Welles's absolute, undeniable stage presence is on
full display. He makes himself huge physically,
visually, and emotionally, and then spends the entire
film toppling himself, playing both roles of Jack and
the giant. This is a film about a man full of bluster
and bonhomie who, despite being superficially
well-liked by all around him, continually pushes their
tolerance to the breaking point, needling them,
sapping their patience and their wallets even as he
makes them laugh uproariously. Falstaff is good
friends with all who meet him but never quite truly
beloved by any, and when he finally acts upon
presumption of that love he is utterly destroyed.
Knowing that Welles identified so personally with
Falstaff, went to such great lengths to make this film
happen, and even said that this role was his life's
work makes its function as self-critique to the point
of self-destruction all the more pointed. Fallstaff
lies baldly and constantly, and we know from F for
Fake that Welles saw his own role as a liar and
charlatan; this film suggests that as much as those
lies were an intrinsic part of himself, they were also
a source of grief. Orson Welles, a man who always
presented himself as larger than life, in this film
where he is at his largest is also at his most
exposed, raw, and vulnerable.
I've been having migraines on and off for over a week now,
which is a very upsetting change of pace from the one migraine
I'd usually get every three to six months, but if there's a
silver lining it's that I'm reading a lot of
audiobooks while I more or less can't use my eyes
This weekend, a few friends embarked on a voyage of romance,
adventure, and discovery all from the comfort of our computer
rooms. We came together to achieve something that, to my
knowledge[1], has never been achieved before. We experienced the
MCCONAUGHAUPS: a two-day marathon of every 00s romantic comedy
that starred Matthew McConaughey.
The germ of the idea formed when I read somewhere that Matthew
McConaughey, today known for his dramatic roles on the big and
small screen, had spent his early stardom almost exclusively
in chick flicks. It was, in fact, a conscious attempt to flee
this typecasting that led him to refuse further roles as
romantic leads beginning around 2010 and eventually through
force of will mold his career into what we know today.
Now, I have no particular affection for the man. I
would say I hadn't thought about him much at all prior to this
event. But I do consider myself quite a fan of the rom-com
genre, and having watched only a single one starring him my
curiosity was piqued. What does it look like for a man to
spend a decade in a genre, and what does it take for him to
swear it off completely afterwards? I had to know.
I managed to talk a few friends into joining me, and together
we trekked into the unstoppable flood of affable grins and
light Texan drawls that was the MCCONAUGHAUPS. And now that it
has come to a close, please allow me to present you with the
fruits of our excursion: a thoroughly-researched ranking of
all six of Matthew McConaughey's 00s rom-com feature films.
Tiptoes. A film whose existence is baffling, but not as baffling
as the choices that went into making it. This only
barely counts as a rom-com to begin with; only
the first third of the film and the unwelcome sprinkling
of fart jokes through the rest of it are at all comedic,
and the rest is a dour drama about a man (McConaughey) who
hates himself and his family. Glad I watched this with
friends because it would have been unbearable alone.
Failure to Launch. A deeply stupid film where one of the running gags is
that various animals bite Tripp (McConaughey) and then
visibly chuckle to themselves about it because he hasn't
yet achieved inner harmony. Portrays him as a layabout
loser only to reveal halfway through the film that he was
engaged but his fiancée died six years ago(!) and he's
been helping to raise her son(!!) ever since. Dragged into
watchability by Zooey Deschanel and Kathy Bates moving
mountains as secondary characters.
Fool's Gold. Barely a rom-com, this is more of an adventure movie
with light rom-com elements. Anodyne, overlong, and
suffers tremendously from every black character being a
rapper-slash-murderer. Other than that, though, it's
decent enough.
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Silly, schlocky, but at the end of the day pretty fun.
Connor (McConaughey) is a huge asshole in a way…
I feel a little less dire about the films of 2025 than I do
about the games,
but only a little. There are no films I found outright
repulsive, which is a win I suppose, although I do feel like
I'm still inhabiting the hater spirit in being relatively cool
on films that sent people at large into raptures.
Sinners
was undeniably cool, but it was also unfocused, lacking in the
clarity of purpose that's necessary to make a truly excellent
film about supernatural horrors.
One Battle After Another
is principled in a shockingly impressive direction, but
doesn't quite land the plane on its ambitions.
Wake Up Dead Man
is an excellent whodunit, but the writing and characterization
around that ends up cartoonish as often as it is profound.
The other sad fact of this year is that there's no film from
it that hit me hard enough that I have given it a full five
stars. I do try to be conservative about giving out my highest
possible rating, but despite that I've watched multiple
five-star films each year all the way back through 2021. Worse
still, looking back through the films that came out this year
and my friends' reactions to them, I don't know if there's
anything that's even plausible that I would love
wholeheartedly.
This has been a grim year in a lot of ways, and an infertile
media landscape is hardly the worst of it. But it's also hard
to say that the two are unrelated. How can you separate the
systematic evisceration of life through genocide and culture
through LLMs from the faltering of art itself? I suppose, if
there's a silver lining to be had, it's that this ignites in
me the fire to create things of beauty myself. And I can only
hope I'm not the the only one.
I'm not universally a fan of Guillermo del Toro's work,
although I'm always a fan of the way he thinks about and
articulates his relationship to art. Frankenstein,
though, hit for me in a way that nothing he's made has since
Pacific Rim. It thoroughly embodies his philosophies
of creation, perhaps because it's about creation. I
also can't deny the influence on me from the large volume of
quotes and making-of shots that I saw on Tumblr—getting into
the artist's head doesn't always help make the art more
compelling, but in this case it worked wonders.
The other thing that boosts this to the top spot, of course,
is the lack of competition. The only other film that I gave
the same rating was
Naked Gun, which I do heartily appreciate as a proper comedy that
refuses the tyranny of the deadpan. But ultimately the
craftsmanship of Frankenstein won out for me over the
exuberance of Naked Gun.
It's not lost on me that these two are an adaptation and a
remake, as I was bemoaning in my post on games as well.
Wake…
This year, I think I'm going to split up my oaties post into
two, one for games and one for films. I don't want the posts
to be massive, especially since I'm going to continue the
tradition I established last year of updating my all-time
of-the-year lists along with choosing individual years.
I'll be honest: I'm not feeling great about the state of video
games in 2025. I certainly missed some games that might change
my opinion here—notable games I didn't get around to that I
think I stand a shot of really loving include PEAK,
Shadow Labyrinth, Of the Devil, and
Kinophobia. I'll mention Despelote as well
as a game I watched
Eden
play most of and thought very highly of. But on the whole,
this year leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me feel
like a hater.
I always try to muster precise and thoughtful critiques of
games I don't like, especially when I know other people feel
differently, and that often means I'm putting myself in the
position of thinking as much about the games I don't like as I
do about my favorites. This year, though, it felt like I was
endlessly pouring out criticism with only brief intermissions
for auditions.
Many people, including numerous friends of mine, loved
Blue Prince,
Donkey Kong Bananza, and
Hades II. I found all three of these flawed in ways that were
actively repugnant to my design sensibilities. That's not to
say I didn't enjoy them, but the fun I had felt like digesting
content, that increasingly refined slurry of
choose-three mechanics and the steady drip-drip-drip of
unlocks. The failures, on the other hand, were born of deep
misunderstandings of the player's
perspective-in-the-moment—the very experience whose careful
shepherding is what I find most compelling about the very best
game design.
I was looking forward to
Civilization VII
so eagerly I took time off work to play it with
Liz. It was so disappointing we abandoned it after two days.
Even games I broadly quite liked, like
Q-Up
and
Demonschool, were marred by notable design flaws.
That's not to say there weren't games I enjoyed this year, but
looking back at them I'm faced with the horrifying realization
that everything I really loved this year was a sequel or a
spinoff.
Fish Fear Me,
Monster Train 2,
Elden Ring: Nightreign,
Death Stranding 2, and
Hollow Knight: Silksong
all remix or reinvent their source material to some degree,
and I think they're all excellent. But the knowledge that none
of them (nor Hades II nor Civilization VII)
is fully original haunts me.
This is kind of a shoo-in choice, if I'm being honest. There
are only three games I gave five stars this year.
Nightreign is certainly my most played of the three,
and (similar to my reasoning for picking
Elden Ring as my game of 2022) exploring…
And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI
aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by
their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them
wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make
art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so
they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream
is to invent new forms of life to enslave.
And to what end? In a kind of nihilistic symmetry,
their dream of the perfect slave machine drains the
life of those who use it as well as those who turn the
gears. What is life but what we choose, who we know,
what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell
me the chance to stop reading and writing and
thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my
parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I
do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in
the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry
machines.
I'm a bit late to the party, but I was just linked Anthony
Moser's poetic and impassioned evisceration of LLMs today and
I think anyone who hasn't yet read it should do so. I cosign
it as an articulation not just of my position on the subject,
but of my emotional stance towards it as well. The
techno-cultural nexus that we have recently taken to calling
"artificial intelligence" is deeply corrosive, and we must not
tolerate it. We must not give it air to breathe. When this all
falls to an ignominious end, we must dance on its grave that
it may never rise again.
is that if anyone were going to have a doppelganger
with a spoonerized name it would be her. she's made multiple
films about basically that. so while I'm not claiming that
Swilda Tinton exists (although I'm not claiming that she
doesn't) I just wanna say: it makes sense. it makes sense!
The first thing you gotta understand about the dead is that
even if they manage to cling to the afterlife and retain a
sense of themselves, they only have access to one verb, and
that verb is "haunt". Without a medium like me who knows how
to channel their voice and give them words, breaking all the
glass in the kitchen is the only way to get your attention and
making your friends foam at the mouth and chant gibberish is
their best attempt at speaking to you. It doesn't mean they
meant you or Samantha any harm. It's important that you
understand that.
When you said who you thought it was haunting you? You were
half right. The couple who sold you this house, the husband
said his mom died here? Well, that's not
strictly true. Turns out, it was his dad. And he has
unfinished business that he wants you to deal with.
The second thing you gotta understand about the dead is that
they don't really have the same concept of privacy that the
living do. Or, it's more accurate to say that they
can't. When that haunt a something, they more or less
become that thing. Its spirit. Technically, its primary
nooperceptual locus. Doesn't matter. Point is, if they're
haunting a house, they "see" whatever happens in it. They
don't even really understand anymore why that would be a
problem. It's not personal, just a side effect of the
consciousness shift.
So, when I tell you that your entity, the dad, saw you, um,
become... transgender? Transition. Right. When he saw you
transition, it's not like he was a living person looking in
your window while you changed. He just knows because the walls
and floors know. And apparently he didn't know,
before you arrived. That that was a thing. That people could
just... do that.
So. What he wants you to do is talk to his son and tell him
that his mom was actually his dad, and get him to update the
headstone. His name is Martin. Which, you know, it's hard for
the dead to convey specific words. It's mostly just emotions
and imagery, which is what makes my job so interesting. But
this came through really strong. "Martin".
He seems pretty confident that his son will be cool about
this, especially if someone who gets it talks him through what
it means. And if he doesn't? Well, the third thing you gotta
understand about the dead is that if you piss them off, they
get mean. So let's hope that this guy is just happy
to have gained a father from beyond the grave.
