Movies I Watched This Week (2/10/25 - 2/16/25)

PRE-ROLL

• I caught the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary special last night (save for the first 25-ish minutes). i’m not one for the general happy-go-lucky hagiography of this whole project, honoring a show that started as a piece of earnest counter-cultural programming that has since ballooned into - arguably - the most powerful comedy institution in the country. this is a show whose troubled past hosts include the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk (both surprisingly absent from the “controversial hosts” montage), a show that had Jimmy Fallon doing blackface in the early 2000’s (curiously blurred-out in the “#problematic” montage), a show that has credibly covered up for its abusive cast mates. has all this abuse and kowtowing to power been worth it in the end, whatever “worth it” even means? that’s not for me to answer, ultimately. all I can say is, celebrating half a century (!!!!) of sketch comedy with tired retreads of already overdone sketches was certainly a choice. anyways, my top three moments were;

  • 1. seeing Jack Nicholson there.

  • 2. Adam Driver dressed up as a hot dog.

  • 3. Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg’s respective songs.

• a brief tangent - a look into how my mind works, if you will - related to one of the films I watched this week; whenever I encounter a piece of art that truly shakes me, I proceed to jump down various rabbit holes related to that piece and see where the internet takes me. with this particular thread, I was looking into the output of composer and sound designer Joshua Schmidt (a deep-cut favorite composer of mine for many years now), and came upon some music he had written for a Kansas City Rep production of “The Glass Menagerie” directed by David Cromer. fair enough. but suddenly, a door opened in the back of my mind, and what came flooding out were memories of the long-extinct Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s own “Glass Menagerie,” one of those seminal storefront theater shows of the early 2010’s that made this city so alluring, begging young artists to come here and make similarly scrappy, exciting work1. i remember adoring the production when I saw it remounted first at Theater Wit, then at the Den with the Hypocrites, the memory play turned mystic and nightmarish, evoking a dreamlike horror that felt dramaturgically sturdy. but most of all, I remember the music; a haunting theme that flowed through the production, tinkling keys waltzing through the air, gripping my heart throughout. what was that theme again? who wrote it? after doing some light research, the answer revealed itself in one of those bizarre world-colliding moments, like when you meet someone at a party in your late 20’s and then realize they’re actually someone you went to summer camp with decades ago. point being; the Mary-Arrchie “Glass Menagerie” score was written by Daniel Knox, a man I’ve never personally met, but have known him solely as the guy responsible for curating various David Lynch retrospectives at the Music Box Theatre over the years. from what I know, he’ll be back in April at the Music Box to honor the late surrealist’s work with another series. I hope to find the chance to tell him how a little tune from a tiny theater production over a decade ago has inexplicably stuck with me all these years.

  Subscribe now

THE MOVIES

• A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024, dir. James Mangold). watched at Landmark Century Centre Cinemas.

  • I’ll write a little more on this in this week’s forthcoming Best Picture Ranking Post, but the long and short of it is, I did enjoy watching this very mediocre film. Mangold and crew make very strong structural choices while the moment-to-moment storytelling is pretty middle-of-the-road and uninspiring. all of the female characters in this are written so terribly to the point of comedy. I enjoyed seeing my favorite theater actors Joshua Henry and Norbert Leo Butz pop up. and it’s true, Bob Dylan wrote some bangers, no argument here. Timothee Good.

• CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD (2025, dir. Julius Onah). watched at AMC River East.

  • my review for this for the Chicago Reader should be out any day now. cutting right to the chase, this movie is abysmal. the MCU needs to go bankrupt, stat.

• THE END (2024, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer). rented on Fandango at Home.

  • I’ll be writing more on this for this Friday’s Cine-File, so stay tuned for that. I had a wonderful time with this artsy chamber musical about a group of rich folks living in an underground bunker post-apocalypse. it’s giving Michael John LaChiusa musical commissioned by the Public Theater for their 2011-2012 season. the best musical film of 2024, no question!

that’s all for this week! anything you enjoyed watching this week? who’s your favorite SNL cast member? why is there an asterisk in the title of MCU’s upcoming THUNDERBOLTS*? have a lovely week!