#103: Blue Film is the feel-bad movie of the year
Plus: why Mother Mary and Ann Lee should maximize their joint slay
Death by Consumption
5/19/26 - 5/25/26
Did you have a lovely holiday weekend? If you weren’t in NY, you probably did! Here, we suffered through, apparently, the rainiest Memorial Day weekend since the 1940s. Pray for the New Yorkers in your life who have had to endure the unimaginable horror of being kind of wet for a little bit. Between the weather and the onslaught of work I’ve had to do lately and the fact that I turned 39 which is famously the last year before you turn 40 and society sets you adrift on an ice floe — I think all of that combined to pull me into a slight little depressive episode, which I decided to lean into by reading and watching bleak things for most of the week. Thankfully, the sun is out and something good happened in local basketball so people on the street are happy and summer is finally here and nothing bad will ever happen to any of us! Yay!
This week: I watched two beautiful new movies that are rather difficult in different ways, I’m struggling with the new HBO show from that Baby Reindeer guy, I tormented myself by reading a bleak book about 9/11, and I counteracted all the darkness by watching Point Break!
Blue Film (2026) — at IFC Center
To say Blue Film deals with thorny issues is an understatement. Let’s just speak about it plainly: this is a movie about a sexy camboy who is hired to spend the night with a pedophile. Eek!! The entire film takes place over the course of that one night, in which the two men mostly talk but also sometimes have sex, or at least attempt it. It’s… nearly indescribable? “Brave” is a loaded word, but also possibly an understatement with regards to this film — this is the writer/director’s first feature movie, and I can’t believe he took a swing this big. This is one of those movies where the entire theater has to sit in silence during the entirety of the credits before being able to get up and leave. You just need a minute to, like, reset before rejoining the outside world.
This is not all to suggest that it’s a bleak, dreary ride. In fact, Blue Film is often quite beautiful and tender, which only makes the moments of disgust or shock even more disgusting and shocking. The two men will have these quiet moments of beautiful intimacy, which will immediately be followed up with someone saying something so deeply disturbing that your mouth drops open. This is a layered, wild film, and a refreshing sign that there’s still some life left in Hollywood after all. It felt so good to be genuinely scandalized by a movie!
It’s one of those films that’s bad to write about, because you don’t want to spoil the ride for anyone who’s going to go on it — I don’t want to steal the shock value from you, and you really should see this, if it’s showing near you (it probably isn’t). And, anyway, your feelings about my one-sentence description of the film’s plot at the beginning of this email will tell you pretty quickly if you do plan on seeing this; when I tell people about it they either immediately say, “I need to see that,” or they look at me as if I were the pedophile in the story — which is fun! You know media literacy is dead when you feel like you have to state, “For the record, I am not a pedophile,” before recommending a movie to people! Anyway, clearly I’m not as brave as the people who made this movie — I’m currently worrying if the government’s technofascist AI surveillance systems are reading this email and misinterpreting it and my door is about to be knocked in by gestapo thugs. So let’s move on!!!
Mother Mary (2026) — on Apple
Mother Mary came and went from theaters in what felt like a matter of days, and now that I’ve seen it I can understand why. This is not an easy movie! A two-hour baroque film in which two women talk obliquely about their past while designing a dress — this was never going to be a blockbuster. Anne Hathaway literally cries for 2 hours straight in this movie, and her hair is wet the entire time. I’m almost positive there is not a single man in this entire film (the Bechdel test is dead… the new standard is the Hathaway test, when men aren’t even acknowledged to exist). These are not the makings of a megablockbuster. Where are the EXPLOSIONS?
And yet I was captivated the entire time. I’ve never seen anything like Mother Mary. It’s wide open to interpretation, almost frustratingly so. It could be about how the best way to process difficult things is to transform it into art. It could be about the difficulties of collaboration. Or it could be about what it feels like to create something in service of something or someone else. Or it could be a messy lesbian film. Or it could just be about great gowns, beautiful gowns. Or it could be about all of that! Up to you!
It’s a challenging, deliberately obscure movie, and I loved the experience of trying to figure out what the fuck these two women were talking about. And as it builds into a strange, visually stunning gothic horror, I understood it less but loved it even more. Something is going on inside the mind of writer/director David Lowery, whose career has balanced kiddie Disney films with twisted, haunted films like this and The Green Knight, and I love spending time in his brain. This is a baroque, swing-for-the-fences film that has a lot to say but doesn’t care if you get it or not.
Mother Mary would work, weirdly, as a double feature next to The Testament of Ann Lee: two big, bold, beautiful films about wacky ladies who love singing and writhing and heavy fabrics and shivering in barns. They should make a gay musical Avengers where Mother Mary and Ann Lee team up to destroy men through the power of song. Now that’s a blockbuster.
Half Man, episodes 1-4 — on HBOMax
Bleakness abounds! This show, from Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd, is a bit of a slog, if I’m being honest. It’s got gay stuff, so obviously I had to watch it, but I’m struggling! Every episode is an endless onslaught of psychological and sometimes physical torture, a slow-burn horror series in which everything could be solved if the characters just stopped talking to each other. After every episode I feel like I can’t keep doing this to myself, and yet here I am, having almost finished the whole thing. Even though I hate all the characters! Everyone’s either an asshole or an idiot or both, and I’m not even sure what the point of it all is. (To be honest, this is also how I felt about Baby Reindeer, though I was too much of a coward at the time to speak up against all the rave reviews. That show was annoying!) I suppose, if nothing else, this show could be made for people who have irritating stepbrothers? Representation matters!
Point Break (1991) — on Criterion
To counteract a week of rather bleak and complex films and TV, I needed to watch something stupid and perfect. Enter: Point Break, the most gorgeous film ever made about surfing criminals (a packed genre). These stupid hunks and their silly little crimes! I refuse to enjoy this movie on an ironic level, to cheapen it by laughing at it — this is genuinely great. If nothing else, Keanu’s butt looks incredible in a wetsuit, and Patrick Swayze was king of the twinks. During a miserably cold and rainy Memorial Day weekend, Point Break was exactly what I needed to get me into the summer mindset. Let’s rob a bank and hit the waves!
Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, by Richard Beck (2024) — library ebook
I don’t know if you’re aware, but things are bad right now! And, if you’re an elder Millennial like me, you’re probably all-too aware of the fact that it’s basically been bad and steadily getting worse since we first became politically aware (to place my own life against world events: 9/11 happened during my first week of high school, and the Great Recession hit the year I graduated college — slay mama!!!!). So, if you’re a lifelong Bush-hater like me, you probably understand the broad strokes of how we got from 9/11 to today. Even so, it’s helpful and clarifying to see the process all laid out in great detail in a book like this, which tracks the slow and steady decline our country has been going through for decades (it didn’t just start on 9/11, of course — the book argues the decline started in the 70s, though it’s clearly been accelerating lately).
A lot of the book’s history meant having to confront demons from yesteryear that I had almost forgotten about, but whose names were, apparently, indelibly seared into my developing brain — Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, and Lynndie England kept popping up like the Ghosts of Christmas Torture. I can’t believe these people just have normal lives, after all the evils they’ve committed! And yet that’s the point of the entire book: because we allowed people to act with impunity, even worse people are allowed to act with even more impunity. There’s a direct line from Bush’s torture programs to Obama’s drone-bombing of children to everything Trump has ever done. Reading this book makes you feel like every American President should be sent straight to prison the second their term ends. Lock them all up! I’m not joking!
Reading this was an unpleasant but clarifying experience, one that I did not enjoy — but that’s a commentary on the times, not the book itself. By the end, when he’s getting into the ongoing genocide in Gaza, after 500 previous pages of endless horrors, it’s all just a bit, like…….. fuck, man. What the fuck are we going to do. (Especially since his conclusion is, literally: things are going to get worse, and good luck to all of us. Fun!) Anyway, this book is important, like so many bleak things, but I wouldn’t suggest reading it over a holiday weekend. I would, however, suggest giving it to a Gen Z youth in your life who doesn’t understand why they’re growing up in a fairly hopeless society. Kids, gather round and let me tell you the spooky tale of Halliburton!