#96: The Drama is dramatically shallow

And other inane thoughts at the end of the world

Death by Consumption

3/31/26 - 4/6/26

Well, today feels fucking insane. We’re all waking up to do our patriotic duty of creating value for shareholders, while our deranged leader is hovering his finger over the nuke button, and the branch of government made to prevent stuff like this all have their out of office replies on while they’re all gallivanting around Disney World. We live in a hell of our own making and unfortunately I don’t even think today will be rock bottom. Anyway, let’s talk about movies???? Jesus Christ.

This week: I watched Zendaya and Robert Pattinson have some drama, I watched a bunch of conquistadors go mad, I enjoyed a documentary designed to kiss Martin Scorsese’s ass, I decided I wanted to stay forever in November 18th, and I observed Passover by reading about Gaza.

The Drama (2026) — at BAM Cinemas

Much has been made about “the twist” in The Drama, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s big new dark romantic comedy, but it’s not a twist — it’s revealed in the first 20 minutes, and is, in fact, the entire plot of the film. But it’s more fun to go into this movie blind, so I won’t spoil it, and will only say that something is revealed about someone’s past, which makes Robert and Zendaya’s characters start to question their entire relationship. The central question of the film is: if you learned something shocking about the past of the person you love, would you be able to look past it?

The spiral that follows the big revelation is fairly entertaining, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, while never losing its core darkness — this is a fun film to see in a packed theater like I did, with the audience reacting almost as if they knew these people personally. Our audience squirmed in horror and secondhand embarrassment throughout the film, occasionally letting out an, “Oh nooooo!” or a simple, “Oh my god.” People were reacting to every scene the way you’d react to a friend telling you the exact same story over drinks. (By the end of the movie, everyone had been so thoroughly worked up into a frenzy that several people let out a shocked gasp at the revelation that… Robert Pattinson’s socks had holes in them?? I’m telling you, this movie had that theater in the palm of its hand!) As a moviegoing experience, it’s fun!

Unfortunately, however, the film is all fun without much depth — it has a fantastically simple premise, but doesn’t seem interested in going any deeper than the surface. After the initial revelation, the characters spiral about what it means about the person who revealed it, but after almost two hours of people rehashing the same issues over and over and over again, you kind of just want everyone to get over it. Grow up! It was shocking at first, but now you’re just being dramatic! Much like the writer/director’s previous film, Nicolas Cage’s Dream Scenario, this film starts with a very smart premise that gradually just… goes nowhere. He doesn’t seem to know how to end his films, or even have much interest in ending them. Actually, forget ending a film — he doesn’t seem to know how to even end a scene! Nearly every scene tends to end abruptly, so that I could almost feel the writer getting bored and deciding to move on. I’m not joking: three separate scenes end with someone projectile vomiting. If you’ve backed yourself into a writing corner so the only way out is to end the scene, “She suddenly vomits,” you might need to rethink the story a bit!

It’s all a bit Emerald Fennellesque, dare I say, a little too proud of how edgy it’s being, while winking and nudging at you the whole time. My biggest gripe is that The Drama regularly employs one of my least favorite tropes: showing something shocking (screaming at someone, physically attacking them, etc.) before cutting to reveal it was only a fantasy the character was having. It’s always such a cop out, the director wanting to have it both ways, and after the 10th instance of one of these “Oops, it was just a fantasy!” fake-outs, it started to feel more than a little cheap.

I know the most boring opinion you can have about a movie was, “It was fine,” but: The Drama was fine! The central premise is great, most of the actors are great (Alana Haim is perfectly cast as a deeply annoying egomaniac — doesn’t feel like a stretch for her, sorry! — but the movie is completely stolen by Zoe Winters and Hailey Benton Gates, who need starring roles in something immediately), but the overall execution is so-so. All those complaints aside, watching it in the theater was like a fun little carnival ride: it’s quick (I genuinely thought Hollywood had forgotten how to make films under 2 hours) and frivolous and a little nausea-inducing, and a rare communal moviegoing experience.

Much like the movie, this review is kind of piddling out without saying much of anything, sorry — let me just projectile vomit so I can end this!

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) — on Criterion

A descent into Hell, both on- and off-screen. From the opening minutes, with a cast of hundreds on a miserable slog through the jungle — the Peruvian extras regularly looking straight into camera as they’re knee-deep in mud, a look on their faces like, “What the fuck have gotten myself into?” — it’s apparent that Werner Herzog went a little mad in the jungle while making this story about men going mad in the jungle. Sublime and awful, and weirdly perfect for the period we’re living in, in which deranged men drunk on power and their own importance drag us all into a hell from which we can never return. Yay!

Mr. Scorsese — on Apple TV

Absolutely devoured this docuseries and wouldn’t have complained if it were twice as long. Martin Scorsese is impossibly charming, just a real silly billy, and one of the most interesting directors we have. I mean: Mean Streets to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to Taxi Driver to New York, New York is an absolutely insane run of films. The tonal whiplash between those four films (all made within four years!) is enough to make him a legend already, before he went on to make even more brilliant films over the next 50 years. No one has the range he has! I’ve always been fascinated by how wildly different Marty’s movies are from each other, and this docuseries does a fantastic job of showing how and why his filmography all hangs together, despite the tonal differences — there is a connective thread between Liza Minnelli tap-dancing and Joe Pesci torturing guys to death, and Mr. Scorsese does a great job showing how all those sides are contained in this one man.

The one gripe you could have with the series is it’s a bit up Marty’s ass the whole time. It’s directed by Rebecca Miller, who happens to be married to perennial Scorsese bestie Daniel Day-Lewis, so there’s no world in which she would make a genuine tell-all that exposes the darker sides of Marty. The only nods we get to anything dark in his background are vague statements — shoehorned in the final minutes — about anger issues in his younger years, which we are reassured are all fixed now. Okay, sure! If you say so! Let’s not worry about that and get back to praising Marty! Don’t get me wrong: Marty is a genuine living genius, possibly the greatest living filmmaker, but there are several points in this series in which people say things like, “You had to know if the camera was going to move to the right or move to the left, and Marty knew exactly which way it would go.” As opposed to other directors, who… don’t know which way to turn their cameras? Sure, he’s earned his accolades, but at times in this series it feels like we’re one step away from celebrating the fact that he eats food and breathes oxygen. What can’t he do!

All the dick-sucking aside, we watched the series with grins on our faces the entire time — it’s just so fun, especially with its focus on how the details of Marty’s life have shown up in his films throughout the years (my favorite bit: due to dangerously bad asthma he spent a lot of his childhood stuck inside, looking down on the kids playing on the streets outside, which is why he’s partial to high-angle shots). Sometimes it’s obnoxious and forced when people try to “explain” an artist’s work via his biographical details, but you really do need to delve into the psychology of Marty to explain how someone can so beautifully capture the Edwardian dandy fops of The Age of Innocence just a year before filming the scene in Casino where a man’s head is crushed in a vise. Marty contains multitudes, clearly, and this series is a charming and highly entertaining glimpse at the brilliant mind churning behind those beautiful eyebrows.

On the Calculation of Volume, Book III, by Solvej Balle (2026) — paperback

I am officially addicted to this series. The third book is the plottiest by far, which I was actually somewhat bummed about. I truly could have read seven books in which Tara simply sat and contemplated the time loop she’s stuck in, but I guess it’s for the best that the plot finally acquires some forward movement. I’ll keep it spoiler-free, because you really should go into the series as blind as possible; most of the joy has been in knowing nothing, and just letting the story slowly unfold a page at a time. These books are oddly calming, despite their sad and lonely tone, and it’s fascinating to map your own feelings about the world and Tara’s situation as you move throughout the series. At first I wanted her to get out of her November 18th loop and return to normal time, but now I’m not so sure — the world of the 18th is more interesting and complex than we originally thought, and I’m suddenly enjoying the fact that she’s stuck, and following the slow unfolding of the central mystery (a mystery I’m not even sure the book is that interested in solving — I’m very prepared for the series to end without any resolution).

Like Tara, I’ve grown accustomed to the time loop, and am almost finding comfort in it, in a weird way. It almost feels stranger, now that I’ve finished the third book and have to wait for the fourth to be published (next week, thankfully), to be outside the world of the novels. I’m missing the 18th of November, and I’m ready to jump back into it!

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, by Peter Beinart (2025) — hardcover

Passover felt like the right time to finally read this book, a book I’ve had on my shelf for a year, but have never picked up out of a sense of overwhelming dread. And, as an anti-Zionist Jew, there’s really nothing in here that I didn’t already know. But still, it felt somewhat comforting, at least, to see someone else grappling on the page with the horrors that have been committed in our name, especially someone who was raised, unlike me, with Zionism. I didn’t learn anything from this book I didn’t already know, but it’s still important to have it down on the page, to have it spelled out this clearly and explicitly. I hope the people that actually need to read this book will pick it up and give it the chance it deserves, even though I suspect most of them hardened their hearts to any criticism of the genocide of Palestine a long, long time ago. There’s really nothing much left to say that hasn’t already been said, and yet it’s important we keep saying it.