#100: I am at war with the Viceroy
Ella McCay and an infuriating hotel have conspired to drive me insane
Death by Consumption
4/28/26 - 5/4/26
Wow, it’s the 100th Death by Consumption! Time sure flies when you’re consuming! It’s a privilege to be able to get on here and complain weekly at you. This started as a way to try to be more conscious of the things I’m consuming, to spend more time thinking critically about what I consume and why. To be honest……. can’t say it’s really changed my overall consumption patterns! (I did just watch all of Love Overboard on Hulu, after all…) But it’s been fun regardless. And isn’t having fun more important than bettering yourself??? Maybe by DBC #200 I’ll become the world’s most perfect consumer. Until then: let’s make fun of a really bad movie I watched!
This week: I watched the most insane movie of the century, plus two other mediocre movies from last year, I was driven to the brink of madness by petty hotel policies, and I read three lovely books.
Ella McCay (2025) — on Delta
Ella McCay launches itself into insanity faster than any movie I’ve ever seen. It opens with an older woman — the voice of Marge Simpson, in fact — speaking to camera, who introduces herself with, “I’m the narrator,” before she starts telling you about a woman named Ella McCay. Ella, we learn, is the Lieutenant Governor of a state. What state, you ask? We never learn! (The most hilarious version of the movie’s weird refusal to say what state this takes place in is when Jamie Lee Curtis says to Ella, “You’re going to be the governor of the state you were born and raised in!”). We also quickly learn that the narrator, Marge Simpson, is not just a narrator, but also Ella McCay’s assistant — why Ella’s administrative assistant is narrating her life to us, we don’t know. We are 2 minutes into the film and I already have 20 questions.
We learn a little about Ella’s backstory: she grew up living with her aunt, Jamie Lee Curtis, after her father, Woody Harrelson, had to relocate to California after some sort of a sexual harassment scandal. Her father’s sexual harassment of women at work is, for some reason, played for laughs. This is already a lot to take in, and we’re about 5 minutes into the film. In the middle of a bafflingly light-hearted family confrontation between Ella and her father over his sexual harassment allegations, Ella pulls her little brother over to the dictionary to read aloud the definition of the word “trauma,” before resuming the fight.
At no point in this movie did I have any idea what anyone would say or do next, nor did I ever understand what I had just seen after anything happened. I watched Ella McCay in a flow state, as if I were in a sensory deprivation tank, or as if I were a 6-month-old staring up at the adults speaking English, trying to figure out what all this babbling means. To watch Ella McCay is an exercise in learning to be comfortable with the unknown. I’m starting a conspiracy theory that Ella McCay was made by the government in anticipation of UFO disclosure; once you’ve watched Ella McCay, the concept of conversing with an alien species will no longer feel foreign or scary. Whatever the fuck is going on with Alpha Centauri will make more sense than anything that happens in Ella McCay.
Every single choice in this movie is deeply baffling. In one scene, we cut to the bedroom after Ella and her husband — we’ll get to him in a second, oh boy — have just finished having sex. They’re breathing heavily, and naked under the sheets — you know, normal post-sex movie stuff. Except there’s one inexplicable addition to the scene: Ella is wearing a jaunty silk scarf, ostentatiously wrapped around her neck. The scarf is never mentioned. Why does Ella have a sex scarf? Are they into erotic asphyxiation? Was there a graphic Ella McCay choking scene that was cut after testing audiences reacted poorly to it? These are just some of the infinite questions you will be left with after watching Ella McCay. The sex scarf is never revisited.
The core plot of this movie is so crazy that I truly didn’t believe it was the plot until I checked the time and realized we were more than halfway through the movie and a different, better plot had yet to materialize. So, here is what Ella McCay is about: Ella — who, again, is the Lieutenant Governor of “the state you were born and raised in” — is about to become Governor, because the current Governor, Albert Brooks(!), is getting promoted “to the Cabinet.” But Ella’s big career move is about to be ruined, because a journalist has just learned that Ella has secretly been having consensual, marital sex with her husband during lunch hours — in a government apartment! This, the mildest government sex scandal in human history, is apparently enough to derail Ella’s nascent governorship, due to arcane laws about misusing government property. You know what they say in film school: nothing builds dramatic tension quite like getting into the fine print of local legislation!
Even worse for our dear Ella, her husband leaked the story himself, for reasons that are never quite clear to me. Sometimes it seems we’re supposed to find him endearing, while other times he’s presented as a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Her husband is a local pizza shop owner, who has scandalously been “watering down his tomato sauce,” a shady pizza parlor practice that has netted him “an extra $300,000 a year.” Mamma mia, that’s a lot of sauce!!! His mother, a WASPy matriarch who’s always in a pearl necklace, randomly appears in, like, two scenes as some sort of Lady Macbeth figure, urging her son to scheme against his wife Ella McCay for reasons that never make sense. The best I could figure was that she wants Ella to appoint her husband… co-governor? For a movie that’s deeply in the weeds when it comes to the rules around misappropriating government property, Ella McCay often seems to have no idea of how the government actually works. Kathy Hochul’s husband must have watched Ella McCay and been like, wait, we can do that???
To get ahead of this “scandal,” Ella decides to go public with the shocking fact that she’s been consensually having sex with her husband. Unfortunately this brilliant PR move pisses off her bitchy tomato sauce husband, who at this point made me start to worry he had some sort of borderline personality disorder based on his ever-shifting character traits. You see, he’s annoyed with Ella because he wasn’t consulted before she had a whole press conference about their sex life. Fair! But wait: he’s the one who told the reporter about it in the first place. Things then get even more confusing, as Ella’s nefarious pizza husband decides to go back to the reporter and bribe him to bury the story — even though the story has already been publicly confirmed by Ella herself. And this dumbass pizza boy bribes the reporter with a signed check for the bafflingly specific figure of $7,500, which then becomes another scandal in itself. This movie is, basically, Ella McCay and her husband running head-first into a brick wall over and over again while everyone else just kind of watches, confused.
Throughout all of this, there’s a strange subplot in which Ella’s brother has agoraphobia (you’ll recall, from the reading of the dictionary definition of “trauma,” that he has been traumatized by their father’s sex scandal). But he pretty much gets over the agoraphobia after Ella tells him he needs to go outside. Why didn’t anyone else try that! But while he’s been hanging out inside, he’s developed “math that helps people with sports betting” (???), and this vague math is so good that he’s making “$2 million a year.” Okay, so, to recap: watering down pizza sauce = $300,000/year; sports betting math = $2 million/year. Got it.
But wait: there’s more going on with Ella McCay’s brother! The year prior, he proposed to his girlfriend Ayo Edibiri, but then he panicked and ran away before he could get a real response, changing his phone number so she can’t contact him again. (No one in this movie has ever heard of the concept of “going to someone’s house” or “being normal.”) Prompted by Ella — who’s in rare truth-telling form thanks to the “6 doses of weed” she accidentally consumes; don’t ask, it’s a long story — he is inspired to go find out if his girlfriend still possibly wants to marry him, a year after he bizarrely stopped speaking to her. Good news: she does!!! So that’s a fun little plot to follow. Glad that got resolved so easily! There’s also another side plot that features Ella’s security detail, played by Kumail Nanjiani and some other guy, who are trying to get more overtime pay, but that is way too stupid to even get into.
What I’m saying is: Ella McCay is perfect. Watching it on a plane, I caught the worst case of the giggles I’ve had in ages, alarming the woman sitting next to me, who looked over at my screen to see what I was laughing at, and then ended up watching Ella McCay herself. I am sorry to that woman, but I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did. I have no idea what happened in James L. Brooks’ brain to make him sit down and write a movie like this, but I hope he isn’t discouraged by the reaction, because I will die if we don’t get Ella McCay 2. There are so many enormous, unanswered questions! Will Ella pass “the mom bill” she’s been “working on for years”? Can Kumail Nanjiani get overtime pay without getting in trouble? Will Ella’s husband go to jail for his pizza sauce crimes??
Ella McCay is unafraid to ask the big questions and, even bolder, to leave them all unanswered. It’s unconcerned with small-bore concepts like “coherent story arcs” and “beginnings and endings” and “character growth” and “sentences that have logic.” It’s an avant-garde cinematic experiment, a bold new step forward for Hollywood, a huge leap in the field of Covid Brain Fog Cinema. Some day soon, I think we will all look back on Ella McCay as the kind of brilliantly confusing mess that only a human brain could cook up. AI could truly never create a disaster like this, and for that we must be thankful to Ella McCay.
Freakier Friday (2025) — on Delta
Between Ella McCay and this, I spent about 5 hours in the air watching Jamie Lee Curtis make some of the strangest faces ever captured on screen. Anyway, Freakier Friday was totally fine — it didn’t capture the fun of the first movie, exactly, but it also didn’t shit all over it, which is pretty much all we can ask for, I guess. Lindsay Lohan doesn’t quite have the spark she had as a younger actress, but she’s also better than she’s been in her Netflix slop, with at least a couple moments of actual comedic brilliance. This is fine! I see why it came and went without anyone really talking about it. This movie would have been better if Jamie Lee Curtis’s character had died, though. (But that’s true for every movie she’s in these days.)
Nightbitch (2025) — on Delta
Of the three movies I watched on the plane, it’s tragic that this was my least favorite. It’s such a good concept — Amy Adams goes so feral after giving birth that she starts to turn into a dog, or at least believe she’s turning into a dog — but the film knows the concept is good and wants to tell you how good it is at every turn. In nearly every scene, the characters tell you exactly how they’re feeling and why they’re doing the things they’re doing; because when you’ve got an actor as talented as Amy Adams, you definitely do not want to let her play anything with subtlety! Even worse, about 30 minutes in, the film runs out of ideas and just starts hitting the same beats over and over again for an excruciating 90 minutes longer, before it’s all mercifully put down.
An $8 cup of drip coffee — at the Viceroy Santa Monica
Work has sent me to LA for a wildly long 12-day business trip, where they have put us up at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. From what I’ve been told, the Viceroy was once upon a time (say, 2014) the spot on the west side for the cool and the famous, but time ravages us all, even once-trendy hotels. I’m halfway through my stay here, and it is safe to say the vibe here is a bit… upscale motel. You could argue that it’s gauche for me to complain about my free hotel, but just think: you could have spent serious money staying here during your next family vacation. I’m doing the world a favor! So this isn’t entitled whining; this is service journalism, okay?
The first and most ever-present issue for me is the coffee situation. Even your lowliest Holiday Inn Express understands the primal importance of being able to access coffee immediately upon waking up, and as a result, most hotels make it as easy and frictionless as possible to inject caffeine straight into your aorta the instant your eyes flutter open. Nearly every hotel in the world understands that quick, easy, and most importantly free coffee is a human right. But not the Viceroy.
Here, there’s no coffee maker in your room. To be fair, I was asked at check-in if I wanted to have one delivered to my room, and I said yes, but that coffee maker took days to get delivered. “Is there coffee in the lobby as well?” I asked the front desk, and — after a momentary pause that I should have seen as a harbinger of doom — the front desk woman said, “……………….Yes.” What that actually means is that you have to buy a coffee from the bar. I only learned this after shuffling downstairs at 7 am my first morning here, in flip flops and shorts, hair looking like Doc Brown’s, blinking helplessly in the middle of the lobby as I tried to locate the goddamned coffee vat. Inexplicably, there were already several business meetings happening in the lobby area at 7am, while I scurried about the corners of the lobby in search of my beloved coffee, hissing at anyone who looked at me.
Finally, I saw the sacred shimmering urn of coffee behind the bar, like a beacon. I approached and growled, “Coffee, please,” to the man behind the counter, who did his best to not look horrified at the creature in front of him. Instead of handing me coffee, he handed me a receipt and said, “Room number and name.” I looked at the paper, which informed me I was being charged $8 (including a mandatory 20% “service charge”!) for the privilege of being handed a small paper cup of medium-strength drip coffee. I was appalled. I’m still appalled! I genuinely believe charges should be brought against the Viceroy for petty larceny. 8 American dollars for a cup of coffee? At a hotel???? Ironically, I no longer needed the coffee, because my body and mind were instantly sharpened into alertness by a white, hot rage.
The next morning I awoke at 5am due to jet lag, so I shuffled down to the lobby to pay my morning coffee tithe to the gods of capitalism, only to discover a new loophole created by the CIA-trained torture squad here at the Viceroy: you can’t get your $8 coffee until 6:30 am. (For some reason, that :30 feels especially galling to me — all other hotel amenities, like the gym, for example, open at 6 am, but the Viceroy apparently doesn’t believe in caffeinated workouts.) I shamefully ambled back up to my room and waited an ungodly 80 caffeine-less minutes, before I went back down at 6:20. The coffee, I could see and smell, had been brewed, but no one was behind the bar. I stood there, looking as pathetic and hangdog as possible, my eyes begging any passing employee to take pity on me and pour me a fucking cup of goddamned coffee. Finally, at 6:27, someone asked, “Have you not been helped?” “NO,” I practically shouted, and begged him to pour me a cup. First, of course, he handed me the receipt, and I signed away another $8 before I was mercifully granted my pathetic cup.
This has become my routine here, now: wake up, shuffle downstairs, grumble if anyone so much as looks in my direction, beg for a coffee, sign the $8 receipt, retreat to my room. It’s an undignified, humiliating way to start the day, and it’s just one of the many ways I’ve started to suspect the Viceroy is actually trying to slowly drive its guests insane. The bathrooms, for example, were clearly designed by someone who’s never actually been inside a bathroom before. The door is — like every modern hotel these days — a sliding barn door, because the thing everyone wants is a 3-inch gap so that anyone outside your bathroom can hear you shitting (though I suppose at the Viceroy you won’t be shitting, because you can’t get coffee). The shower is in the deepest tub of all time, so precarious to get in and out of that I assume housekeeping is constantly finding bodies in the bathrooms of people who have died of head injuries. But most infuriating is the bathroom sink, where the faucet isn’t aligned with the bowl of the sink, so there is no way to wash your hands without water pouring all over the countertop. The bathroom floor is constantly wet, due to the waterfall pouring off the edges of the counter. Every time I go to the bathroom, and I step in a puddle of water, or practically die getting out of the shower, I think, “These people are completely insane.” Do they want me to become insane too?
I’ve lost track of my petty complaints, because practically every aspect of the room makes no sense. If I want to sit at the desk and do some work, I can’t, because the desk chair is locked into place by another chair, like so:
I knew the Viceroy had broken me when, delirious on jet lag during another miserable 5 am morning, I awoke to a sticky-hot room despite having set the thermostat at a lovely 67 degrees. I conducted a few psychotic experiments that allowed me to determine — and please go with me here, even though I know what I’m about to say will sound like I’m falling into Alex Jones territory — that the room’s AC is controlled by sensors that only activate it when someone is moving around the room. So if you’re out of the room or lying still — a thing people famously do while sleeping — the AC will turn off. It appears the only way to keep the AC on is to continuously move, which luckily you will be doing while you sleep, because you will be sweating and thrashing in your sheets all night. In the depths of my sleepless mania, I descended into an AC-triggered paranoia, trying to uncover where the sensors were in my room, and what that meant. Is the Viceroy watching me in my room? I considered buying some tinfoil and lining the walls. I still might!
The longer you stay here, the more the petty indignities pile up. When I first checked in, I tapped my room key against the door lock, and it kept flashing a red light, refusing to unlock. After several attempts I trudged back down to the front desk, where they asked me, “Did you touch the key to the lock?” and I replied, “Yes, of course!” thinking I had just passed the simplest test of all time. In fact, I could not have been more wrong, as the front desk woman informed me, as if she were talking to a dog who had somehow learned to speak, “Okay, you are not supposed to tap it on the lock.” She continued to explain, slowing her speech pattern down so that an idiot of my caliber could possibly understand: “If you touch the key to the door, it de-magnetizes. You have to hover the key about half an inch from the lock and then it should unlock!” (I’m now on my third set of room keys.) This is an insane hotel designed by insane people who want to turn the entire world insane, one guest at a time.
The Viceroy wants to be this upscale yet quirky hotel where we do things a litttttle bit different than those other guys, but all the other guys were doing quite fine and, in fact, turns out I prefer the other guys! But I love having an enemy, especially a corporate enemy, so I’m excited to discover new reasons I hate the Viceroy for the rest of my stay.
On the Calculation of Volume IV, by Solvej Balle (2026) — paperback
God, it felt so good to slide back into this book, and to fall back into the 18th of November. The rhythm of the language is so soothing to me, almost hypnotic. It lulls me into a slightly sick sense of comfort that somewhat mimics the way the characters themselves have grown comfortable with being trapped in November 18th. I suspect your experience with this series will vary depending on how you pace your reading — reading all 7 in a row, once they’re released, will feel very different than waiting months between the volumes’ releases. Right now, I’m enjoying the on-and-off rhythm of it, where I now have to wait 6 months until the fifth book comes out. It’s just lovely to dip into November 18th every once in a while! I haven’t loved a book series like this in a long time. Get on board with this series now, you won’t regret it!
The Changeling, by Joy Williams (1978) — paperback
A very strange little fairytale of a book about the horrors of having children, with the beautiful and odd language you’d expect from vintage Joy Williams. Dusk is “the hour between the dog and the wolf.” Children are “like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence.” This book is funny and horrifying and mystifying, even though half the time with Joy Williams I’m like… girl what are you even saying………. But that’s my problem, not her problem.
Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Ancient Egypt’s Temples from Destruction, by Lynne Olson (2023) — library ebook
This is a fascinating little biography of a woman I had sadly never heard of: Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, a French Egyptologist who had a wild, eventful life, managed to change the world for better in multiple ways, and, least importantly but most personally, has made me feel quite lazy in comparison.
She starts her career in the 1930s, in a heavily sexist male-dominated field and we follow all the trials and tribulations of being a woman working in the field in Egypt — and, for all the anti-Arab bullshit in the media, it’s very morbidly funny that the Egyptian men treat her with way more equality than the French. Once World War II hits, the book becomes almost a spy thriller, with Desroches and a motley band of historians and artists working together to not only secretly empty the Louvre of its treasures before the Nazis can get their hands on it, but to also spearhead the French Resistance (almost all of them were caught and killed by the Nazis; Desroches’ survival is practically miraculous). After the war, and for the next 50 years of her life, she’s dedicated to saving some of the most impressive and famous Ancient Egyptian temples from destruction — pulling off some truly incredible feats of engineering and politics.
This is a wild, all-encompassing history of not only one woman’s life, but the history of Egyptology, as well as the beginnings of the United Nations and international cooperation, with lots of fun little historical tidbits, including some incredible cameos from personalities like Anwar Sadat and Jackie Onassis. There’s even good gossip about Ancient Egyptians who lived 5,000 years ago, like a temple builder who was notorious for sleeping with the other builders’ wives. Between that and the rampant misogyny Christiane deals with throughout her long career, this book is full of timeless reminders that humans really never change, like this complaint from a traveler to Egypt in the 1800s:
The worst enemy of Egyptian antiquity is the English or American traveler. The name of these idiots will go down in posterity, since they were careful to inscribe their names on famous monuments across the most delicate drawings.
Americans and the English: ruining the world in large and small ways for centuries!