Yeah Dude, Okay

Film Collection: The Lady Vanishes

September 17th, 2026

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Sidney Gilliat & Frank Launder
1938 | 97 minutes | English, German, Italian, French
DVD

Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, May Whitty, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Mary Clare, Emile Boreo

What it’s about: An avalanche in the fictional nation of Bandrika strands a group of foreign travelers into an overcrowded hotel. Among them is Iris Henderson (Lockwood), a young Englishwoman headed back to London to get married. During the stay, she runs afoul of Gilbert Redman, a fellow Brit and ethnomusicologist with a bit of a cheeky streak and a penchant for making noise. At first, they dislike each other, but boarding the train the next morning, Iris has a strange experience. A potted plant falls and knocks her on the head and the elderly and kind Miss Froy (Whitty) looks after her for a bit, but when Iris awakens from a brief nap, Miss Froy is gone and no one but Gilbert seems to believe Iris’s insistence that she existed in the first place.

Reflections: A stone-cold mystery-comedy classic, Hitchcock’s biggest hit to date, and the film that convinced David O. Selznick to bring him to America, this movie has lost none of its appeal in nearly 90 years. It takes the spine of Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel The Wheel Spins, but invents much of its story whole-cloth from some of the director’s characteristic fascinations: ordinary people pulled into shadowy conspiracies, an ambient menace with the threat of violence, and a set of eccentric characters drawn with an acid English wit. Two of the latter–Caldicott and Charters (Wayne and Radford, respectively), a pair of blasé, cricked-obsessed gentlemen, actually spun off into a popular duo that appeared in several other films, including Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940).

The story takes a little while to get going, but once the central mystery kicks in, it stays involving even as it becomes increasingly absurd. Lockwood’s Iris gives it momentum; set up as a girl who believes she’s seen it all, she sells a fascinated, frustrated curiosity rooted in that self-confidence. And Redgrave’s Gilbert has a rogue’s charm from the moment he appears onscreen, obnoxiously tooting on a clarinet, giving the film much of its wit with his running string of sly remarks on the unfolding investigation (“Faint heart never found old lady” and such). The puzzle pieces of the plot are engineered masterfully around them–the big picture of the answer doesn’t matter that much, but the small details that add up to it do and Hitchock absolutely understood how to roll out twists and payoffs in ways that are clear and exciting. Although the tone is mostly light, the situation never become stale or comfortable, including in the early scenes where things feel slightly off even before the action really begins and culminating in a rousing standoff where the final pieces come into focus.

I’ve seen it before, but had forgotten enough of the details that it hooked me. It’s definitely a film of its time, but there is a certain elegance and charm to that. And in lesser hands, it could all very easily feel ridiculous, but the deft touch of the director and the magnetism of the stars go a long way in selling it. And the ride is genuinely funny in a droll, old-fashioned way. It’s not on the artistic level of Hitchock’s later work, but it’s a solid, enjoyable thriller with a lot of great style.
Film Collection: Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday

September 16th, 2026

Directed by Jacques Tati
Written by Jacques Tati & Henri Marquet
1953 | 87 minutes | French, English
Criterion Blu-Ray, reedited/restored cut

Jacques Tati, Nathalie Pascaud, Micheline Rolla, Valentine Camax, Louis Perrault, André Dubois, Lucien Frégis, Raymond Carl, René Lacourt, Marguerite Gérard, Suzy Willy, Georges Adlin

What it’s about: Among a group of beachgoing tourists descending upon a seaside town on France’s northern coast is Monsieur Hulot (Tati). Towering and clumsy, but formal and timid, he seems to have difficulty fitting into either the physical space or the social order around him as he stumbles from incident to incident. He putters about in his weird little backfiring car, falling in with a scouting group, experiencing a kayaking misadventure, dominating a tennis match with an unusual technique, accidentally participating in a funeral, and so on. The holiday culminates in an impromptu fireworks display the night before everyone returns to their ordinary lives.

Reflections: A first-time watch, but not my first exposure to Tati, so I had a sense of what I was in for. The film makes clever use of sound, but its core sensibility is drawn from silent comedy–not for nothing did Tati start his career as a mime. Dialogue is sparse–indeed, an early gag featuring announcements over a train-station loudspeaker electronically mangled to incomprehensibility warns the audience not to rely on language–and the film leans almost wholly on often-elaborate physical, visual gags. For all his gentility, Hulot is fundamentally a disturbance to the machinery of everything around him and words, exposition, or plot mechanics are all incidental to the almost visceral pleasure of just watching that play out.

This is a canon film that’s been analyzed to death–I remember reading Bazin’s breathless praise in grad school–but there is a lot going on here. Tati was a sharp observer of post-war France and there are a lot of thematic ideas one could point to through that lens: while the other characters have clear backstories and social roles, Hulot himself is a undefined cypher, suggesting a culture grappling with an unknown identity in the wake of occupation and devastation. Or the way in which echoes of the war reverberate through the old veteran (Dubois) and his reminiscences or the pseudo-bombing attack of the whole fireworks escapade and the kind of reclamation and neutralization of that. Or the film’s weird pacing–the way it’s kind of suspended, following meandering side-paths and anticipating the Nouvelle Vague’s fractured relationship to cinematic time. Or the whole “scatterbrained angel” aspect–how Hulot presents a humor completely without cruelty in a way that stood out in its time and reflected a kind of midcentury modernist, Utopian outlook.

All of that is there, but you don’t actually have to care about any of it to enjoy this. It reminds me of the kind of movie my mom would show me as a kid–something that both a 7-year-old and a 70-year-old could find funny, but with a classic sense of sophistication to it. It is a movie from the ’50s, it’s not gonna grab your attention and pummel your dopamine receptors, but it’s fun and smart, and has a kind of warm-hearted sweetness to it that not only holds up, but goes a long way in our current world.
Film Collection: Napoleon Dynamite

September 15th, 2026

Directed by Jared Hess
Written by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess
2004 | 95 minutes | English
DVD

Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, Diedrich Bader, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Haylie Duff, Emily Kennard, Shondrella Avery, Sandy Martin

What it’s about: This slice-of-life style narrative follows the eponymous Napoleon (Hess), a teenager in Preston, a small town in southern Idaho. When his grandmother (Martin) injures her coccyx in an ATV accident at the dunes, his Uncle Rico (Gries) comes to stay with Napoleon and his older brother Kip (Ruell). As Rico dreams of past football glory, he gets Kip involved in selling tupperware so Kip can make money to bring his online girlfriend LaFawnduh (Avery) to Idaho to meet IRL. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends Pedro (Ramirez), a new student from Mexico who has eyes on the class presidency, and encounters Deb (Majorino), an equally awkward, industrious girl who runs a glamour photography business.

Reflections: This movie hit a nerve when it came out, becoming kind of an iconic touchstone of a certain hip millennial whimsy. And coming back to it, it does still read that way–the closest analogue I can think of is like a rural farm-town version of Wes Anderson. The performances are stylized in a particular way, a kind of slow deadpan. The production design is elaborate and very intentional, capturing and only lightly exaggerating a time and place in a wash of textures and patterns and little details. And the movie takes its time drawing out the landscape and environment with quietly lush composition and lingering on a number of on-point needle drops.

The plot never has much momentum and the stakes are never very high. This is a film more interested in just observing a character and it centers on Heder’s eccentric performance. Napoleon is surly and put-upon, legitimately talented in a number of ways, but also oddly oblivious and deluded, cluelessly self-centered but genuinely caring. He’s one of the truest distillations of the weirdo-nerd kid in cinema. And, despite the cultural specificity of the film as a whole, his nerdishness isn’t tied to any kind of pop cultural trope; like the movie around him, he exists in his own world, but his challenges and dreams, and those of the oddballs in his orbit, feel larger than that world.

This is another movie that, because I was there for its moment (I was 19 when this was released, and it was very much to my taste at the time), I’m curious how people not of that era do or don’t relate to it. But watching it for the first time in a decade or so, I still found myself charmed. There are moments that make me cackle because of the ways in which they’re familiar more than anything, but it’s a mellow, restrained movie with a genuine empathy for all its subjects, even the popular kids. And when Napoleon urges Pedro before his big speech, “just listen to your heart; that’s what I do,” he sells it without being cheesy because you believe him.
Film Collection: Shin Godzilla

September 15th, 2026

Directed by Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi
Written by Hideaki Anno
2016 | 120 minutes | Japanese, English
DVD

Hiroki Hasegawa, Yutaka Takenouchi, Satomi Ishihara, Mikako Ichikawa, Ren Osugi, Isshin Onudo, Kyusaku Shimada, Jun Kunimura, Issey Takahashi, Kimiko Yo, Kanji Tsuda, Sei Hiraizumi, Akira Emoto

What it’s about: A take on Godzilla that presents as a modern disaster procedural, things kick off when the Japanese government discovers a heat anomaly in Tokyo Bay that has damaged a traffic tunnel. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi (Hasegawa) and his belief that it’s being caused by a living creature are laughed off until an amphibious form of Godzilla makes landfall in Shinagawa. It retreats to the water after only a couple hours but the attack causes massive devastation and creates a tense political mess, both within Tokyo and with interested foreign nations, the US in particular. When the mature and aggressive Godzilla reappears, the situation becomes a race between nuclear-armed and reactionary governments and Yaguchi, leading a crack team of scientists searching for alternative ideas.

Reflections: It seems improbable that a movie which is about 75% government meetings would rule this hard, but it does. Part of that is down to the way it moves–characters speak in mostly dry, official language, but there are a lot of them, talking quickly, shooting ideas up and down and throwing out complications at a sweeping clip. This is helped along by mockumentary and found-footage elements: bodycam footage, news broadcasts, etc., which break up the atmosphere and ground the abstract discussions in the outside world. And when Godzilla does appear or make a move, the design is otherworldly and gross and the way it’s shot looks tactile and surreal. It’s a very talky movie, but it grabs the audience quickly and never lets go.

It’s hard to talk about characters or performance–partially because the sheer number of them and the detached style of the film make them hard to keep track of, and partially because I suspect this is a movie that does a lot with the specifics of its language and with small, cultural nuances I wouldn’t pick up on. The portrayal of the American characters is fun, though, and there are personalities that stand out: the American official/senator’s daughter with a Japanese grandmother, a cowboy negotiation style, and presidential ambitions; the socially blunt lady scientist, not afraid to tell her colleague he smells bad; the elderly general seeing a sign of the times in his soggy noodles, and so on.

Godzilla as a figure exists as a cultural reaction to postwar nuclear trauma, and watching this, it feels clear that there is a similar working-through of the Fukushima disaster here–while I’m not familiar with Japanese politics surrounding that incident, an overall sense of criticism of a bureaucratic response with misplaced priorities is palpable in watching Yaguchi and the others wrestle with the system as they respond to something it was never designed to handle. But even without knowing all the specifics, Anno and Higuchi clearly understand the core of what Godzilla represents and deliver possibly the sharpest, most “realistic” Godzilla film ever and arguably the best since the original.
Film Collection: Tommy Boy

September 13th, 2026

Directed by Peter Segal
Written by Bonnie Turner & Terry Turner
1995 | 96 minutes | English
DVD

Chris Farley, David Spade, Bo Derek, Julie Warner, Dan Akroyd, Brian Dennehy, Sean McCann, Zach Grenier, Rob Lowe

What it’s about: Thomas “Tommy” Callahan III (Farley), barely graduating college after seven years, is a well-meaning, party-loving doofus who has no plans for the future, instead coasting into a job at his father’s (Dennehy) auto-parts factory just as it launches a new line of brake pads. The elder Callahan is about to get hitched to Beverly (Derek), a knockout with a surly son Paul (Lowe). But when he falls dead at his own wedding, it’s suddenly up to Tommy to save the company from being sold to Ray Zalinsky (Akroyd), the Auto Parts King. So he grabs Richard (Spade), his father’s buttoned-down “right hand man” who can’t stand Tommy’s antics, and hits the road, but Beverly and Paul have their own plans to foil his mission.

Reflections: Looking back on this one, for all the fart jokes, testicles being smashed by various things, and other general adolescent crudity at play here, there is also a certain innocence to this that’s kind of endearing. This was one of those comedies that was just in the atmosphere, growing up in the ’90s and, well before I ever saw it, I knew it: “fat guy in a little coat,” “that’s gonna leave a mark!,” the whole bit with the deer in the car, and so on. And watching it again now, those moments still make me laugh because they’re ground into the DNA of what I learned to find funny.

I say “innocence” because the film isn’t trying to do anything beyond that. “It’s funny when dudes get hit in the balls” is about the level this is pitched at; the script is full of, as Roger Ebert infamously put it, “an assembly of cliches and obligatory scenes from other movies.” There is no deeper theme or statement at work, just a loveable oaf saving the factory, villains who are never anything less than cartoonishly evil (and get their shirts sucked up pneumatic tubes), and as many pratfalls and zingers as two SNL stars with a well-honed dynamic can cram into the space in between. And there is a certain immature charm to that recipe: it’s fun to watch Farley’s outsized persona boiling up out of his body like a force of nature or Spade’s tightly-wound wise guy start to unclench, and it’s not asking for more engagement than a rowdy 13-year-old boy could give.

Which also probably means there’s limited appeal here for someone not watching it through a set of nostalgia glasses. It’s one of the lesser SNL movies, not as smartly observed as Wayne’s World or outlandishly bizarre as Coneheads. But it does capture a moment; everything–from the cheesy music swells and misogynistic streak (the pool scene stands out, but… y’know, all of it) to the weirdly-endearing “brothers gotta hug!” and the underlying assumption of worker’s rights and solidarity–all feels like a distillation of its time. If you were a teenage boy in the mid ’90s, this is what you had to work with.
Film Collection: Armageddon

September 12th, 2026

Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Jonathan Hensleigh & J.J. Abrams
1998 | 153 minutes | English
Criterion DVD

Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, Peter Stormare, Keith David, Jason Isaacs, Chris Ellis, Eddie Griffin, Ken Campbell, Grayson McCouch, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, Judith Hoag, Christian Clemenson, Ellen Cleghorne, Lawrence Tierney, Charlton Heston

What it’s about: The team at NASA, led by Dan Truman (Thornton), discovers that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and will wipe out life on the planet in 18 days. Too massive to be redirected, the only way to stop it is to drill 800 feet into its surface, plant a nuclear bomb, and blow it apart from the inside. In order to pull this off, they’ll need Harry Stamper (Willis), the roughshod owner of a drilling company who never backs down from the most dangerous jobs. But Harry needs to bring the experience and rapport of his own team into space, a ragtag bunch of misfits, including the hot-headed A.J. (Affleck), who’s kicked up tensions between them by involving himself with Harry’s daughter Grace (Tyler).

Reflections: Oh boy, this movie. This was absolutely inescapable in 1998: the biggest, loudest, dumbest movie of the summer, with big stars, flashy visuals, and an epically schmaltzy Aerosmith theme song that got beaten into the ground by radio and MTV. I saw it, thought–even as a teenager–it was stupid, and the only reason I own it now is because I found a used copy put out by Criterion and was compelled to understand that. How could a movie so loaded with broad one-liners and immature characters, with such a preposterous premise, that thinks Ben Affleck playing with animal crackers on Liv Tyler’s belly is in any way sexy and not weird have anything artistically serious going on?

Perhaps serious is the wrong word, but there is something at work here: a kind of American mytho-poetics, big and loud and dumb because America is frequently big and loud and dumb. This isn’t a movie that’s worried about exposition or gritty verisimilitude–this is a fantasy of the working-class hero rising to the occasion despite his flaws. He’s not anti-intellectual: he’s educated, understands machines, works with his hands but uses his brain. But he is uncomfortable with his emotions and is pushed to prove his character in the moment where it truly counts. That idealistic archetype has a huge place in the culture and it deserves both interrogation and celebration; this film leans enthusiastically into the latter in an almost abstracted way. Everything from the script–which, in addition to the final credits, featured contributions from seven other writers, including Tony Gilroy and Robert Towne–to the then-frantic editing which was regarded as chaotic and confusing at the time but feels more apace with modern aesthetics, to the overwrought goofiness of the performances, is all working together to keep things clear and exciting and moving, to keep the stakes and the emotions high, and to consistently foreground this notion of overcoming both internal and external challenges through sheer grit, raw belief, and emotional honesty. And that level of coherence is an artistic achievement.

None of that makes it not big and loud and dumb, to be clear. This is not a film that’s meant to be challenging or subverting anything. It’s not trying to make you think or show you something you don’t know; it’s trying to make you feel good about something you do know. The optimistic, mainstream Americana of the ’90s can be a little hard to get into these days, and because that is such a big part of what this is doing, that’s a little bit of a barrier. But there is also some larger and more general idea about the human spirit underlying the adventure and Bay is at his best in bringing that out on a gut level, tapping into physical, instinctual responses in the audience through the mechanics of action storytelling. Just don’t overthink it.
Film Collection: Robin Hood

September 11th, 2026

Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman
Written by Larry Clemmons
1973 | 83 minutes | English
VHS

Brian Bedford, Monica Evans, Peter Ustinov, Phil Harris, Roger Miller, Terry-Thomas, Carole Shelley, Pat Buttram, Andy Devine, George Lindsey, Ken Curtis

What it’s about: A simple retelling of the legend with Disney’s first entirely-animal cast. The throne of England has been usurped by the childish Prince John (Ustinov) who, aided by his long-suffering assistant Sir Hiss (Terry-Thomas) and the bullying Sheriff of Nottingham (Buttram), is taxing the poor out of every last farthing. But Robin Hood (Bedford) and his pal Little John (Harris) are set about making impish headaches for the villains, plundering the prince and his minions to save the good folk. And when Robin’s childhood love Marian (Evans) appears back in town, he sets in motion a scheme to win her hand and foil the Prince once and for all.

Reflections: This was always one of my favorite of the Disney classics growing up. It was coolly-received at the time, and I do understand why. The humor is pitched somewhere around a variety-show skit–a gentle chuckle more than any real laughs. The action would be at home in a Scooby-Doo episode: hallway routines, pies in the face, that sort of thing. Everyone knows the Robin Hood story and there’s nothing really added onto it here. And the animation is… fine, with moments of beauty here and there (the caravan of rhinos marching through the trees at the beginning, say) but hardly the grand splendor of the studio’s best work.

But rewatching it for the first time in years, as an adult in my 40s, that’s all kind of the appeal of it. It has a low-stakes, shaggy charm and a cozy, folksy vibe, helped along in no small part by Roger Miller’s drawling contributions to the soundtrack (although it’s hard to hear “Oo-de-lally” without envisioning hamsters–if you were there, you know). There is a certain humor in hearing Sir Peter Ustinov sniveling and whining the way he does here, or a Shakespearian actor like Bedford imitate Buttram’s country-fried patois. But the draw is mostly the chill feel of it, the ever-so-slight winking edge, the laid back, early ’70s atmosphere. And speaking from the point of view of imprinting on a nascent, pre-adolescent sexuality, the foxes are kind of hot. It’s brought up enough among people around my age that it’s clearly a thing and it would be missing some of the legacy and impact of the film not to mention it.

Ultimately, it’s a Disney movie–it’s part of a larger series of work that has an undeniable foothold on the culture, for better or for worse; it doesn’t need a recommendation. Within that context, though, it is an odd one and it’s hard to gauge how much it might resonate with someone who didn’t grow up with this exact clamshell VHS on frequent rotation. But it’s a great movie for crashing out to at the end of the night, an easygoing time-capsule draped onto a familiar structure.
Film Collection: Samson and Delilah

September 11th, 2026

Directed by Cecil. B DeMille
Written by Jesse L. Lasky Jr. & Fredrick M. Frank
1949 | 133 minutes | English
DVD

Hedy Lamar, Victor Mature, George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, Henry Wilcoxon, Olive Deering, Fay Holden, Julia Faye, Russ Tamblin

What it’s about: The land of Dan is currently under an oppressive occupation by the Philistines, but the muscle-headed hero of Dan, Samson (Mature) wins favor from the ruling Saran (Sanders) by killing a lion with his bare hands. As his prize, Samson asks to marry Semadar (Lansbury), a Philistine woman of whom he is enamored, also courted by the Philistine Prince Ahtur (Wilcoxon). But Semadar’s wily younger sister Delilah (Lamar), who watched him perform the task, becomes obsessed with him. When her meddling leads to tragedy, she swears a vicious revenge that spirals toward a deadly end, but the power of God and love perseveres and Samson’s name is remembered for thousands of years.

Reflections: Based on a treatment adapted from the book of Judges by historian Harold Lamb, itself influenced by a 1927 novel by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and a pet project of DeMille’s for over a decade, this movie goes hard with its epic tone right from the almost-psychedelic opening of a model of the Earth, spinning in smoke and lightning. Characters speak in theatrical pronouncements, striding through the sumptuous, Oscar-winning design elements. All this is captured with a grand composition–the shot of Semadar begging for the answer to Samson’s riddle stands out in memory for its opulent geometry, and the destruction of Dagon’s temple is a massive spectacle of miniatures, rear-projection, and well-paced inserts.

Despite the stylized acting, Mature works surprisingly well, taking Samson from a slightly-spoiled himbo to a far more somber and committed man as he compromises his principles despite himself, broken over his own desires. Lamar has the most challenging part here, investing humanity and vulnerability into cruel obsession and she does–her Delilah has a strength just as much as Samson does, but one that is not recognized or respected, coming back on her as much as it tears down what’s around her. On top of the two leads, it’s also a great deal of fun watching a young and fiery Angela Lansbury, and seeing George Sanders purring and preening over the proceedings with his dry acidity.

The ending drags a bit before the climactic sequence, but even so, it’s one of the shortest and tightest of DeMille’s later films and one of the big sword-and-sandal standards, worth seeing for its place in the canon alone. But even with the slow pace and stagey artifice, there is still an undeniably sweeping quality to it, and it doesn’t overbear with its religious themes, focusing more on the personal melodrama. A blunt instrument, absolutely, but also a rich, sensual treat.
Film Collection: The Bourne Identity

September 10th, 2026

Directed by Doug Liman
Written by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron
2002 | 119 minutes | English, German, French, Italian
DVD

Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Gabriel Mann, Walton Goggins, Josh Hamilton

What it’s about: Rescued from the Mediterranean with no memory and two bullet holes in his back, a man who soon learns his name is Jason Bourne (Damon) quickly realizes that, not only does he have an unusual set of instinctive skills, he’s being hunted by some very dangerous people. Specifically, his CIA handler, Alexander Conklin (Cooper), under pressure from his superior (Cox) to resolve the problem that Jason’s failed mission and suddenly unpredictable behavior have become. Following clues to his past, Jason recruits Marie (Potente), an aimless young German woman who becomes his only friend in the world as he gathers information and formulates a plan to turn the tables on his unforgiving former employers.

Reflections: From what I understand, Gilroy’s script stripped down Robert Ludlum’s 1980 novel and Herron’s original draft, omitting a good deal of political-thriller context to focus on Jason’s experience discovering what he’s capable of and why. And, while it doesn’t make as much of a mystery of his mission or identity as it could, that focus still ultimately serves it. Damon sells the capable bewilderment of a man who genuinely wants to do the right thing rapidly realizing and wrestling with how much that is out of character for him . And because the specifics of the politics don’t matter, there’s less to get hung up on, which gives it an energy that holds up.

Action-thrillers in the early aughts had a kind of airy, shellacked feel to a lot of them, and that is true here, but it’s done well. The action is mostly grounded–a few moments, like riding the body down the stairwell, stretch credibility, but forgivably so–without being self-consciously gritty. And scenes like the car-chase in Paris are cleanly edited and comprehensible while still having an element of spectacle, emphasized by an electronic soundtrack that is just bangin’ enough without overdoing it. Potente is solid as a female lead in this kind of movie, occasionally overcoming the thanklessness of that with flashes of depth. And the supporting cast is great, even if most of them are underutilized.

I would call this a solid, tightly-exectued genre flick. It’s not doing anything especially inventive–particularly viewing it again a quarter-century after the fact–and it takes itself very seriously, but it also delivers what it promises: some star-power, some paranoid, badass spy shit, a certain–at this point, nostalgic–aesthetic sensibility, and it does all of that well. A bit dour, but not dumb, and sprinkled with enough genuinely cool moments to be worth recommending, if only for a certain kind of mood.
Film Collection: Party Monster

September 9th, 2026

Directed by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato
Written by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato
2003 | 99 minutes | English
DVD

Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chloë Sevigny, Diana Scarwid, Wilmer Valderrama, Natasha Lyonne, Wilson Cruz, Dylan McDermott, Marilyn Manson, Mia Kirshner, John Stamos

What it’s about: Based on the 1999 memoir Disco Bloodbath by James St. James (Green), who narrates the rise and fall of Michael Alig (Culkin). Michael moves to New York City in the early 1980s and is taken under St. James’ wing, becoming enamored of the city’s glamorous nightlife. Landing a job at the Limelight club, run by Peter Gatien (McDermott), Alig’s natural charisma and edgy personality quickly make him a rising star in the club scene, the host of increasingly hedonistic parties. But as Michael and the other Club Kids’ profile rises, he also descends further into madness and drug addiction, culminating in the murder of Michael’s friend and dealer, Angel (Cruz).

Reflections: My impression of this movie, seeing it for the first time in nearly 20 years, is very similar to what I felt when I first watched it. It should work, all the elements are there. Culkin gives a surprisingly fearless performance as Alig, leaning into both the outsized, infectious drama and depraved vacuity–he’s both charming and unpleasant, magnetic and pathetic, and one never feels as though the actor is holding back from the character. The supporting cast is full of hip names in small roles who are all fun to watch (and also Marilyn Manson, less acting than cackling and vamping through a bit part until he dies offscreen). The soundtrack is full of canny choices. The look of the film is colorful and vibrant. And the somewhat insufferable fabulousness is on point.

But there is a kind of emptiness to the whole exercise I wrestle with. Because on the one hand, that’s kind of part of it–Michael and James pride themselves on their irony-soaked superficiality, unwilling and unequipped to deal with the serious, “after school special” aspects of their lives or consequences of their choices. For a film about them to be a trenchant drama would, in some ways, be a betrayal of its subjects. But that also creates a distance from the audience–it’s difficult to walk away from this feeling like one has a real sense of Alig as a character or insight into the true story that inspired it. There is something to be pulled out of it, but it takes a little more openness and work as a viewer than, I think, many people might be willing to give it, and if one isn’t, it could easily come off as flat, obnoxious or tedious, despite the individual elements all firing.

But it is fascinating as a kind of doubled document of culture in a time and place–on the one hand, the strangely hedonistic, plastic-art fueled New York scene of the ’80s and early ’90s that it documents, and on the other, the early ’00s hipster film culture of the document itself. And to the right sensibility, there is a certain “dream the impossible dream” tragedy to the tale and a cachet to the eccentric way in which it’s told. Whether the film is successful is a matter of temperament, but if it’s a failure, it’s at least an interesting one and worth watching for that, even if anything deeper going on within it is held at arm’s length.