when i said eat the rich i didn’t think the rich were going to eat my - actually i can’t be bothered with this

i have been delinquent with my substack lately. this is mostly to do with having edits to work on, and also a full time job, and also four million commitments and no off switch and no hope of rescue, but it is also because - to be perfectly honest - i simply couldn’t imagine wanting to write a substack about any of the multitude of things that have been going on, both cinematically and culturally, just recently. far be it from me to overstate anything ever, but i do recall thinking several times in the early parts of this year that i would rather eat my own skin than produce a public-facing opinion on the movie frankenstein (2025), and indeed that i would rather be found upside down covered in tar on the central reservation of the m6 than say a single word in front of god and substack about the movie wuthering heights (2026)*. perhaps this is cowardice on my part. perhaps i am simply too old. perhaps after a certain point in every sensible person’s life, the impulse to get one’s metaphorical head kicked in for being like idk man, it seems like making dumbfuck movies that don’t trust their audiences is really hot right now and also accusing the detractors of a bad and tedious movie of being misogynistic because the bad and tedious movie was made by a woman is in fact inherently misogynistic begins to cool. either way. here today gone tomorrow and all flesh is as grass and so on.

if i were to offer any vaguely topical opinion on What Has Been Going On, just lately, i might say that without bearing any particular ill will to amy madigan qua amy madigan, the fact of her oscar win was deeply lowering to me personally, purely by virtue of empowering zach cregger; a man whose artistic process is roughly akin to drawing a pair of tits on a grundon bin filled with air horns and then jumping in it. i don’t want to get into it all over again on weapons (2025), both because i have already covered it and because i simply won’t live that long, but suffice it to say that any critical vote in favour of that movie is, to me, akin to someone telling the person who lives next door to you and plays the trumpet with the window open that they’re really good at playing the trumpet with the window open and should in fact do it more.

as a side note, i’m frankly extremely glad the oscars are over and done with, mostly because every year around february time i become briefly and terribly certain that the oscars are in fact never going to end, and that it will somehow always be oscar season, and that we have always been here, sir, in oscar season, and that the rest of my life will consist only of oscar season, and therefore only leonardo di caprio giving hollow-eyed interviews to that inescapable woman who asks people questions about chicken tenders, and everyone arguing about whether it’s praxis to get a face-lift and ethan hawke demonstrably being the only person, apparently anywhere, who knows how to read.

so yes.

anyway.

that’s why i’ve not been updating my substack. now i’m going to update my substack.

*i should say that bringing up both frankenstein and wuthering heights as examples of things i cannot bear to think about should not be taken as any kind of judgement on jacob elordi, an actor who i used to consider a straight woman’s concern but have since become deeply compelled by, perhaps because of his monstrous height or perhaps because i witnessed an interview in which he drew his finger down his nose like lady gaga in the movie a star is born (2018), thus enchanting me forever. i think he’s neat. i think he’d be good in like, a wharton adaptation, but they’re too busy casting people who look like they know what nalgene is in those, so never mind.

+

the other day, i had to find something to do because an existing plan had fallen through and i wasn’t meeting my wife until later. faced with the prospect of finding a movie to watch that was not project hail mary (2026) or project hail mary wearing a pair of false glasses and a fake moustache, i flailed around for approximately forty-five minutes, before finally deciding to attend the single screening i could find of how to make a killing (2026); a movie that bravely asks the question: what if the rights to american psycho were tied up so we had to stick glen powell in kind hearts and coronets instead.

i should say, right off the bat: i am a glen powell enjoyer. i am typically highly susceptible to any white boy of the month, and glen powell is, in my opinion, actually very talented in a way that people tend to forget given all the other myriad things it is possible to assume about glen powell. unfortunately i think he’s great in top gun (2022) and he’s great in hit man (2023) and he’s great in set it up (2018) and he’s great in that one snl sketch where he has to sing about how he misses his daughter’s ex. everybody wants some!! (2016) is one of my favourite movies of all time, in no small part because of glen powell’s performance in it. so on one level, how to make a killing was an easy sell for me.

in brief, the movie tells the story of the disinherited and stupidly named becket redfellow committing a series of increasingly baroque murders of his assorted uncles and cousins in the hopes of getting his hands on the family fortune. in less brief, the movie is an exceptionally silly meditation on how many different types of baseball cap glen powell can reasonably be expected to wear to a string of family funerals, masquerading as a treatise on the bleak dissatisfaction at the core of capitalism and jazzed up by margaret qualley wandering around in chanel business casual, topher grace for some reason playing a megachurch minister on crack cocaine and ed harris delivering all his lines as if he’s calling in on a bad line from argentina. people are dispatched in increasingly ridiculous ways - the moment when glen powell shoots ed harris five times with a bow and arrow and he collapses like boromir is rendered funnier than it should be by how extremely relieved ed harris looks to be on the floor - and all with a pervading sense that everyone involved should probably just have gone outside and touched grass and it probably would have been ok. i enjoyed it very much, even if i’m not certain it would be correct to say that it was good or that it worked or that i left the cinema afterwards unimpeded by such thoughts as “where did casting get adrian lukis’ number”, but still. my general experience was positive, and really only rendered more so by my experience, some nights later, of going to see the movie ready or not 2: here i come (2026), and realising about fifteen minutes in that it was a no-holds barred disaster.

ready or not (2019) is, in my opinion, a pretty fantastic movie, so it brings me no pleasure to report that ready or not 2 is not only bad and stupid but bad, stupid and boring, which is a far greater feat when you think that it involves sarah michelle gellar, david cronenberg, the concept of ritualised global scale billionaire human-hunting, a black mass, a goat, and samara weaving, who is wonderful and really deserves better than the warmed-over cruise ship buffet this movie tries to pass off as a new idea. as before, samara weaving’s bride is being hunted by rich people who have made a pact with the devil, only this time there are more rich people, and this time samara weaving also has a sister, played by kathryn newton, although these additions are completely pointless on both sides and add nothing, so i won’t dwell. the problem with the movie is not, i think, entirely down to any one thing, although there are a few stabs i could make in the direction of a probable culprit. perhaps it’s the fact that the always-enjoyable elijah wood has been hired with the express purpose of delivering exposition, largely read directly from the pages of a book, and he does that, and the movie is still completely incoherent. perhaps it’s the fact that the movie relocates much of the gothic cluedo board dark night manor house action of the original to a golf course, in the daytime. perhaps it’s the fact that horror movies about eating the rich are, by this point, so played out that it’s almost impossible to watch one without a strong sense of existential nausea. yes, it’s still a good idea. no you can’t just say it and then look at me happily like zach cregger having once again identified a boob on an older woman. it’s 2026, you have to give me more than that.

in many ways, ready or not 2 is swimming in the same waters as how to make a killing - both of them intimately invested in the twin storytelling pillars of apocalypse capitalism and killing people in really dumb ways. the difference, i suppose, is that how to make a killing is fundamentally less irritating than ready or not 2 (the latter of always seeming a second away from making its characters deliver dialogue of the “that went well” variety) but also infinitely less self-satisfied and also at least nominally interested in something of the actual griminess of contending with the super-rich. it may be silly, but it is nonetheless a movie which, i think, has some sense of the murk through which its characters as struggling - a sense, however cartoonishly conveyed, that big money is ultimately destructive to the soul, and an underlying note of something real and dark and bleak accompanying this. ready or not 2, on the other hand, seems mostly content to sit and point at something and wait for us to clap our hands. rich people are bad, right, everyone’s always on their phones, right, also look we soundtracked a fight scene to total eclipse of the heart. idk, it all felt like the cinematic equivalent of waving a bunch of keys in front of a baby. although i guess it was good when samara weaving stuck that guy in a washing machine. so idk.