#85: Bend it like Victoria Beckham
Death By Consumption
1/13/26 - 1/19/26
Our president, whose brain is leaking out of his ears, is enlisting more and more Nazi death squads to snatch people off the street and terrorize the elderly and children in the Midwest, while mulling how best to crater the economy and also whether he should nuke Nuuk, Greenland — and yet, despite all this, we now have to also contend with the fact that Victoria Beckham did a sexy dance on her son at his own wedding? How much are we expected to take before we all just fucking snap! Everything feels like a CIA psyop these days, but this feels especially suspicious, like someone somewhere decided that none of the distractions have worked, and that everyone still has plenty of time and energy to absolutely despise everything this administration is doing, so they hit the big red BECKHAM INCEST button. We must resist! (But please send me any new information on this story as it develops.)
This week: I saw three new movies, all kind of crazy, and all kind of great; I watched a classic, also kind of crazy, Scorsese; I got mad about the fascist takeover of Minneapolis; and I read a book about a weird creepy loser.
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) — at AMC Lincoln Square
I have no idea how to summarize a movie like Ann Lee. It’s a semi-musical, semi-fictional biopic of Ann Lee, one of the founding leaders of the Shaker religious sect in the 1700s, and I simply can’t imagine seeing a more insane film for the rest of the year. This is a full-body ride, an overwhelmingly exhausting, exhilarating, and deeply strange experience. I had the time of my life!
Ann Lee is such a strange historic character, so it’s fitting that this is a strange movie. A mystic to some, a cult leader to others, she found religious conviction via, it seems, overwhelming grief at losing baby after baby (which we also endure in a particularly harrowing montage early in the film), and turned it into a movement that didn’t exactly transform the world, but at least transformed the cabinetry industry.
It’s a shame this movie is only in, like, 5 theaters around the country for some reason, because Amanda Seyfried deserves a hell of a lot more attention for this role. She throws herself into it, singing, dancing, chanting, wailing, beating her chest, somehow resisting the physical allure of Christopher Abbott.
It’s definitely one of the best performances of 2025, but one that no one will really see — and, frankly, I feel like half the people who watch this movie might hate it! In our group of four who saw it together, our opinions were extremely varied. We all found it a bit too long, but I found it completely immersive, and felt that its maximalism had its reasons — you can’t exactly make a quiet, simple movie about a charismatic freak like Ann Lee, you know? I was completely engrossed, nearly ecstatic with joy throughout most of it, and baffled at seeing a movie that felt like something completely new. It’s been called a “musical,” but that feels so reductive, and the idea of putting this in the same conversation as Wicked is laughable. The music is just kind of how these Shakers communicate, so most of the songs flow organically in and out of the scenes (except for one insane musical moment featuring a kooky guy and his index finger — not explaining beyond that, sorry!). Honestly, I never say this about a musical, but I could have had more songs in this. Let Amanda sing!!
But, as I said, for some reason this remains nearly impossible to find in theaters — perhaps they want you to suffer and travel long distances, as Ann Lee did, in order to prove your faith, as some new, immersive form of stunt marketing? Whatever it takes, I think it’s worth seeing, even if you end up walking out of it like so many of those snooty French losers at Cannes apparently did. This is big, bold, strange filmmaking, and I think it should be rewarded.
And, really, you should get on board before everyone else does, because I’m calling it now: 2026, we are having a Shaker Summer. We are forgoing all carnal pleasures, and beating our breasts in ecstasy with our best girls and gays. We are fighting tyrannical governments and getting arrested and growing arm hair in prison. We are refusing to take our husbands in our mouths, no matter how much they beg, and we are making our gay brothers cut their nasty hair. We are taking care of the Earth, and carving gorgeous furniture. There might only be two Shakers left, but possibly not for long!
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
It’s still so shocking to me that the 28 Years Later movies are good — 28 Days Later felt so singular, a one-off miracle of a movie that only got better with retrospect, especially in light of its sad and stupid sequel 28 Weeks Later. But last year’s 28 Years Later and now this year’s Bone Temple follow-up are a rare thing these days: big, splashy blockbusters with a lot to say about Big Issues. Danny Boyle really took issue with how lame the zombie genre has gotten, and returned to wake us all back up!
28 Years Later used its zombie-ravaged England setting to explore ideas of grief and loneliness, and the different ways people respond to trauma and tragedy, and while The Bone Temple is in many ways a more traditional movie-like movie than its predecessor, it’s still got plenty of big things to mull over. It follows two intertwining stories from the first film: in one half we have the “Jimmies,” a cult of psychos with a belief system that absurdly blends Satanism with the Teletubbies, who were bafflingly introduced in the final minutes of the previous film; in the other half, we have Ralph Fiennes’ semi-mad doctor, who’s battling grief and loneliness but also can’t help but continue to try to figure out how to heal the world.
This sets up a classic reason-versus-faith dichotomy, one that has been explored for better and worse in many better and worse movies and TV shows, but director Nia DaCosta makes it all feel brand new. I loved this movie, way more than I thought I would. Its tone is all over the place but somehow never felt jarring — we go from dark comedy to comedy comedy to classic horror to horrific scenes of gore, and none of it ever feels out of place. I don’t know how she did it, really!
And when the two stories finally come together, the resulting scene is, like Ann Lee, one of the most bafflingly hilarious and jaw-dropping musical moments I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. I won’t spoil it, but I can tell you this: the audience I watched this with had an enormous reaction to this musical moment, especially compared with the absolutely silent audience I watched Wicked: For Good with. (I don’t know why I woke up so mad at Wicked today, but I’m running with it.)
If the Oscars producers know what they’re doing, they’ll get Ralph Fiennes and Amanda Seyfriend on stage together, performing a Satanic/Shaker musical medley mashup that will change the entertainment industry — and maybe even religion! — forever.
Pillion (2025) — streamed through nefarious means after going to great lengths to see it legitimately
Alexander Skarsgård is very attractive. This is not up for debate! And Pillion is a movie based on the blunt fact that, for most of us, Alexander Skarsgård would be one of the most attractive men we had ever seen in real life, if we were to run into him. So the question the movie is asking is: would you let this man ruin your life?
It has become such a trope online, this need to be destroyed by the object of your desire. Kill me, daddy. Hit me with your car, mommy. Choke me, Heated Rivalry’s Francois Arnaud. In Pillion, one kind-of-ugly gay (I’m not calling him ugly, okay? The movie calls him ugly! Get mad at them, not me!!!) gets to live out that fantasy, becoming the sub to Alexander Skarsgård’s dom, resulting in a deeply strange, twisted, and heartbreaking British romcom of sorts. It’s Love Actually or Notting Hill, with just sliiiiightly more leather fetish.
The marketing played up the sexiness and silliness of the film: come see Alexander in a wrestling singlet! Look at one of the boys from the Harry Potter movies, all grown up and licking a man’s leather boots as he jerks off! So it’s a real bait-and-switch that what this movie actually is is devastating. You quickly learn this is not all the fun, sexy silliness you thought it was going to be. Because Colin, the sub played by Harry Melling, does get what he wants (to be dominated and practically destroyed by Alexander Skarsgård), and we have no choice but to sit and witness it all. We watch Colin slowly and methodically excise the freethinking, free-acting parts of himself, all in service of being closer to Alexander Skarsgård. The more Alexander debases him, the more ecstatic his face.
And yet, this isn’t torture porn or meaningless pain for the sake of it — it’s really a love story, between two men with very different but conveniently overlapping needs, while also exploring loneliness. And after so many years of having to hear endless hand-wringing about the “male loneliness epidemic,” it’s refreshing to have a movie that actually steps up and shows these guys a potential way out: put on a leather singlet and let a bigger man step on your face! Stop complaining and get out there!
But, really, the movie handles the dichotomy between their needs so well: Colin needs to be needed, and Alexander’s character needs someone to need him. And that works for a while, but what happens when your needs overtake you? When there’s nothing left but need? Or when your needs are, actually, not what you thought they were? The movie raises a whole slew of bleak, thorny questions that are destined to absolutely tear the Online Gay Discoursers to shreds, if this movie is ever actually seen — so it’s probably good news that you can’t find it anywhere! If the community can’t handle Heated Rivalry, I don’t know if we deserve Pillion.
Much like Ann Lee, Pillion has been absolutely impossible to track down (it appears to now be showing a couple times a day at Angelika, if you’re in New York — which is fitting, because no theater treats you more like a worthless little sub than Angelika). I know movie distribution is absolutely broken (did you know there’s a new Ben Affleck/Matt Damon movie that just got randomly dropped on Netflix? I didn’t! Though I do love that the press tour for it has mostly just been the two of them shit-talking Netflix), but what I don’t understand is how much money was spent on marketing both Pillion and The Testament of Ann Lee specifically to gay people, only to make it impossible for anyone to actually see the movies. Maybe spend less money targeting me with daily Instagram ads that tell me to go see these films, and more money getting your movie into a theater so I can actually see it? I’m no movie producer, but the math isn’t adding up! Is everything, even the movie business, just a front for money laundering and crypto scams now? (Yes.)
The King of Comedy (1982) — on Criterion
This feels like the most overlooked Scorsese film, and it’s probably because it’s so tonally out of synch with everything else he’s ever made. This is a wild, goofy, incredible ride, and arguably De Niro’s funniest role ever, one that’s at times explicitly in conversation with De Niro’s role in Taxi Driver. It’s also a prescient film, one of those ahead-of-its-time cult classics, because, really, everyone’s acting like this now. Sure, maybe no one’s plotting to kidnap a TV host to get on their show (imagine wasting your one big kidnapping attempt on Jimmy Fallon!), but everyone basically has more parasocial relationships than real relationships at this point, and most people seem to think that if they can’t be a big star, at least they deserve to be noticed by a big star. What I’m saying is: no one show this movie to Club Chalamet, I don’t want her getting any ideas!
“Where are the Democrats?” by Ryan Broderick — at Garbage Day
Ryan and the team at the Garbage Day newsletter have been some of the best at succinctly explaining Why Everything Is Fucking Horrible for years now, simply because they do two things the LAMESTREAM media doesn’t: 1) they take Republicans at their word, and 2) they take the internet seriously. Which means their coverage of the absolutely horrific things happening in Minneapolis has been very strong, like this piece from last week. Ryan’s focus has been on the relentless need for spectacle and content, and how everything can basically be boiled down to that. It’s not an accident or a coincident that the ICE freak who murdered Renee Good was filming with his cell phone while shooting her in the face. As Ryan and others have pointed out, it’s also not a coincidence that we never hear from the Proud Boys or other Neo-Nazi militias anymore. It’s almost like they all went and got jobs somewhere?:
That’s what ICE’s true purpose is — a state-sanctioned holding pen for Trump’s most violent supporters. Looking back at it, January 6th was likely Trump’s version of the Night of the Long Knives, or at least a first attempt. Just like when the ascendant Nazi party cleared out their paramilitary gangs and laid the groundwork for more official party enforcers, to too do [sic???] insurrectionists and far-right militia members now have two easily-monetizable paths towards legitimacy. (That aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.) Join ICE and fuck up the libs and brutalize minorities, or film it for the internet.
Anyway, so glad the Democrats are leading on this. Newly married (to a woman!!!) Senator Cory Booker seems to think the solution is more training, which would be funny if it weren’t literally life-or-death. A 45-minute mandatory online HR video module should get those guys with literal Nazi tattoos to stop acting like Nazis! And as Ryan says in response to brainless flop Richie Torres’s new plan to put scannable QR codes on ICE agents (??????), “Maybe someday soon you’ll be able to scan an ICE agent like a restaurant menu right before he shoots you to death.”
Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (2025) — library ebook
This is a strange book, one that I’ve seen ripped apart by people who don’t seem to understand that the narrator is, like, extremely delusional? I guess the literacy crisis is hitting people who even still read books. Bleak! Anyway, if you understand that the narrator is unreliable — which is, like, 75% the entire point of the book — then you’ll probably enjoy this more than the people who missed it completely.
The book (bear with me here, it’s overly complicated) is presented as a collection of sci-fi short stories written by four college students who go by the name The Orb 4, with annotations and explanations written by the narrator, named Michael Lincoln (yes, the actual author’s name is Lincoln Michel — again, this is all very, very meta).
As you quickly learn, Michael is obsessed with these people, to a problematic account, and his “annotations” quickly spiral into score-settling, drama, and barely concealed hatred for some of the members of the Orb 4. It’s a bit like a modern version of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is one of my all-time favorites in “weird creepy kinda gay guy” lit, but your enjoyment of this will depend on your tolerance for spending long periods of time with a nerdy, completely un-self aware, obnoxious character who talks like this:
What’s to be said of Taras, my steadfast friend? He’s a kind and somewhat unkempt man. Laconic and ironic, he speaks only when words are necessary yet one can never be quite sure when he’s joking. I watch as he strolls past the bathroom. His six-foot-one frame, scraggly hair, and red-tinged scruff make him appear as a mythic warrior teleported from the battlefield to twenty-first-century Brooklyn. He grips his sword—Muji 0.5mm gel ink pen—in his smooth right hand as he strides into the wine-dark room.
I did find myself laughing at it and mostly enjoying it, but unfortunately it never really went anywhere beyond the central concept of “weird guy is kind of in love with and obsessed with his best friend and his writing group.” Overall, the book definitely teeters on the edge of being a little too cute (not only is the author, Lincoln Michel, writing in the voice of a character named Michael Lincoln, but at one point the character Michael Lincoln discovers the existence of the real-life Lincoln Michel, a moment which will only land for you if you’re really into the work of Charlie Kaufman), but, again, there is a lot of fun to be had with skewering a specific type of overly confident, not-self-aware, weird loser, like so:
“I don’t think you have to be necessarily queer to produce queer texts,” Jane offered. “Look at Italo Calvino. A novel based on tarot cards. Another that’s a long list of cities.”
I nodded from my bedroom, where I was listening via the fern microphone. Perhaps if straight people could be queer writers, they could be queer readers too. I thought about the various ways I’d “queered” my readings. Maybe the time I put my bookmark in the wrong place and read the ending before the middle? Or when I’ve listened to half an audiobook and read the rest on a Kindle?
But really, I’ve lived with way weirder roommates than this guy. I’ll take a Michael Lincoln as a roommate any day, rather than the girl who painted gnomes and roosters all day and night in the pitch black in our living room, or the other girl whose boyfriend once pooped next to the toilet instead of in it. Give me this weird creepy loser — at least he mostly stays in his room!