, she can’t help but give off a passive aura of likeability that extends to the whole movie.
And a heist movie, even one that’s both implausible and predictable, can’t help but be at least a little bit engaging.
There’s one scene in particular, shot as if it were one extended, continuous take, in which each of our seven (!) lead characters swirls around each other, taking turns trying to one-up each other with illusions. It escalates from card tricks that undeniably feel like VFX, to more and more elaborate gags that eventually turn into one character transforming a torn-up playing card into a blizzard of confetti, which another character walks through and effortlessly does a complete costume change. It’s so brazenly unconcerned with being plausible that it feels like the scene itself is an attempt at misdirection. To hypnotize us into not trying to process what we’re seeing as if it were an actual movie, and instead just appreciate the spectacle.
Again, I haven’t seen the first two movies. But the premise of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t implies an unrealistic but still reverent celebration of stage magic and its pioneers. This is most obvious in a scene where Justice Smith’s character, who the movie takes care to relentlessly stress is a “magic nerd,” goes wide-eyed through a museum of rare artifacts from well-known magicians. Part of that is to introduce a historic trick in a shot that might as well have THIS IS FORESHADOWING super-imposed on it, but the rest is to establish that this universe is one where stage magicians are super-heroes.
You might think that this is to give audiences a peek behind the scenes of what real stage magic is like, but it’s not at all. I’m not even well-versed in the history of magic, but I feel like I could’ve hammered out this script based solely on what I already know and a web browser opened to the “history of magic” page of Wikipedia. The movie’s actually a celebration of the showmanship of a big, Vegas-ready, magic act. Unabashedly corny and all driven by spectacle. And most of what you get out of it is how willing you are to just take in the spectacle.
And again, the ridiculousness of the movie ends up being part of its charm. It’s hard to be offended or insulted by it. Even when it tries to be relevant to our earth, it comes across more as dated and tone-deaf than offensive. In the spectacular finale, in a shocking twist that everyone saw coming at least an hour ago, the diamond heiress is served Justice1 on stage in front of a crowd of affluent F1 fans on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. Our heroes announce that the diamond will be returned to its rightful place of origin in South Africa, and exposing her will also take down all of the greedy billionaires who were complicit in the trade of blood diamonds. And even better, they’ll give back some of that money to the crowd. Of affluent F1 fans on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.
At the start of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, there’s a black screen with text warning that the film contains flashing lights. I’d initially thought that it was a warning for photosensitive people who are prone to seizures, and I kept waiting for a set piece based entirely around strobe lights or something. But I never noticed anything particularly egregious. Based on everything else in the movie, though — including a tense scene in which a professional escape artist performing a heist to steal a diamond from a diamond heiress needs a group brainstorm and 15 minutes to realize that diamonds cut glass — I’m wondering if it was a more general-purpose warning for the target audience who’d be surprised and delighted by this movie. They might not grasp the entire concept of cinema, and be startled to suddenly find themselves in a dark room where disorienting lights are flashing onto a screen and seeming to make moving images.
2025-11-14 16:07:16
Yesterday, Valve announced three new devices to join the Steam Deck in its line of interoperable Steam Hardware, and honestly it’s all I’ve been able to think about. There’s an article from Chris Person at Aftermath if you want to hear a professional journalist sum up all the solid design choices evident in the announcement, but I wanted to add my take, too.
Disclaimer: I do have several friends who work at Valve, but I want to make one thing absolutely clear: I have no shame whatsoever, and if any of them wants to get me a developer kit or deep discounts on the hardware, I’ll gladly accept it in return for more gushing posts like this one.
Because while it’s not at all unusual for me to get excited about announcements of upcoming tech, especially if it includes AR/VR capability, it is unusual for me to get excited about announcements that are so sensible and reasonable. Based on what I’ve seen, it just looks like Valve made all of the correct choices, and they’re creating stuff that is exactly what I’m in the market for.1
The announcement is just over a day old, and I’ve already read or watched every article or video I could find about it, from YouTubers who got to try the hardware in person, and from other commenters reacting to the specs and videos. What I quickly realized is how much the usual sources for tech and gaming coverage have become irrelevant for what I want.
I rarely play AAA games anymore — and I’m not great at the ones I do still play — so I don’t really need the highest frame rates or resolution, and the majority of TLAs2 associated with performance specs for video games these days are completely lost on me. My Steam library is almost entirely made up of independent games, and the ones from larger studios are almost all turn-based, or simulators and city-builders. My Windows machine is several years old at this point, and it’s still overpowered for just about everything I try to play on it.
On the VR side, I’m still optimistic about the potential of it as a platform, even though it never quite seems to take hold beyond a niche audience. But even for me, the advancements I’d need to see are all in terms of experience, not technology. Not even in-game experience, since I have to wear glasses no matter what3, so I’m never going to get the highest clarity or widest FOV4. For me, the determining factors of “experience” are: how quickly can you put it on and get started, how comfortable is it to wear for extended periods, how self-contained is it, and how much is there to actually do with it once you’re inside?
I’d just started to take it for granted that to keep up with all the stuff I used to love — even as a consumer, not just as a developer — you had to be informed about all the details of rendering technology, processor design, memory caching and access speeds, display technology, object tracking, network latency, display latency, and whatever else has become crucially important just in the time it’s taken me to write this paragraph.
What I appreciated about Valve’s announcement is that the tone was basically, “Nah, we’ve got a lot of smart people who’ve figured all that shit out. You’re good.”
This one is the least interesting of the three devices to me, because I rarely have to put any thought into what controller I’m using. All of the stuff I play on a desktop machine, I play with a mouse and keyboard. As God intended.
But even here, they made all the right choices. If I were to get a controller for playing PC games, this is almost certainly the one I’d get.
There are people who love the original Steam Controller, but personally, I never found a good use for it. The overriding design principle seemed to be bringing every input you’d have available on a PC to a handheld controller, resulting in the over-sized trackpads that in theory combined mouse, dpad, and joystick input into one control, but in practice just felt like the worst version of each. Plus, the use of AA batteries made it a hassle, and the overall build quality felt cheaper and more plasticky than it actually was.
The new one is at its core a Steam Deck without a screen, and that’s exactly what it should be. The Steam Deck’s ergonomics are like the physics of bumblebee flight: it shouldn’t work, and yet it does. It seems like the thing is way too big to be comfortable to hold for extended periods, but as soon as you get into it, it’s a joy to use.
In addition to the dpad, two joysticks, and everything else you’d expect from a game controller these days, the touchpads have a placement and size, not to mention responsiveness, that makes a lot more sense. I still rarely use them, but on a platform based around playing everything in a library of games built for PCs, it’s inevitable to need to simulate mouse input at some point or another.
And all the improvements specific to the new Steam Controller sound like genuine improvements. In particular: joysticks that are designed to be drift-proof, which the Switch 2 didn’t include for some reason. And it’s table stakes to include a rechargeable battery instead of relying on AAs, but the magnetic puck that is both a charger and a wireless receiver is ingenious. Especially in a world where everybody else has essentially said, “Just give up and use Bluetooth.”5
I’ve heard several people praising Steam Input as the underrated MVP of the Steam Deck and the platform in general. I haven’t spent any time experimenting with it myself. But again, the philosophy of modding and community-shared content that seems to run through everything Valve does will pay off here, since there’s a good chance someone has already made a controller profile optimized for whatever game you’re wanting to play.
More appealing to me is the Steam Machine, which we have to acknowledge is solid, 1970s-style product naming, even if Steam Cube seems more appropriate.
I’ve been wanting a PC in the living room for almost two decades and three different living rooms. I’ve used everything from a Mac Mini running a Windows VM, to a Steam Deck dock. None of them have “stuck,” because there’s always been that little bit of friction that keeps it from being as quick and simple as a console. So I just keep taking the path of least resistance and saying, “Okay, fine, I guess I’ll buy the new PlayStation.”
So assuming they get the price right6, it looks like the Steam Machine will be exactly the thing I’ve been hoping for. A lot of the coverage I’ve seen has been focusing on the technical specs and comparing it to a desktop PC, but that honestly feels like it’s missing the point. I think Valve emphasized exactly the right priorities, namely: size, convenience, and compatibility.
Can it play my entire Steam library? Is it more capable than a docked Steam Deck? Can I leave it plugged in and not have to go through any setup every time?
And most importantly: can I 3D print a custom faceplate for it that allows me to attach Lego bricks?
It would’ve been foolish to position it as a gaming PC instead of a console alternative, since the people who are most interested in having a high-end gaming PC have almost certainly already got one. (Assuming they can afford the price of video cards). For people like me, who use Windows begrudgingly and only for gaming, a medium-to-high-end PC just sits under the desk making noise and taking up space. And it’s never a seamless experience for its intended purpose, either, since every time it boots up, it needs to go through another lengthy round of Windows system updates.
I appreciated that Valve showed the Steam machine being used as a desktop PC — and that’s all they showed, as far as I’m aware; I haven’t seen any out-of-game shots of whatever Big Picture looks like on this version of the platform. (I’m assuming it’s the Steam Deck’s interface, but bigger). But what I especially appreciated is how focused they were in the out-of-game shots: someone developing a game in Blender and Godot, and someone else using the Steam Machine to stream Stardew Valley. It’s such an ingenious way to communicate “this machine can do whatever you want” but still acknowledge “but we’re still perfectly aware of our target audience.” Clumsier and over-eager marketing might’ve tried to emphasize the computer’s versatility by showing someone editing a spreadsheet on it.
While I’m saying how impressed I am by this launch announcement, I should also mention how effectively they communicated “this is the diversity of our audience.” It doesn’t feel like a marketing team carefully picking out a member of each demographic to pointedly include them, but more a genuine effort to show what the audience really looks like.
And finally, the VR headset, which was the announcement I was most anticipating and still the one I’m most looking forward to. I skipped the Index, because it was too expensive for me to afford, and because I already had VR fatigue by the time it came out. From what I’ve seen, the Steam Frame is exactly the device I wanted it to be, since it’s positioned somewhere between the high-end Index and the less powerful but more self-contained Quest 2 and 3.
The biggest surprise to me was the inclusion of an SD card slot. Valve emphasized that you could take the card with your Steam library from the Steam Deck, and put it into either the Steam Machine or the Steam Frame, and it all works. Even if the specifications don’t match up, it is essentially a Steam Deck for your face.
I’m so used to thinking of VR headsets as either being standalone computers, or 3D displays for stuff streaming from a PC, that it hadn’t really occurred to me to take the “why not both?” route. I’ve been using a Quest 2 with Steam Link to play Half-Life: Alyx streaming from my PC, and I’ve been surprised how well it works — apart from my general ineptitude with the game, the biggest problem has been using controllers that the game wasn’t designed for. I’ve liked a few of the Quest-native games that I’ve played on the device, and I’ve wished that there were more I could play that didn’t require either streaming from the PC, or buying again for the Quest. The Steam Frame seems to say, “how about you have a VR device that can play pretty much anything from your entire Steam library?”
And since I’ve mentioned the Quest a few times: the obvious appeal of the Steam Frame for me is not having to use a Meta product. That’s not even the start of an anti-Meta screed, either. It’s just the simple and innocuous observation that the medium needs healthy competition to be viable. For years, the Quest has been the major player in VR, they’ve done a ton to keep it from dying out completely, and they’ve funded projects that wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to be made. And to their credit, they’ve made the platform open-ish enough for apps like Steam Link to let you stream games from the PC.
But even if you’re able to disregard how much they’ve integrated the negative aspects of their other platforms into the Quest, the more pragmatic problem as a consumer is having to build up a separate library of games. And while I still like the Quest 2 — even though it’s been so long since I used it that the batteries in the controllers have likely corroded — the Quest 3 never appealed to me enough to warrant an upgrade. It felt like they pushed too hard on the Mixed Reality aspect, trying to position it as a cheaper-but-just-as-viable alternative to the Vision Pro, instead of really playing to its strengths as a gaming platform.
If the pitch for Steam Machine was basically “it’s like a video game console, but it’s also a PC (that you can use mostly for gaming-related stuff),” the pitch for the Steam Frame doesn’t even bother with any such qualifiers. It says “your games in every dimension” right there on the front page. Valve is letting everybody else chase this idea of wear-everywhere AR goggles, or VR headsets as a lifestyle device for affluent people to consult recipes or browse the web. Meanwhile, they don’t betray even a whiff of being ashamed that this is a device targeted at people who play video games. And they shouldn’t be, because games are still the most viable application of consumer VR, by far.
Most of the magical appeal of the Vision Pro faded for me once I realized how unsuited it was for any of the types of gaming that I’m interested in. Not technically unsuited, but as a result of the conscious design choice on Apple’s part to position it as a lifestyle device instead of a gaming-focused, or really even gaming-capable one. It remains pretty great for watching movies, and I’m still holding out hope that some kind of killer app reveals itself before the platform becomes a dead end. But paradoxically, the push to make it more general purpose has meant that there’s not enough that it’s particularly great at. And even with the stuff that it is good at — watching movies or videos, browsing through photos, or using the giant-screen desktop mirror — it’s always a question of whether it’s enough of a better experience that I wouldn’t rather just do it with a flat screen.
So the fact that the Steam Frame’s pass-through cameras are still monochrome, for instance, is something I see as a feature, not a bug. I’m hoping it’s a sign that they’ve considered affordability as one of the main drivers of the project, and are hoping to price it competitively with the Quest 3, instead of higher-end headsets.
And it’s a sign that they’re not concerned about AR or MR, an implicit acknowledgment that there still haven’t been any truly standout experiences for AR or MR that rival the best immersive VR. Or even relatively early VR, for that matter: to this day, some of the best things I’ve seen in a headset were a dungeon crawler called Vanishing Realms, and Valve’s own The Lab demo suite.
Another way of looking at it: time spent using the passthrough cameras is time not spent playing games, and it’d be better to put all the emphasis on getting you into a game as quickly and easily as possible.
The through-line in all of the hardware announcements has been simple and obvious: more ways to play the games in your Steam library.
On that front, you could make a solid case that it’s hypocritical to complain about Meta being the 900-pound gorilla in VR, when Valve is the 900-pound gorilla in video game distribution. Where’s my love of healthy competition now?!
It’s still there; I just think that it’s a competition that Valve already won, years ago. And they keep winning, every time a new challenger steps into the ring, no matter how powerful they are, or how much money they pour into it. And unlike the contenders, Steam wins because I think they know what their business is, and they know who their customers are. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Epic, and Microsoft have all tried over the years, to some degree or another, to build their own marketplace. And without fail, they force the customer to make concessions or jump through hoops, either with subscriptions or with exclusivity. It’s always more of a hassle than simply having all your games in one place.
It’s so rare in the tech world to find a situation where what’s good for the company is also good for the consumer. Every company either needs to be a non-profit constantly struggling to stay afloat, or a behemoth so fixated on maximum growth that customer service becomes an afterthought if not an outright inconvenience. I’m happy that Steam has made a metric shit-ton of money by distributing games, because I never have to ask myself, “wait a second… what’s the catch?”
(I haven’t ever tried to release anything on the platform, so I don’t know what the situation is for developers. But as someone who aspires to independent development and is also really, really, horribly, old, I still remember the pre-Steam days, when the idea of trying to make a living off your game without being beholden to a publisher was all-but impossible. Unless you’d made something genre-defining like DOOM).
And on the VR front, they’ve got their bona fides simply by having been invested in VR for a very long time. I have to say that the Steam VR experience has never been my favorite, since the interface was always little clunky, there was inevitably a setup step, and the whole process felt like a hassle to get started. The main reason I was so pleased with the Quest platform initially was that it was worth the downgrade from PC-quality games to mobile-quality, simply because the whole process was so much more seamless.
So I am completely and prematurely on board with the new Steam hardware. So far, all signs point to affordability being a goal, but of course it remains to be seen whether Valve’s idea of “affordable” is the same as mine.7 I don’t want to say that I’m getting too invested too soon, but I will acknowledge that I’ve already cleared a 7×7 inch space (for breathing room) on our entertainment center, and made sure that the living room floor is free of obstructions.
2025-11-12 02:00:00
Last month, we went to the LA Haunted Hayride, where two of the non-hayride attractions were an Elvira-themed haunted house (pretty cute and fun, the highlight being a room simulating crawling through Elvira’s cleavage), and “Monáe Manor.” That was a typical low-to-mid-budget haunted house, with a music track that played throughout, and it had video screens of Janelle Monáe in various Halloween horror-themed costumes.
It reminded me how it’s been a while since I’ve re-listened to her earlier music, back when I first found out about her and instantly became a fan. Which seemed weird, since that was only a few years ago.
Haha, no, The ArchAndroid came out in 2010, fifteen years ago. For me, after watching the video to “Tightrope,” featuring Big Boi — not to mention a performance on David Letterman which culminated in helpers coming out to put a cloak around her like James Brown — she seemed to come out of nowhere as a fully-formed super-mega-star with limitless talent and charisma.
Today, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has been showing video clips from a recent event inducting Outkast, with interviews or speeches coming from Donald Glover and Monáe. Glover credited Outkast for making it possible for black artists to achieve success with whatever they can imagine, instead of being stuck in the typical predefined lanes.1 And in an interview with Monáe, she described selling CDs out of the trunk of a car in Atlanta when Outkast discovered her and cast her in Idlewild. A reminder that she didn’t come out of nowhere, actually.
The thing that still amazes me about The ArchAndroid is that for being a breakthrough major-label debut album, there’s nothing particularly “safe” about it. It’s the second of three concept albums (along with Metropolis and The Electric Lady) where Monáe assumed the alter-ego of an android living in an oppressive dystopian future where dancing and music were forbidden. It’s all over that video to Tightrope, ingeniously including all of the sci-fi world-building she wanted to do, but while feeling celebratory and joyful instead of pretentious.
With Dirty Computer, she kept the ideas of world-building but shed the alter-ego (and the uniform-like suits and hairdo), fully making all of the creativity and imagination expressions of aspects of herself instead of a character. It’s not uncommon to see an artist achieve super-stardom and live a life of performative opulence, hanging out at glamorous parties or extended vacations in exotic locations. It makes me genuinely happy that Janelle Monáe is enough of an over-achiever that she does all that plus remains weird AF. Like putting herself in ridiculously elaborate Halloween costumes and makeup every October, and putting herself in a local haunted house event.
My favorite of her songs is still from way back on Metropolis, and it’s called “Sincerely, Jane.” There used to be more videos of live performances online, but now the best one I can find is from the Sydney Opera House and has a disappointing sound mix. Her incomparable showmanship is still on full display, and I especially love seeing the string section getting in on the act. I mean come on, who else could take down the spectre of Death with finger guns, and then moonwalk across the stage for the big finale?
2025-11-08 14:28:03
I’ve said it before, but I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten the Predator franchise, and it drives me crazy. It’s not just like I’m not getting a joke that everyone else in the world seems to be in on, but a decades-long failing in basic media literacy on my part.
So for anyone else who might be in the same boat, sitting down to see Predator: Badlands, my first piece of advice is simple: let it cook for a while.
It starts out on the Yautja homeworld, with a shot of various prey being eaten by predators that’s so cringingly on the nose that I was honestly tempted to walk out right then and there. Then there’s an extended fight scene in a dark cave between two characters we don’t know and can barely see, but there’s an awful lot of slashing and punching and dialogue thrown back and forth. It’s a good thing that we have absolutely no stakes in this fight sequence, because it’s practically impossible to tell one character from the other or get any sense of who’s winning.
That leads to a sequence that actually introduces the character and explains what our protagonist is all about. The basics are that he’s a Predator who’s the runt of his clan, and to prove himself, he makes a vow to go off and kill an unkillable monster, one of the only creatures even the Yautja are afraid of.
We see him crash land on the creature’s home planet, and that’s when my armchair director kicked in, insisting that they should’ve started the movie here. And I still believe that, since this is where it starts getting kind of interesting, showing one of the Predators being immediately at a disadvantage on a ludicrously hostile planet. It seems that literally every living organism on the planet is trying to kill him in one way or another.
I already knew that the concept was that a Predator was the protagonist of this movie, trying to prove himself to a clan that had rejected him. But I quickly started to wonder whether I was even on board with the premise as much as I’d thought. It felt less like an interesting mix-up of the formula, and more like it was missing everything that makes the franchise interesting. It seemed like if you made a Halloween movie that not only focused on Michael Myers, but had him talking a lot and sharing all of his inner monologue with the audience.1
Anyway, eventually our protagonist runs into Thia, an android created by the Weyland-Yutani corporation. After a run-in with the aforementioned unkillable monster left her torn in half, she’s been stuck in a vulture’s nest. She suggests that she can help him survive the planet if he helps her out of her current predicament. He eventually agrees, and they head out on his quest to the monster’s lair, with Thia strapped to his back, Banjo-Kazooie style.
This feels like it must be at least thirty minutes into the movie, but it’s only here that Predator: Badlands finds its legs, so to speak. Until that point, the only trace of personality I was able to detect in the movie was a brief scene where our protagonist almost eats an exploding caterpillar creature. With the introduction of Thia, it settles into more of a light-hearted buddy action movie.
The moment that I like best in Predator: Badlands is a spoiler, but it made me laugh out of recognition that it was cleverly letting the pieces of plot that it’d seeded earlier start to fall into place.
The non-spoiler (mostly) moment I liked a lot is from the same sequence. During an extended fight sequence in which our protagonist is getting thrown around, he’s flung into the table on which Thia has been re-assembling herself, causing her to get split in half again. She just reacts with an exasperated, “Oh, come on.”
I wish there were more sparks of cleverness like that in the movie, which otherwise maintains a tone of “surprisingly light-hearted” instead of genuinely surprising. There’s an extended sequence later on, set inside the Weiland Yutani outpost on the planet, where the movie allows itself to get genuinely goofy, still structured like an action movie but also making it absolutely clear that it’s not taking any of it too seriously. That’s where we see one clever moment after another of our protagonists taking out a ton of identical androids — almost like GI Joe cartoons, I guess because this is a PG-13-rated installment in a series that otherwise features monsters ripping out people’s spines. I didn’t feel like the rest of the movie ever hit that level of imagination, though.
I kept having the sense that this movie is like one of the Dark Horse comics set in the Predator universe, but if they’d been allowed to let loose and have fun with it. I haven’t read a ton of those comics, but the ones I did seemed like the end of Predator 2 had sparked something in a ton of writers and artists, suggesting a conjoined Alien/Predator universe that could spawn any number of stories going deeper into the lore of that shared universe. But they also seemed grim and dark to a fault, as if this lore was something to be taken very, very seriously.
And that helped build this imaginary version of “The Target Audience for Predator Movies” that I’ve had in my head since then. It’s all guys in their early-to-mid 20s, fans of Alien and Zack Snyder movies, who casually throw out “Yautja” as if of course everyone is aware that’s what the Predators are called, who almost certainly own at least one katana, and will not hesitate to earnestly and inaccurately explain to you the principles of the samurai code of bushido.
When Thia starts explaining about Earth wolves and alphas, my immediate reaction was oh no here it comes. But that’s definitely not what the movie is about. And I suspect that that type of stereotypical dudebro audience member would reject Badlands as being too goofy and too “woke.” Ugh, the Yautja are a proud and honorable culture and you’re mocking it with your silly DEI bullshit!
But it’s a lot more likely that I’ve turned fans of stuff that I’m not into a cartoon that has gotten more and more ridiculously cartoonish over the years. It’s more likely that the core audience has always been more of the Mortal Kombat variety: people who can appreciate ridiculously over-the-top hyper-violence but still not take any of it all that seriously.
In which case, it seems like they’re going to be disappointed by the toned-down violence, and the inclusion of a lovable animal sidekick?
Ultimately, I’ve just got to resign myself to the fact that not everything with lasers, spaceships, and aliens is made for me, dammit. And even though it wasn’t, I still enjoyed it fine, once I was able to get a handle on the tone it was going for.
Prey is still my favorite entry in the franchise, and I still genuinely love that Dan Trachtenberg — who I’m assuming must be a fan of the franchise — is getting to do what he wants with it, delivering three tight, mid-budget action movies that expand on the lore and are all tonally distinct. Badlands ends with a suggestion of a story to follow, and I’m sure I’ll be watching that as soon as it comes out, too, and likely being every bit as frustrated that I’m just not getting it.
2025-11-08 02:00:00
While I was looking online for more info about The Favourite, I was surprised and more than a little disappointed in what seemed to be at the top of the search results. One recurring idea was people on Reddit and the like complaining that the movie wasn’t all that funny, actually. Another was the tendency, especially for media outlets, to use headlines that emphasized it as having a predominantly female cast.
It made me feel like I’d crawled at least partially up my own ass, since I’d been hyper-critical of Poor Things and The Great for being good but not perfect. I was reminded just how difficult it must be to make anything that tries to raise the bar or be innovative, since there’s so much push back against anything weird. A less ambitious mainstream movie will get a better response — yes, including from me — than a more daring one that doesn’t get every single thing right.
I hope it’s obvious why I think it’s shallow to complain about the movie not being funny enough. More than that, though, I was surprised to see anyone watching The Favourite and coming to such a reductive conclusion that the most interesting thing about it is having female leads. I hadn’t thought of it as a movie about women, so much as about three distinct characters who are women.
Isn’t that the goal, after all? To have characters who are interesting enough, and enough of them, that they’re no longer defined predominantly by their gender?
But you don’t have to think back on the movie for very long to realize that that take is reductive as well. The movie is full of ideas about sex, gender roles, motherhood, and the patriarchy, and it’s not particularly subtle about it. But one of the things that The Favourite does so well is keep all of these ideas present throughout, but it doesn’t let them take over. It keeps almost all of the focus on the characters’ relationships with each other, not their relationships with men. (Unless it serves their purpose, in Abigail’s case, or gives insight into their character and what they value, in Sarah’s).
In other words: the patriarchy is the instigating event of this story, but it’s not the story itself.
Much of Anne’s sadness, loneliness, and insecurity have to do not with being Queen, but with being a wife and mother. Her husband is dead, and she keeps constant reminders of all the children she doesn’t have.
At the start of the story, Sarah has already established herself as a woman treated as equal in a man’s world. The first time we see her, she’s talking about affairs of state with two men, and there’s little question as to who’s in charge. She defers to her husband, but it always feels like a combination of propriety and genuine affection; in the few moments we see them alone together, they speak as equals.
And the movie doesn’t treat this as a regular occurrence in the early 1700s, either. In an early exchange with Harley, she’s flinging witty and clever insults at him, and it outrages him so much that he can only respond with the most misogynistic swear that I can’t say. You quickly get the impression that the respect she’s earned in the court was hard-won, and the result of being at least twice as smart and capable as anyone else.
Which helps explain why there’s immediate tension between her and Abigail, and why she so quickly considers Abigail a threat. You can imagine that she’s rarely intimidated by men, but instead sees them as either contemptible (like Harley) or with a mutual respect (like Gondolphin). But another woman with education and ambition is a vivid reminder of how tenuous her own position is, since it’s allowed not based on her own merit or competence, but because she has the favor of the Queen.
And Abigail is to me the most interesting, because I immediately thought of her story as being about class instead of gender. She’d seen life as a noble and a life in poverty, and was willing to do whatever it took to get back to a place of comfort and high rank. That took all of my attention, even though her first scene involves her getting sexually harassed. She matter-of-factly tells Sarah about getting sold by her father to another man, and how the saving grace was taking advantage of the fact that men don’t understand menstrual cycles. Later on, it’s taken for granted that her key to being part of nobility once again is by marrying a nobleman. The interesting thing there is that the marriage of convenience isn’t treated as taking advantage of her; she may not be in love with him, but she at least finds him fun and interesting (at first), and she doesn’t hesitate to treat him as an equal.
One of the other things that I thought was so interesting about Abigail is that she’s almost always shown with a book. That’s such a well-worn cinematic shorthand for a woman who’s got more than just her looks — see, fellas, she can think, too! — that I’d been expecting the movie to make a point of it. But it never does. Even when she’s smashing herself in the face with a book.
Overall, I got the impression that Abigail is a character whose life was defined by patriarchy — it’s why she starts the story severely disadvantaged by her father’s mistakes, and why her only means of getting ahead are by exploiting her femininity and finding a noble husband. But I never got the impression that she, or any of the women, considered patriarchy to be the obstacle that had to be overcome. It was just an inescapable part of the world they lived in. It defined the rules of the game, but it wasn’t the game itself.
Which, in my opinion, makes them interesting characters. Because they’re defined by what they want for themselves — and what parts of themselves they’d lose by achieving it — instead of being defined by their struggle against characters who aren’t as interesting or as relevant to the story. The best victory isn’t the one where you defeat the villain, but the one where you achieve so much of what you want for yourself that you don’t have to care about the villain one way or the other.
Near the end of The Favourite, Sarah mocks Abigail by saying “You think you’ve won,” to which Abigail responds, “Haven’t I?” I’m still not sure exactly how to interpret that.
The most obvious interpretation is that it was a spiteful attempt by Sarah to get in the last word. “You’ll see how hard I had it, constantly having to placate and reassure her, and be just as miserable as I was.” That would be in line with Sarah’s character, stubborn, always convinced she was in the right, and prone to lose her temper and make cold, dismissive, threatening remarks. But it seems a little too simple, since even at her angriest, she still had undeniable affection for Anne.
The most convenient interpretation for a blog post reconsidering whether The Favourite was feminist after all: it was Sarah observing that nobody really won, because there are no winners when society forces smart and capable women to immediately see each other as rivals and fight. But that would be a case of sardonic hindsight on Sarah’s part, because Abigail had offered an apology (too late, and at the worst possible time) and a truce to let them all have what they wanted, but Sarah (understandably) refused.
And The Favourite is one of the few cases where I actually like the ambiguity. It tells you who these characters are, instead of telling you what to think about them. That’s why I think it’s shallow to describe it as a movie about women, since that reduces interesting characters down to their gender and how much they do or don’t conform to expectations of their gender. It certainly doesn’t ignore the characters’ gender, but it refuses to define them in terms of it, either.
2025-11-07 04:40:49
I was predisposed to like The Favourite, since I’m a big fan of all three of its leads, I was immediately won over by its trailers, and of course I’ve been hearing praise for it in the years since. It seemed like there was a brilliant movie that I was guaranteed to love, just waiting for me to make the time to actually watch it.
But that enthusiasm cooled a little bit after seeing the filmmakers’ other projects that followed. Poor Things is also directed by Yorgos Lanthimos from a screenplay adapted by Tony McNamara, and I’d been even more excited to see it. It’s an objectively stunning movie, with astounding art direction, deliberately bonkers performances, iconic but disorienting music, and a tone that mashes together black comedy, slapstick, and an earnest exploration of what it means to be human in a cruel and often brutal world. But as much as I appreciated it, its often weird cinematic flourishes, and its wild shifts in tone, felt too arch and distancing for me to connect to anything. I didn’t feel much of anything beyond revulsion.
And after The Favourite, McNamara created The Great, which is essentially the same mission statement expanded to a full series: all the trappings of a gorgeous, stuffy, historical drama with an at-least-loose basis in fact, presented as dark and bawdy satirical comedy. I’ve only seen the first couple of episodes of that series, and again, it does everything right. But again, it felt as if the spark of it ran out quickly. By the end of the second episode, I already felt like I got everything that it was about.
So I went into The Favourite with a little bit of trepidation. On the surface, it’s the same idea: all the impeccable art direction, costume design, and cinematography of the stuffiest historical drama, in service of a dark comedy with no fear of being too profane, vulgar, or anachronistic.
It comes right out of the gate setting its tone of “we’re taking the piss out of historical dramas,” even before the movie’s gotten started. Over the studio bumpers, we don’t hear anything but very faint sounds of the countryside, with chickens clucking the 20th Century Fox fanfare.
Then a scene with Queen Anne and her closest friend and advisor, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. It is straight out of a movie about the lives of the royals, with servants slowly folding up the Queen’s robe and carefully removing her crown as she stands, dispassionate and regal, thinking on matters of the court. But as soon as the servants leave, we immediately see the nature of their relationship, a casual familiarity that only comes from a lifelong friendship and mutual love.
And then we’re introduced to Abigail, Sarah’s cousin. She’s initially presented as the stereotypical sheltered, beautiful young woman who’s about to have her naivety and innocence shattered when she’s thrown into the machinations of the royal court. That familiar introduction to a familiar character type is almost immediately undercut when she sees that the soldier across from her in a crowded carriage is masturbating while staring at her, and he grabs her ass while she’s leaving the carriage, causing her to fall face-first into the mud.
I was immediately swept up in all of it. Not just the plot, but the way that the filmmaking and the plot were perfectly in service of each other. All of the weird and disorienting flourishes which could usually make a film seem arch and distancing — abrupt cuts in time or space, bizarre lines of dialogue left to hang there with no explanation, sudden emotional outbursts, camera angles that feel too close or too wide — instead felt intriguing.
There’s a sense that The Favourite is showing you things that might all seem overly familiar if you’ve seen any historical drama at all, but it’s demanding that you look at them in a different way. The Queen is impetuous and tempestuous, swinging wildly between needy insecurity and outraged imperiousness. Her closest friend and advisor is shrewd and manipulative, placating the Queen while pulling all of the strings as her de facto regent. The newcomer is an outsider, perpetually in danger of having her kindness and humanity shattered in an environment that treats lower classes not just with disrespect, but with disregard or outright contempt. The Favourite demands that we see them as real things happening to real, weird, unpredictable, often awful, people, instead of just familiar characters playing out familiar story beats.
One of the most distinctive ways the movie does this, especially early on, is by inter-cutting or dissolving between two disparate images, demanding that you figure out what the connection or significance is. An example from later in the movie is a scene of a nude man happily standing in front of a folding screen in one of the elaborate halls of the palace, as a bunch of noblemen raucously throw fruit at him. It’s not given any explanation, and it’s filmed in partial slow motion, a jarring jolt of surreality. The movie cuts between this and shots of Abigail going about her business. Initially there doesn’t seem to be any connection, but the combination seeds the idea that she’s on her way to becoming as ludicrously corrupt as these supposed nobles.
Even more effective is when The Favourite holds uncomfortably long on a character’s face, often in close-up, and often when it feels like something even more interesting is happening off screen. There’s a scene with a ball, and Sarah chooses a man to dance with while Anne watches from her wheelchair. (I have no idea if the dance is at all historically accurate, but I desperately hope it isn’t, since it is hilariously bizarre). Instead of lingering on the dance and occasionally cutting back to Anne’s reaction, the camera stops paying attention to the dance at all, and it just focuses on her face. It’s not a broad or violent outburst; in fact, her expression is basically unreadable. But the longer the camera lingers on her face, the more you get a sense of the rage that’s boiling underneath. Not the sudden outbursts that everyone in the court has come to expect, but something much deeper, driven as much by fear as by anger.
Of course, you can only do that kind of thing when you’re working with actors like Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone. The Favourite only works because it has actors who are adept at both drama and comedy, and are fearless in how much of themselves they’ll dedicate to the part. It’s rare to get one actor who can do that, practically unheard of to find three. (For that matter, all of the performances in the movie are outstanding, and I didn’t detect a single false note from anyone. It’s so enjoyable to watch a movie where it seems like everyone at every level just gets it).
The Favourite is full of scenes of surreal dark comedy: moments that are too broad or weird to make sense. Nobles holding a duck race inside the Queen’s court. Sarah getting splattered in the face by blood after Abigail shoots a bird. Harley casually pushes Abigail down a hill after he’s tired of a conversation. Practically every scene of Abigail and Marsham’s “courtship.”
The characters are witty, but there’s actually not a lot of the nasty, verbal sparring of something like The Thick of It, where the humor comes from how cruel clever people in power can be. It’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and it’s rarely shocking or vulgar enough to register as so-outrageous-they’re funny. The moments where the sparring escalates to unforgivable behavior don’t have the feel of “oh boy, the game is on now!” but instead are shown almost matter-of-factly, as if there’s a sense of inevitability to them.
It seems like it all shouldn’t work, neither grounded enough to be a straightforward character-based drama, nor quite outrageous enough to be truly daring black comedy. What makes it work is that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in being straightforward or outrageous.
We’re never allowed to forget that our main characters have more going on than is evident on the surface. And it’s not in the sense you’d expect from a story about keeping up appearances in a royal court filled with back-stabbing and jealously; it’s all happening simultaneously.
The Queen genuinely is insecure and impetuous, but she’s not stupid or completely incompetent. She’s aware that she’s being manipulated, and she’s happily using it to her advantage. She keeps constant reminders of the tragedy in her life, visible signifiers of her loneliness. Sarah is shrewd, stubborn, steadfastly convinced she’s always in the right, and brazenly manipulative, but she keeps none of it hidden, because it is genuinely motivated by love: for Anne, for her husband, and for England.
And Abigail is genuinely sincere and initially motivated by kindness, trying to keep her integrity and humanity intact while also desperate to secure a place among the nobles that’ll guarantee she doesn’t have to go back to the horrors of her past. Even while she’s directly monologuing about her true intentions, it’s evident that she’s trying to convince herself of something, not the audience. She’s trying to navigate an environment of uneasy alliances, betrayals, and outright back-stabbing, determined to come out ahead without losing the core of herself in the process.
By the end of The Favourite, you can recognize it as a tragedy. Three characters who are all far from blameless, but whose character flaws or mistakes get punished far beyond what feels like poetic justice. And the “art film” flourishes don’t create a distance between you and the characters as you watch the plot play out, but drive home the tragedy of it. The intercuts between Sarah struggling to write a letter and Anne distractedly asking for the mail. The camera lingering on Abigail as she fully realizes the depth of the relationship she helped to destroy. And the final scene, which seems mundane enough to be ambiguous, if not for the expressionless face of a woman who’s been completely drained of joy and life, a woman understanding the purgatory she’s built for herself, and images of rabbits layered on top of each other in cross-dissolve, ending with a sense of tragedy layered on tragedy layered on tragedy.