Movies I Watched This Week (7/7/25 - 7/13/25)

PRE-ROLL

• Let’s Talk About “Diana”

  • much ink has already been spilled on the Broadway run of Joe DiPietro and David Bryan’s “Diana,” the musical chronicling the royal life of Diana Spencer that completely and utterly flopped on Broadway. the show is now making its midwest premiere at Chicago’s very own Theo1 (as of this writing, it plays for one more week), and I went to see it last night. I had a lot of fun with what is, ultimately, A Very Bad Piece of Musical Theater Writing. “Diana” as a text is a nightmare of clashing tones, its reputation as a “camp classic” completely belied by the material desperately grasping for seriousness throughout. the whiplash alone I got veering from Diana’s heartfelt visit with patients suffering from AIDs to Diana’s catty fighting with Camilla (“it’s the Thrilla in Manilla but with Diana and Camilla,” the lyric proclaims) was enough to send me to a chiropractor. that said, this production ultimately chooses to lean into the earnestness of it all which I think was the right move, and from a vocal standpoint, everyone was working at the top of the game, no one more so than Diana herself, Kate McQuillan, giving a lovely performance and meeting the material where it needed to at every instance. at the end of the day, bizarre stuff! I plan to never see this musical ever again.

THE MOVIES

• CASTRATION MOVIE (2024, dir. Louise Weard). watched on screener.

  • wrote about this for Cine-File here. it’s the four-and-a-half-hour trans epic we’ve all been waiting for. plays this Wednesday at 7pm at the Music Box!

    

• SERIAL MOM (1994, dir. John Waters). watched on Blu Ray.

  • Danielle and I were looking for a light film less than 100 minutes to watch on Friday night and this was the winner! Waters’ later films are fascinating to me, matching his perverse and subversive humor with bigger budgets and Real Actors, but this has been the most successful of that lot I’ve seen. Kathleen Turner is having the time of her life in the title role, and the film’s general take on the media’s frantic exploitative obsession with serial killers is a general hoot. best use of the song “Tomorrow” from “Annie” i’ve ever seen in a major motion picture.

that’s all for this week, folks! we’re going on Official Vacation next week, so look for a super-sized post in a few weeks. stay well!