#81: Jennifer Lawrence has convinced me to not give birth
Death By Consumption
12/9/25 - 12/15/25
Every year around this time, I get disproportionately furious whenever I have to do work. We should all be given the entire month of December off, as if we lived in a Christmas movie set in London, to spend our days strolling holiday crafts markets with our lovers, and our evenings in cozy steamed-window pubs with our dearest friends and family. That is all the month of December is good for, and yet, despite no one sane wanting to do this, Microsoft Outlook persists until the bitter end. All I'm saying is: I voted for Zohran over a month ago, but I still have to work??? What was even the point! I'm sick of it, I'm on my last nerve, and if I get one more email for the rest of the year I'm going to fucking snap. I even hate this email I'm writing now — do not read this! Who cares! Go make snow angels with your children or, if you don't have children, grab someone else's child and shove them into the snow and force them to make snow angels with you! All the emails will still be in your inbox in January, TRUST ME.
This week: I watched four movies, three about not-great parents and one gay classic; I shamelessly enjoyed yet another stupid Netflix reality show; I invented the concept of slow-roasting brisket; and I read some essays about (what else!) gay people.
Die My Love (2025) — on Apple
Die My Love is a bit of a mess, but at least it’s not a boring mess? Jennifer Lawrence is genuinely fantastic, as a new mother gradually losing her mind (this movie felt almost like a sequel — or maybe more like a replacement — to the atrocity that was mother!), and more than anything this movie made me wish we got to see Jennifer Lawrence do more stuff more often. Why are we plagued by a new Sydney Sweeney project every other day (her new movie Christy will never fail to make me laugh; Christy who??? literally what are you talking about, you sound insane), but we're lucky if we get a new Jennifer Lawrence or Julia Roberts every other year. Hollywood has a lot of problems right now, but this might be at the top of the list.
In Die My Love, Jennifer crawls through tall grass like a prowling cat, seduces a neighbor (or does she? I still don't know wtf was going on with that), barks at dogs, tries to hurl her body out of cars, strips naked any chance she gets; she’s feral and magnetic. Robert Pattinson has less to do but is also great, as her vaguely sad-sack husband. Where the movie suffers, despite its great actors, is from a lack of destination — once we've established the basics, we're just left to sit in the misery with this couple. I gather that's the point of the entire film, but it's a rather unpleasant point to endure for 2 hours. I have to assume this movie hits much, much harder if you're, you know, a person who has given birth. But as I am merely a childless Brooklyn gay, I was mostly just here to watch Jennifer Lawrence slay. Is motherhood hard? It looks hard!
The Mastermind (2025) — on Mubi
Josh O'Connor is everywhere now (the new Spielberg movie trailer just came out and I am salivating) and I'm sure will be getting much more attention for his role in the new Knives Out movie, but I was more excited to see him in this, Kelly Reichardt's new 1970s-style heist film. He plays the titular mastermind (a title that starts to feel mocking as the movie goes on), a small-time art thief and father. This is a heist film, but not a typical one: the heist is over by the halfway point, and the movie is much more interested in exploring the fallout. It's a character study, and a rather slow one at points (the people complaining about Pluribus being too slow truly wouldn't survive The Mastermind), but I mostly enjoyed it due to Josh O'Connor's incredible watchability. The guy is unavoidably charming, and I really will watch him do anything, even if it's just climbing up and down a ladder for 5 uninterrupted minutes. And, it must be said, for the second time this year I've come out of a movie with one lingering question: what was Alana Haim doing there? I just don't think the Haim sisters should ever be allowed to do anything without the other two. It's unnatural!
Sentimental Value (2025) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
Sentimental Value, like The Mastermind, is a slow film, but this one's pace never bothered me. I could have soaked up the film for even longer — it's absolutely stunning, and features some of the best and most surprising performances of the year. Stellan Skarsgård is an aging director and terrible father, who returns to Oslo to try to convince his actress daughter to star in his new film, which is loosely based on his own mother's suicide. It's a darkly funny setup for a movie, and a great way to explore family dynamics, repressed emotions, and how art can (and I know this will sound schlocky but here I go) help you heal. Stellan is at his best in this, but the whole cast knocks it out of the park: most notably Renate Reinsve, who plays his daughter, and is so spectacular an actress that she can seemingly blush on command; and my girl Elle Fanning, who plays an up-and-coming American actress eager to break out of her typecast YA roles but unsure of her own talents. This cast is an embarrassment of riches — even the child actors can seemingly cry on command.
Tonally, this film walks a delicate tightrope, flirting with, well, too much sentimentality. There's a throughline (told via voiceover narration, no less) of the family's house in Oslo as a thinking, feeling central character; there are multiple sequences in which someone reads a script someone has written and is moved to tears; the end scene is a big risk that somehow also feels utterly predictable — in a worse filmmaker's hands, all of this could and should have turned into a schlocky mess. But instead, I loved it. It's quietly one of the best movies of the year, and, in a movie full of characters talking about struggling to get finance for their films, it's genuinely inspiring that movies like this can still get made and released. Cinema's not dead yet!
Far From Heaven (2002) — on Criterion
It felt like a massive oversight in my life to have never seen Far From Heaven, but the Criterion app's new collection of Julianne Moore films has helped rectify that, and immediately turned me into a gay madman, frantically texting friends in the middle of the night about a 23-year-old movie they probably all forgot about. We have to talk about Far From Heaven more! Or have you guys been talking about Far From Heaven all this time without me????
The entire film felt like heterosexual drag: straight 1950s marriage, as seen through a gay man's eyes. The colors are, of course, unbelievable, but I could not stop laughing at the way they all spoke — "camp" has become overused to the point of nothing, but this is actual camp in the true, Sontag-ian sense. The melodrama is the point. This whole movie I kept thinking, "Every single character is a Cole Escola character." I'm not surprised I didn't see this when it first came out — I was 15 years old and actively running away from anything even remotely gay — but had I watched it back then, this probably could have saved me a lot of grief. Straight people are insane!
Pappardelle with port-braised brisket ragu with shallots and rosemary — made at home
Longtime DBC-heads know I love my girl Meryl Feinstein, she of Pasta Social Club, for her incredible cookbook and newsletter, which genuinely transformed my ability to make pasta at home — I'm so good at it now! So on Sunday, when New York got real, actual snow, for the first time in what felt like years, I turned to Meryl's cookbook to find an easy, long-roasting sauce recipe. I tragically could not find lamb in any grocery stores or butcher shops within walking distance, which is what the original recipe calls for (you can find it for yourself here), but I replaced it with brisket and was absolutely not disappointed.
Did you guys know you can just buy some meat, put it in a pot with a bunch of shallots, port, and tomato sauce, let it cook for like 7 hours, and it'll be delicious?! I know none of this is groundbreaking, but doing, truly, the bare minimum on a snowy December Sunday and being rewarded with a restaurant-quality pasta dish made from scratch is one of the most satisfying feelings in the entire world. I could cry right now just thinking about it! I know I sound like Meghan fucking Markle right now, talking about slow-roasting meat as if I invented the concept, but I guess some things can't be avoided. Next week, don't yell at me when I send an entire email about making balloon arches.
Squid Game: The Challenge, season 2 — on Netflix
How is the fucking Squid Game reality show more entertaining and better at character development than Survivor this year? The first season of this show was surprisingly good for such a dumb premise (and, actually, the hysteria around its announcement reminded me of the pre-Survivor hysteria back in 2000: are they going to be killing people on this reality show?? Good to know we're still a nation of idiots, 25 years later), but once it was over it immediately faded from memory. The second season, however, somehow got even better and, dare I say it... smarter?
The show's weakest point is also its strength: there are literally 456 people in the cast, so there is no hope of ever meeting even 75% of them. People appear and disappear in a matter of seconds, and they're lucky to even get a single word on the show. But that means there's a deep, deep bench of potentially interesting people to introduce to the audience, and the show knows how to deploy their backstories in the most interesting possible ways. Often, we learn about someone's tragic life, like, 5 minutes before they're eliminated. (A rule of thumb is: if you start to care about someone, they're probably gone within 2 episodes.) But there's a huge amount of charismatic, compelling people to pull from, so any loss is quickly filled with someone equally interesting. By the end, in a matter of just a few episodes, they had managed to create compelling villains and heroes, and produced a winner that actually felt genuinely emotional and raw, someone you cared about. On the fucking Squid Game: The Challenge!
This was either a surprisingly good season of reality TV, or a sign my brain is truly cooked beyond all hope.
The Burning Library: Essays, by Edmund White (1994) — paperback
I haven't read much Edmund White, but after he died this summer I picked up some of his work. And though I enjoyed it, I would not recommend this collection of 25 years' worth of his essays and criticism as an introduction to his writing, since it's extremely dense and a bit all over the place. There are some incredible essays on gay life in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but those are interspersed between the kinds of book reviews I typically skim in The New Yorker. Like, my attention span is barely clinging to life as it is, but there's simply no way I can endure a 25 page analysis of Jean Genet's work from 1979, I'm sorry!
But Edmund White was an incredible observer of gay life, particularly during the turbulent periods he wrote in: when we were coming out of the closet in the 70s, surviving the AIDS crisis of the 80s, and beginning to build real political power in the 90s. The essays are arranged chronologically, so you can track the changing attitudes of society towards gays (and White's own attitudes towards his own homosexuality) throughout the book, with cutting little observations dropped in your lap out of nowhere like:
No homosexual can take his homosexuality for granted. He must sound it, palpate it, auscultate it as though it were the dead limb of a tree or the living but tricky limb of a body; for that reason all homosexuals are 'gay philosophers' in that they must invent themselves. At a certain point one undergoes a violent conversion into a new state, the unknown, which one then sets about knowing as one will. Surely everyone experiences his or her life as an artifact, as molten glass being twirled and pinched into a shape to cool, or as a novel at once capacious and suspenseful, but no one is more a Homo faber (in the sense of both 'fabricator' and "fabulist') than a homo. It would be vain, of course, to suggest that this creativity is praiseworthy, an ambition rather than a response.
That final sentence, I loved. The way he, at the very last second, pops the bubble he's just built so delicately. At every turn throughout these essays, I felt like Edmund White was saying to me, another a gay person: you think you're special? Well, you aren't, but also you are.