#40: June Round-Up
And a little bit of July. Plus favorite movies of the year so far!
In June, I canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in the rain and then watched him win the primary in such an immediate slam dunk that I was filled with a swell of optimism unmerited by the rest of the month’s news (in particular, the relentless campaign of terror in my hometown). I sweated a lot and went on the Roosevelt Island gondola of Spider-Man fame for the first time. Adam made me ride a Citibike around the island and bullied me for hitting the brake the whole time (I was scared). I went home for a week and my grandma flew out too and she ate 6,000 cherries and our whole family watched Shohei Ohtani hit a home run (before the Dodgers proceeded to lose 7 games in a row).
On a housekeeping note, there’s a little July in here because I want to talk Superman and I’m also trying out slightly new formatting. Idk!
Tonikaku
In LA, my mom and grandma wanted to show me Tonikaku, a Japanese comedian whose schtick is that he can “pose naked” while in fact wearing a Speedo. Specifically, they wanted to show me his audition from Britain’s Got Talent.
Here is what I like about this clip:
Makes me laugh a lot.
After some initial horror because they think he’s going to whip his hog out, the judges LOVE him. Simon is dazzled and calls him the funniest contestant they’ve had on all year.
They keep calling him “Tony” because they don’t realize “Tonikaku” is a complete Japanese word/stage name.
On the flip side, you can tell Tonikaku doesn’t speak much English, but he’s really good at repeating what the judges say back loudly and enthusiastically and everyone loves it.
My mom is fascinated by the fact that in Japan, when Tonikaku says “Don’t worry, I’m wearing” it’s a complete sentence in Japanese but in America, the audience completes the sentence with “…PANTS!”
Movies: New Releases
The Phoenician Scheme
Charming, pretty, laugh out loud funny, the fact that Anderson dedicated the film to his late father in law made me cry in the theater and also I haven’t thought about this movie much since I saw it outside the context of Adam asking me if I’ll get the Mia Threapleton bangs this fall (answer: maybe).
Materialists
This movie sucks. Celine Song loves Ideas and hates people, maybe. I wasn’t surprised I disliked this because I found Past Lives to be more interested in metaphor than human romance, and I couldn’t imagine anything good coming of the sauceless trio that is Dakota Johnson/Chris Evans/Pedro Pascal but it is laughable how little chemistry they have with one another and how gruesomely Song uses a sexual assault subplot to give her main character an unconvincing epiphany.
28 Years Later
A stylish, grotesque, deeply humane film about how England is a freaky place. At the time of viewing, I was taken by this film’s emotional core, far-reaching empathy, classic Boyle flair, its mystical/prehistoric reverence for death, interesting ideas about British empire, the wackadoo ending and Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Hot and Innocent Dad.1 I had slightly more mixed feelings about how much story is spent on Kid Doing Something Stupid and the fact that the great Jodie Comer spends most of the film groggy or in a state of hallucination (boring to me…) but a few weeks later, I’ve only grown fonder of this movie. Every bad new blockbuster I watch fuels my love of 28 Years Later!! I cannot wait for THE BONE TEMPLE!
F1
Originally, I was perfectly excited for Maverick-lite with a worse star/mode of transportation but by the time F1 arrived I was, to be honest, mad at Brad Pitt whose “I’m a chill guy and I’m over all this drama” press tour (the drama in question being abusing his wife and children) left a bad taste in my mouth. I was still prepared for a serviceable blockbuster with cool race scenes but F1 is too flimsily constructed to be fun. Pitt plays an over-the-hill, retired-ish racer named Sonny Hayes who brings his swaggering, maverick know-how to a struggling Formula 1 team and even though Kerry Condon gives a big speech about how his cowboy, lone wolf routine is tacky and antithetical to playing a team sport, Hayes is proven to be correct and good the whole time and ultimately sexually irresistible to Condon’s Smart but Sexy Lady Engineer (cannot emphasize enough what a criminal use of Condon this is). The other women in this movie are: pit crew woman who keeps messing up, mom, and Simone Ashley who was demoted from “girlfriend” to “Simone Ashley as Herself in crowd.” None of this would offend me as much if the movie wasn’t boring with 15 repetitive race scenes that progressively lose meaning and tension as the film fails to produce a compelling emotional hook. This sucks because the cast around Pitt is really good. Condon and Damson Idris are underserved but Javier Bardem somehow emerges unscathed.
Superman (2025)
I love Superman, the guy. He was my favorite superhero when I was little because Christopher Reeve is handsome and I sort of wanted to be a journalist and though he’s probably been demoted to #2 now below Queens’ own Spiderman, I still love him and am impervious to accusations that he is “boring.” Sorry but I have no problem with a man being beautiful, good-hearted, a little clumsy, and in love with a fast-talking brunette. That’s all I want to see at the movies, and having great taste in women is extremely important to me. I also like that he has the best musical theme. All that to say, I was genuinely excited for this despite my historically mixed feelings on James Gunn.2
Unfortunately Gunn, having assembled the perfect ingredients (fantastic, good-looking cast with tons of chemistry + a pleasantly colorful and retro look for Metropolis) manages to cook it all up into an occasionally fun but mostly frustrating slop. For one thing, Gunn makes the big decision to drop the audience smack in the middle of the Superman story—which I understand—but I think he calibrates a little too hard and forgets to ground us at all in Clark’s upbringing, his job at the Daily Planet (why so little Wendell Pierce!!), and his romance with Lois Lane. I’m not stupid. Nobody is ever gonna make a Superman movie for me (His Girl Friday with more kissing and some kind of arc where Lois learns to stop submitting to the New York Times School of Bootlicking, Violent Objectivity), but to spend as much time and energy as Gunn does instead on outer spacey portal nonsense, introducing 4-7 additional guys who will be eligible for a spin-off, and a well-meaning (ish?) but muddled political plot3 that feels ickier the more I think about it is a let-down. The best scene in the movie, where Lois interviews Clark and grills him on his decision to save human lives by pointing out the myriad ways he’s broken laws/conventions is an interesting and relevant idea that gets abandoned in favor of our hero and the most boring villain punching each other near a hideous CGI black hole.
Superman (2025) Cast Promotional Videos
Movie aside, I am so charmed by this cast and I’m having fun watching little videos of them doing lie detector tests (this is the best one) and chemistry tests and holding puppies and stuff. I like that David Corenswet is a beautiful dork about Star Wars and musicals.
Movies: Repertory
Masayuki Suo at Film Forum
Film Forum’s been playing Masayuki Suo’s 1996 unlikely-hobby comedy Shall We Dance? which I watched and loved earlier this year but I was excited because they also programmed, for 1 night only each, two earlier, hard to find Suo comedies.
Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t, the better of the two, is about a popular but lazy college student who is blackmailed by his professor into joining the school’s failing sumo team (basically the Glee pilot where Mr. Schue recruits Finn, minus planted drugs). The plot is what you’d expect but it’s so laugh out loud funny—full of farts, falling down, swinging your arms around weird, and frankly, a lot of diarrhea.
Fancy Dance (no relation to the lovely Lily Gladstone movie from last year) is about another hot, lazy guy4 whose dad forces him to spend a year at a Buddhist monastery before he can inherit his father’s temple. I did not know a temple could be a lucrative form of passive (?) income. I also didn’t know Buddhists were allowed to hit each other with sticks this much. More good poop jokes in this one too.
Cleopatra at the Academy Museum
The massive Geffen Theater with its plush, red velvet seats at the Academy Museum is probably the best movie theater in the whole world and a great place to spend 4 hours watching the 1963 Cleopatra with your dad (if your dad is into that kinda thing. Mine certainly is). Cleopatra is a glorious, expensive, campy mess and also a surprisingly literate and watchable epic. Much of the runtime is wasted on various servants marching in and out of rooms. The costuming is insane. I love her blue glittery eyeshadow, duh, but there’s also a great scene where Cleopatra is making war plans in a 60s leopard print swing coat. I like when Antony’s senate coworkers come all the way out to Egypt to fetch him back and find him giggling in a giant bathtub, playing with a loofah. Overriding feeling I had while watching this was that I should finally watch Drag Race for similar impact.
Plane Movies
Mean Girls (2024)
One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I was not aware this musical sucked so bad.
Clueless
Perfect.
At Home
Boyhood
For some reason I watched this over the course of 3 weeks in 20 minute chunks and for that first 20 minutes I really thought, who the fuck cares but then I realized I cared because every human life is full of wonder. Everybody matters, even boys who get really bad haircuts year after year until they become 18 year olds with tiny gauges and ratty facial hair. More importantly, I cared because Boyhood Boy is exactly one year younger than me. Obama optimism… Half Blood Prince midnight party with no knowledge of what Rowling would become… “Crank That (Soulja) Boy”… I lived it all. Personal identification aside, I think Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are great here. Hawke in particular was mesmerizing to me as a charismatic, loving deadbeat-ish dad who swans in once in a while to teach his kids that the Iraq war is bad and the Beatles are good.
Il Sorpasso
Masterpiece alert!! This tragic and summery Italian comedy is about a shy and nervous law student, Roberto, who gets sort-of kidnapped by a vivacious and insane screwball comedy heroine who happens to be a 40-something tornado of an Italian man named Bruno and the two go on a wild boys road trip together. I will never drive in Italy, that’s for sure.
And the rest in rapid fire:
The Swimmer (1968): Awesome, unsettling movie about how sad and pathetic being a man is.
Body Heat: Sweatiest movie I have ever seen (complimentary).
Norbit (re-watch): Bad, but it was for Brian Wilson.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (re-watch): So easy and excellent and funny and humane, it feels like there should be a hundred of these, but it’s basically impossible for anybody to make a movie this good.
Man on Fire: Perfect when it’s a Denzel-Dakota buddy movie, loses the sauce when it gets to the revenge half.
Tootsie (re-watch): Off-putting to me, but Hoffman shoving a random mime in the park and Teri Garr screaming “What are you saying to me” are basically the two best bits of comedy in the history of the genre. When you watch Teri Garr in this scene you realize how totally unacceptable Dakota Johnson’s whole deal is.
Godzilla Minus One (re-watch): Ethan Hunt logic (every life is valuable).
Television
The best show on television, The Gilded Age, is back!!!!! The show has upped its stakes considerably (our sweet new money heiress Gladys has been sold into a loveless match with an English duke in a lavish wedding that made me cry) although there are still plenty of low stakes shenanigans to be found (footman who invented an alarm clock subplot). I’m petrified that Julian Fellowes is trying to break up my favorite oil baron TV marriage. On the flip side, I thought he was doing some kind of boring consumption plot for Denee Benton’s Peggy but turns out he was just using her brief illness to: introduce us to a hot doctor played by my beloved Jordan Donica (so good as Lancelot in Lincoln Center’s Camelot a few years ago and I’ve been wondering where he’s been ever seen!!!) & get Peggy out of white Fifth Ave. and into black Newport high society (fascinating!). Perhaps I should trust him more. The best thing about The Gilded Age is that its cast is made up about 94% with my favorite Broadway stars because it shoots in New York—Law & Order level cameos without anything disgusting.
Theater
I went to Carnegie Hall for the first time for the star-studded (Kate Baldwin! Andrew Barth Feldman! Helen J. Shen! Santino Fontana! Surprise Jennifer Simard! So many more!) Hello Dolly! in Concert which was really not for Hello! Dolly beginners like myself, but was lovely all the same. I listened to “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” for a week straight after and it made me cry every time. What if everything was good?
Book (Only read 1 book again)
I read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando for book club which is obviously great but also the whole time I kind of wanted to be watching the Sally Potter film, which I haven’t seen in 5ish years, but recall it effectively and beautifully capturing the spooky sumptuousness of the Elizabethan era, and onwards. Plus, hot Billy Zane!
Favorite Movies of 2025 So Far
We’re just past halfway through the year, so here are my favorite movies of the year so far, because by the time we hit Dec/Jan my list tends to be stacked with later fall releases:
Black Bag
Presence
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Eephus
28 Years Later
The Phoenician Scheme
Paddington in Peru
Sinners
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Better Man
Sorry he’s SUPPORTIVE and didn’t want to make his idiot son feel bad!!!!!!!!! Re: the kissing, it’s not very nice but I get where he’s coming from.
You’ll have to harpoon me before I ever sit down to watch Guardians of the Galaxy 3 which apparently has an extended trauma plot about the Bradley Cooper raccoon.
SPOILERS but: Black site thing is kind of cool and definitely true. Tech billionaire manipulating the government for profit also true. The TV show Evil does the “villain controls online trolls” thing a lot better. It’s almost impossible not to read this as an Israel/Palestine allegory, but Gunn himself has denied this so he either wasn’t thinking about it at all OR he wants to play it both ways without ever committing to saying anything, which isn’t very Superman of him at all. The refusal to give the Jarhanpur plot the obvious, satisfying conclusion with Superman himself is bizarre and deflating. Finally, I appreciate the whole “Superman is an immigrant and he gets the job done” press tour but the Big Twist about his home country ends up having insane implications.
Both played by Masahiro Motoki who is soooo handsome and great in both movies.
Can a loving father forgive his treasured daughter for liking/loving any Wes Anderson film? I’m working on it.
“Celine song loves Ideas and hates people” is the perfect way to sum up Materialists. Such an aggressively unspecific movie