For someone who loves horror, I am awfully squeamish. Once it surpasses a certain threshold, I am physically repulsed by violence and gore, particularly sexual assaults and bloodshed directed toward children and animals. It’s not unusual for me to spend a good percentage of an extremely gory horror film looking away from the screen so that whatever I’m watching does not offend my delicate sensibilities.

I’m also someone who, paradoxically, loves violence when it’s done skillfully enough. Last week, for example, y’all voted for me to see the badass, much buzzed-about Hong Kong instant cult classic The Furious. I adored that movie and its elegantly choreographed mayhem.

The Furious went too far, then just kept going. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Watching The Death of Robin Hood, I found myself wishing that I were re-watching The Furious rather than subjecting myself to the dreary intensity of the revisionist take on the oft-told tale of a charming rogue who steals from the rich and gives to the poor.

That’s not the Robin Hood at the center of The Death of Robin Hood. This newfangled take on a classic hero murders the rich, and murders the poor. For good measure, he also murders the upper middle-class, the middle-class, the working class, the working poor, and pretty much everybody he encounters.

You know the phrase, “in your face?” This is one in-your-face Robin Hood. The Death of Robin Hood is the grittiest and most revisionist of gritty, revisionist takes. Robin Hood is historically depicted as a force for good in the universe.

Everyone knows that Robin Hood was a hero. What The Death of Robin Hood presupposes is…maybe he wasn’t? The Death of Robin Hood doesn’t just depict its title character as a bad guy; it portrays him as the worst guy in the history of the universe.

The Death of Robin Hood has the same level of ultra-violence as The Furious, but where the savagery in the Hong Kong action movie is exciting and fun, the kind of pulse-pounding, bone-crunching excitement you want to experience again and again, the murderousness of The Death of Robin Hood is soul-crushing and dispiriting. It’s the kind of movie that’s so pummeling in its intensity that you wouldn’t want to watch it a second time. I wish that I had not seen it the first time, either. I walked out of The Furious excited. I left The Death of Robin Hood exhausted and dispirited, and not just because I took in a 10:20 screening and Regal has a half hour of commercials before each movie.

At the very least, you cannot accuse The Death of Robin Hood of not living up to its “He was no hero” tagline. That’s not just accurate; it’s a wild understatement. Hugh Jackman’s Robin Hood in the winter of his years is no flawed antihero; he’s a fucking sociopath who kills reflexively, without remorse or shame.

The latest from Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One director Michael Sarnoski opens with a plucky young woman attempting to disguise herself as a boy to get close to Hugh Jackman’s Robin Hood, who has the beard of an Old Testament prophet and a brooding air.

She speaks loftily of the legend of Robin Hood, who takes from bad men and gives to the meek. Jackman’s existentially exhausted sociopath insists that Robin Hood was nothing like the legend, but rather a thief and killer who racked up a body count equivalent to medium-sized wars.

Robin Hood spends his days reflecting moodily on his past and all of the horrible crimes that he has committed, and dodging murder attempts by the revenge-minded relatives of the many people that he has killed.

In what will become a pattern, Robin Hood murders the young woman with a casualness and ease that betrays his familiarity with murder. Robin Hood has killed so many people that he can only remember a fraction of the people he’s slaughtered. It would take a photographic memory like that of Taxi star Marilu Henner, who claims to remember every day of her life since she was 11, for Robin Hood to remember everyone he 86d.

Robin Hood isn’t just an unusually prolific mass murderer: he wipes out entire bloodlines. He’s killed multiple generations of the same families. It seems like he’s killed at least one member of every clan in England.

For the first act, Robin Hood pretty much kills everyone that he meets, with the exception of Bill Skarsgård’s Little John. There’s nothing merry about The Death of Robin Hood. Hugh Jackman’s blood-crazed bandit doesn’t have a band of merry men: he has a single murderous man. Little John loves murdering people almost as much as his pal Robin Hood. They take great delight in massacring the masses.

The only thing Little John cares about is his pious red-headed wife and his daughter. When his wife is killed, Little John is lost, distraught, and eager for revenge.

The Death of Robin Hood’s first act simultaneously evokes Terence Malick’s obsession with nature, wilderness, and heady philosophical concerns, and the morally repugnant and borderline unwatchable 2023 exploitation shocker Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey.

Sarnoski gives Robin Hood the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey treatment, re-imagining a legendary hero and friend to children everywhere as an unstoppable killing machine who thinks nothing of shooting arrows inside the skulls of enemies, or anyone, really.

I found the violence and nihilism of The Death of Robin Hood’s first act overwhelming, empty, and off-putting. Sarnoski is an auteur, so he films the bloodshed with a painterly sense of framing and composition. The harsh, downbeat beauty of the cinematography fails to mask the ugliness at the film’s core.

I was consequently relieved when the indiscriminate killing of men, women, children, and animals stops, or at least slows down after Robin Hood nearly dies an overdue and much-deserved death, only to be nursed back to life by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a mysterious healer at a rural nunnery.

Robin Hood’s body is nearly destroyed. His mind isn’t in much better shape, but Sister Brigid takes pity on him. She sees the humanity in a man the film depicts as the worst kind of monster. Robin Hood stops murdering for a while, and comes to understand the charms of a quiet life not devoted to single-handedly reducing medieval England’s population.

Jackman’s brooding brute forms a fatherly relationship with a wild little girl who needs any kind of male presence in her life, even when it comes from Killy McSlaughter.

Can Robin Hood be redeemed? No, he definitely cannot. Is salvation possible? No. He can only end his life in a less genocidal fashion than he lived it.

Jackman gives an appropriately intense, depressing performance, but there’s nothing to the character or film but brooding and brutality.

I admired elements of The Death of Robin Hood like the cinematography, the music, and the performances, but hated much of it with a white-hot burning passion.

If you’re going to see a 2026 Hugh Jackman vehicle, see The Sheep Detectives. It’s a more entertaining film, if I might set the bar very low, but also a deeper and more philosophical one, and a much more moving and adult portrayal of death, grief, and loss, despite being a movie for families rather than a pretentious movie for people who love to see the many colorful ways that human bodies and minds can be destroyed.

1.5 of 5

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In Yorgos Lanthimos’ acidic social satire Bugonia, Emma Stone is boldly unlikable as Michelle Phillips, an Elizabeth Holmes-like girl boss who has risen to the pinnacle of corporate power by removing everything that might distract from success, including children, family, pets, and her own humanity.

Michelle is guilty of the same crime as Hillary Clinton…

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Nicolas Cage delivers a pair of Oscar-worthy turns that perfectly showcase the dueling halves of the actor’s persona in Spike Jonze’s 2002 comedy-drama Adaptation.

Cage’s performance as a fictionalized version of real- life Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, a neurotic struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, taps into the artistic side of Cage’s persona. The role of Charlie’s fictional twin brother, Donald, an optimist who skips giddily through life, serves as a terrific vehicle for Cage the entertainer.

The brothers’ screenplays reflect this divide. Charlie wants to articulate something profound about the human condition. Donald, however, just wants to make money. Kaufman’s script splits the action into parallel narratives that connect in the third act as the film shifts from comedy to seedy thriller.

In the other narrative, author Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) finds the subject of a lifetime in John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a renegade horticulturalist obsessed with the mysterious Ghost Orchid.

Adaptation makes inspired use of Streep’s ethereal beauty and air of detachment. That works perfectly for her bittersweet performance as a journalist whose existence grows progressively more visceral until she’s doing drugs while having sex with a toothless man in a swamp.

Adaptation ends up doing everything its lead character promises it won’t. It’s like a magician who reveals the secrets of their tricks yet still manages to wow audiences.

Cage, director Jonze, and Kaufman invest authentic emotion into a premise that, on paper, reads as ironic, resulting in a film of genuine beauty and unexpected depth.

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It can be hard to believe that Steven Spielberg was at one point slated to direct the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, while Martin Scorsese was supposed to direct Schindler’s List before the legendary auteurs came to their senses and realized that it would make slightly more sense for the most famous Jewish filmmaker of all time to direct a Holocaust drama and for a man synonymous with violence, intensity, and toxic masulinity to helm a remake of a famously sordid crime melodrama.

Spielberg apparently wanted Harrison Ford to play respectable lawyer and family man Sam Bowden and Bill Murray for the flashier role of vengeance-crazed ex-convict Max Cady, who was played in the 1962 original by Robert Mitchum. Instead, Murray’s Mad Dog and Glory costar Robert De Niro earned an Academy Award nomination for playing the larger-than-life villain, while Nick Nolte ended up playing the lawyer whose family he methodically stalks. Gregory Peck played Sam Bowden in the original, and has a hilarious cameo here as Cady’s sleazy attorney. Cape Fear was brutal and seedy for a Scorsese movie. Its sordid intensity would have shocked fans of Spielberg, who remained an uncredited producer through his Amblin production company.

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So think up some questions! If this is anything like the last few attempts, you could very well be the only person on the stream. Like Ray and Dave Davies’ personal trainer, I am still working out the kinks!

For his 1952 comedy Actors and Sin, writer-co-director Ben Hecht turned his keen wit and incisive gaze toward worlds he had conquered: theater and film.

Actors and Sin consists of two unrelated vignettes about show-business egos. In the first, ham Maurice Tillayou (Edgar G. Robinson) stage-manages his actress daughter Marcia’s (Marsha Hunt) life as if it were a theatrical melodrama.

In the second story, agent Orlando Higgens (Eddie Albert) becomes the reluctant representative of Daisy Marcher, the red-hot screenwriter of the lurid melodrama Woman of Sin, a script studio head J.B Cobb (Alan Reed) is eager to buy.

J.B. doesn’t realize that the writer of the ultimate adult romance is a bratty nine-year-old with an abrasive honk of a voice and equally off-putting personality.

Hecht perversely cast his daughter Jenny as a maniacal moppet who mastered the art of being a Hollywood hack before puberty. The younger Hecht has a unique presence. It’s rare to see a child actor so disinterested in being likable. She seems less like a child than a weird old lady in miniature.

Actors and Sin feels like the cinematic equivalent of a short story collection or a pair of one-act plays full of witty banter.

The master of multiple mediums takes pleasure in the possibilities of words, some of which he delivers as narrator. Actors and Sin is a misanthropic gem from a man who understood Hollywood intimately.

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Considering the direction his career subsequently took, it's easy to forget that Ron Perlman rose to fame not as a towering badass who could crush skulls with his bare hands, but rather as a romantic leading man, albeit of the beastly variety, on a cheesy 1980s television show. It’s similarly easy to forget that Linda Hamilton achieved her second greatest fame as the female romantic lead on the aforementioned cheesy television show.

Beauty and the Beast was never a smash, but it was a cult hit with a devoted following that began to abandon it when Hamilton left during the third season after getting pregnant. It’s strangely forgotten these days, perhaps because it was the television equivalent of a romance novel, and those have never commanded respect or proven particularly enduring.

Perlman would go on to even greater fame as a tough-guy character actor whose height and physique made him a natural for villain roles, including the juicy part of Collie Entragian, the sheriff of a small Nevada town with a dark history, in the 2006 television movie Desperation.

Desperation’s full name is Stephen King’s Desperation, which feels like an unintentional self-own. King adapted his own 1996 novel for the teleplay, and it was directed by his frequent collaborator Mick Garris, who also helmed the King adaptations Sleepwalkers, Riding the Bullet, The Shining, Bag of Bones, and Quicksilver Highway, and co-wrote the story for the 1996 short film Michael Jackson’s Ghosts, a characteristically bizarre and self-indulgent short film, with King and Jackson.

I’m excited to revisit Michael Jackson’s Ghosts for this project, even if the only critic referenced in the “Reception” part of its Wikipedia page described it as “clunky, leaden, and overblown” and said it was a “staggeringly blunt” allegory for Jackson’s life and pop culture status.^[He attributed its failure to Jackson’s place in the public imagination at the time, following his recent divorce from Lisa Marie Presley and the 1993 child molestation allegations against him. The critic in question is, of course, Nathan Rabin, and that creep is wrong maybe 100 percent of the time.

Desperation is based on the 1996 novel of the same name, which is apparently a “mirror” novel to The Regulators, released the same year under King’s Richard Bachmann pseudonym, and features many of the same characters.

The Regulators apparently began life as a screenplay King was writing for legendary Western director and fellow boozehound Sam Peckinpah that was abandoned when the action auteur died. King then reworked The Regulators as a vehicle for rapper Warren G and singer Nate Dogg about a young Black man who is robbed of his Rolex and rings during a dice game gone awry, but is bailed out by his tough, gun-toting, yet smooth-singing pal, at which point they celebrate by taking some horny tricks to the Eastside Motel for sex.

King had some creative differences with his collaborators. He insisted that G and Dogg’s characters be geeks off the street, but they insisted on playing characters that were proficient with guns and able to earn their keep. Dogg’s 2011 death spelled doom for this new iteration of The Regulators.

Of all the King-Garris collaborations I’ve seen, Desperation is easily my favorite, and I’m intrigued by the existence of The Regulators to the point where I may read it at some point, if I have the time.

Desperation has a terrific cast that includes Henry Thomas, Annabel Gish, Charles Durning, Steven Weber, Tom Skerritt, and Matt Frewer, but Perlman dominates the proceedings with his scenery-chewing turn as a literal sheriff from hell, a maniac cop possessed by evil.

That makes it unfortunate that Perlman departs the proceedings halfway through when the earth demon that had taken over his body chooses a different, less physically imposing host.

The second half of Desperation suffers from Perlman’s absence and some seriously cheesy business involving a helpful ghost child and a demon, but it remains chilling and intense despite its occasional missteps.

Desperation opens with Peter (Thomas) and Mary (Gish) Jackson getting pulled over by Collie Entragian (Perlman) in the middle of the Nevada desert. The outsized lawman/law-breaker plants a comically oversized bag of marijuana in the couple’s car, then drives them to Desperation’s jail.

From the beginning, something is terribly wrong. Actually, everything is terribly wrong. Collie, an over-the-top caricature of a red-state bad cop, slips, “I’m going to kill you,” into the middle of reading the duo their Miranda Rights. Also, Desperation is full of dead animals, primarily dogs.

Collie makes good on his threat by killing Peter before they even reach the jail. A horrified Mary discovers that Collie has an unfortunate predilection for killing innocent people. All cops may be bad, but this one is positively demonic.

Collie previously murdered a little girl nicknamed Pie and imprisoned her devout brother, David Carver (Shane Haboucha), a pious child of unshakeable faith, and David and Pie’s father, Ralph (Frewer), and mother, Ellen (Sylva Kelegian).

The jail’s other inhabitant is Tom Billingsley (Charles Durning), a local veterinarian with a drinking problem who knew Collie before he became possessed and knows all about Desperation’s dark secrets and demons, both literal and metaphorical.

Elsewhere, roadie Steve Ames (Steven Weber, a year before starring in the King-penned and Garris-directed adaptation of The Shining) picks up hitchhiker Cynthia Smith (Kelly Overton) and gets a desperate call from his employer, Johnny Marinville (Skeritt), an author successful enough to employ him as his soundman during speaking engagements.

Collie fucks with the famous writer by pretending to be a huge fan, only to beat him up and imprison him in a jail surrounded by savage animals, seemingly under the control of Collie, or rather, Tak, the earth demon possessing him.

In Desperation, Steve and Cynthia are horrified to discover an unending series of corpses that, needless to say, did not die of old age or natural causes but were instead brutally murdered by Collie, or rather, the exemplar of pure evil controlling him.

Even for a Stephen King horror movie, Desperation is brutal and overflowing with death and corpses. It’s so unrelenting in its nastiness that I found myself worried about the psyche of Haboucha, whose role forces him to see things no child should have to witness, even for the sake of a movie, primarily in the form of the vast army of dead bodies that represent Desperation’s mostly murdered population.

Perlman is clearly having a blast playing an outsized figure of Satanic evil. There’s a deep streak of pitch-black comedy coursing through Perlman’s electrifying performance that does not compromise the terrifying viciousness of the character actor’s virtuoso performance.

If Tak had not decided to jump from Collie’s body to Ellen’s, the film’s villain would have ranked as one of the most terrifying and unforgettable bad guys in King’s oeuvre. Unfortunately, Perlman is missing in action for nearly all of Desperation’s second half.

Desperation opens much stronger than it closes, and would benefit from pruning a few unnecessary subplots, but it’s nevertheless a compellingly lurid B-movie that exploits our fear of empty spaces and lawmen who got into the business to abuse power and terrorize the very people they’re supposed to protect and serve.

Despite a modest budget and the constraints of appearing on network television, Desperation is a talky yet engaging terror tale distinguished by a wildly overqualified cast and a riveting central performance by Perlman that leaves us hungry for more.

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I like to think that there is a furtive blessing in every trauma I experience because it broadens my frame of reference and makes me a more experienced and authoritative writer. For example, when a car with the headlights off barreled into my wife’s BMW on Thanksgiving night and sent me to the hospital for nearly a week with a punctured lung and broken ribs, it hurt like hell, but it also gave me firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be in a car accident, and then to recover in a hospital bed while being pumped full of painkillers.

Then again, you do not need to be in a car accident to understand just how painful they can be. But when you’ve experienced that trauma yourself, you understand it on a deeper and more painful level.

Last night I watched The Furious, which sounds like a weird spin-off of a famously family- and car-focused franchise but is actually a badass Hong Kong action movie. In it, protagonist Wang Wei (Xie Miao) runs after the truck containing his beloved daughter and some nefarious child traffickers.

Miao resembles Robert Patrick’s unstoppable, shape-shifting android killer T-1000 from T2: Judgment Day as much as he does a flesh-and-blood human being. People under tremendous, life-altering stress are capable of seemingly superhuman feats, like the proverbial slight, unassuming mother who lifts a car off her child in the aftermath of a car crash because she’s so overcome with adrenaline.

Witnessing his daughter’s abduction has a similar effect on Wang, who races after the truck while wearing flimsy sandals, which he discards so he can run faster. Wang seems to be going about thirty miles an hour despite running barefoot over broken glass.

Then our underdog hero is hit by a car. He’s hit hard. It is not a love tap or a minor collision. A car slams into him when he should be so exhausted that he can’t move another inch.

I could feel the poor man’s pain in a way that would not have been possible if I hadn’t experienced something similar myself. For neither the first nor the last time, I let out an involuntary “Oh shit!” or “Damn!” because The Furious is a profoundly visceral experience that will make you feel like you’re being hit by a speeding truck of awesomeness.

I wanted the poor man to go to the hospital to recuperate, but he walks it off because there would be no movie if he did the smart thing and spent a few days in the hospital rather than pursue his goal with relentless, single-minded focus. It’s The Furious, not The Reasonable.

Instead of seeking timely medical treatment, Wang goes home, downs a fistful of painkillers, and pours some cold water on his injuries. I also staggered away from my car accident, convinced that I could handle the excruciating pain until I woke up in the morning with my face horrifically bloated from random air surging through my body after I punctured my lung and went to the hospital, where they confirmed that my shit was all fucked up, and I wouldn’t be going home any time soon.

Rather than spend time in a hospital bed recuperating, Wang engages in hand-to-hand combat with hundreds of henchmen. In the process, he racks up a body count in the triple digits.

Compared to the steroid-addled jocks of American action, Miao is slight and small to the point of being Lilliputian, but he’s superhuman in his speed, power, and agility. He’s a goddamn superhero in everyman garb, a ferocious force for good in a cartoonish realm of ultimate evil.

In the fast-paced The Furious, Wang is a simple man whose life revolves around spending time with his adoring daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), and teaching her everything he knows about martial arts, which appears to be everything.

Then one awful day, Rainy is bamboozled by a seemingly injured child seeking help. It’s a cynical ruse to lure innocent kiddies into a trap so they can be kidnapped and then trafficked by the sinister forces of Paklung (Joey Iwanaga), the ambitious son of a powerful crime lord who masks his evil with a veneer of upper-middle-class respectability.

Wang has an ally in his quest to bring down Paklung’s reign of terror in Navin (Joe Taslim), a chain-smoking journalist who has been going undercover as a criminal degenerate ever since his muckraking reporter wife Matia (Yanin Vismitananda) disappeared mysteriously while investigating Paklung’s trafficking ring.

Wang goes to the police with a physical description of the kidnappers and their license plate number, but they’re in league with the child traffickers and consequently of no help.

The Furious has the structure of a beat-em-up video game, with each bone-crunching, spine-snapping, mind-melting action setpiece bringing our heroes close to the Big Boss and victory.

From a plot, dialogue, and characterization standpoint, The Furious is nothing special. It shares the same premise of seemingly half of all action movies: traumatized heroes get revenge on the monsters who hurt someone they love. Whenever Wang and Navin are not destroying vast armies of heavies with their feet and fists of fury, the movie feels as cheesy as a 1980s Cannon B-movie.

The Furious is a corny exploitation movie with some of the most incredible action sequences ever committed to film. The movie’s boilerplate aspects cease to matter once the fighting resumes, and it instantly morphs into a stone-cold masterpiece of pure action.

Director Kenji Tanigaki’s background as an in-demand fight choreographer is apparent in every impeccably designed melee and beautifully executed fistfight. The Furious is a balletic bloodbath, a soaring symphony of slaughter, the ultimate in ultra-violence.

It’ll bring in a heavy like Ho (Brian Le), a hammer-wielding brute who seems even more massive and intimidating due to the small, slight stature of the other characters, who seems like the baddest motherfucker in the history of film, only to top him with a villain who is even more of an unforgettable, iconic badass like Tak (Yayan Ruhian), a skilled assassin in a red track suit who is handy with a knife and even handier with a bow and arrow.

Paklung at first appears to be a businessman content to let others handle the dirty business of kiddie abduction and mass murder, but he turns into a seemingly unstoppable fighting force when angry. The Furious has its overmatched heroes square off against dozens of enthusiastic killers, often at the same time, but the movie’s extraordinary climax finds Wang and Navin squaring off against Paklung and Tak, with Ho in the mix as a wild card.

The Furious takes Robert McKee’s famous line about action being character to a cartoonish extreme. We learn NOTHING about Wang except that he’s better at killing people and avoiding death than anyone in the history of film. We don’t need to know anything about Wang for him to be a great character. He’s defined less by a hacky backstory than by his extraordinary fighting ability.

Like pornography and horror movies, action movies aspire to a physiological response. I was so blown away by The Furious’ action that I found myself issuing so many grunts of astonishment that I was worried that I would annoy the other three people in the theater.

Believe the hype. The Furious will bring out the kid in you, even if it’s so violent that it probably merits an XXX. It’s full of brutality, but its violence is anything but gratuitous. It’s the other elements of the movie that feel unnecessary. The violence, in sharp contrast, is absolutely essential, as is the film itself.

4.5 Stars out of 5

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A really great podcast can get you interested in subject matter you otherwise wouldn’t care about. I started listening to Maintenance Phase because I’m a fan of co-host Michael Hobbes’ If Books Could Kill, an essential podcast about timely, then hilariously dated tomes that captured the cultural zeitgeist, hurt people, groups, and institutions, then were mostly forgotten. I’m talking about books like Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, a massively influential guide to winning a man’s heart that encourages anxious women to abandon their identities and personalities and change into whatever their husbands most desire that they haven’t gotten around to covering.

I will write about If Books Could Kill here, but I love writing about terrible books in part because terrible book culture isn’t anywhere near as evolved and ubiquitous as bad movie culture. Some of my favorite episodes of Maintenance Phase, which Hobbes hosts with Aubrey Gordon, are devoted to diet books from a delightfully random assortment of celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Ed McMahon, and Mike Huckabee.

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For the last month or so, my sick father’s impending death has cast a long, dark shadow over every aspect of my life. I did not realize that death, grief, and mourning play a central role in Bring Her Back and The Life of Chuck.

Last night, roughly half an hour before Father’s Day, my father died after 77 great years. Thanks, Dad! He died while I was watching a movie that is about the death of Chuck and the world, as much as it is about his life.

It seems fitting that I was at the movies, very late on a Saturday night, in a nearly empty theater watching an unusually emotional and poignant exploration of the joy, pain, and confusion of being human in an unfathomably complicated world, when my old man passed away, because movies were something we shared. Pop culture was an intense bond between us for as long as I can remember. He loved movies. He loved the blues. He loved his family. He loved life.

My dad would take me to the movies and the video store. Instead of Chevy Chase or Eddie Murphy movies, I watched classic musicals, like my dad’s favorite, Meet Me in St. Louis. I’d play hooky to see movies instead of suffering through the Chicago public school system. He’d always write me a note facetiously attributing my absence to sickness or a family emergency, not an urgent need to continue my life’s work: finding out which movies had boobs in them and which did not.

My dad always took tremendous pride in my career as a writer. I felt bad that, after a certain point, there wasn’t much success for him to take pride in because I struggled professionally the way he did after he left his secure but soul-crushing government job.

Dad understood that movie theaters were a special place. They were sacred. They were a place where I didn’t have to mask or pretend to be neurotypical, where I could be alone with movies, my eternal special interest, as well as popcorn and a big cup of Cherry Coca-Cola.

The Life of Chuck is a Stephen King adaptation about death, dying, and a slow-motion apocalypse that’s also, surprisingly but delightfully, about life’s fragility and the life-affirming joy of dance.

King has written his share of non-horror novels and novellas, most notably the novellas that inspired Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, but he’s never written anything quite like this.

The Life of Chuck opens at the end of life as we know it. The internet is down permanently. Rather than inspiring a paradise where humanity rediscovers the simple pleasures of an offline existence, confusion and despair reign.

A world addicted to technology that pushes us further apart while promising to unite us doesn’t know how to deal with an analog world, so it undergoes painful withdrawal symptoms.

As “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” illustrates, human beings, as a species, tend not to deal well with emergencies and uncertainty.

Sad-eyed teacher Mike Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) copes with the breakdown of civilization and the possibility that he is living in end times by clinging to the comforting ritual of work and repetition.

With the end of the world seemingly imminent, Mike tries to reconcile with his ex-wife Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan). The Life of Chuck originated as one of four stories in If It Bleeds, released in April 2020.

If It Bleeds was released early during the COVID-19 pandemic and filmed after it had profoundly changed the way we live, in unsettling ways.

The Life of Chuck captures, on a visceral level, the culture-wide sense of dread and confusion that ensued when confronted with a public health crisis beyond our imagination. Would the pandemic ever end? How many people would it take? What would our world look like after it?

Like us, the characters here are cursed to live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, never knowing when it will all end. In the first act of The Life of Chuck, Earth is a science project a vengeance-crazed god chose to end because the results displeased him.

Can you blame him? If I were God, I’d be contemplating a Great Flood-type scenario to punish humanity for its wickedness.

Ejiofor lends an understated humanity that grounds the dark fantasy in human emotions such as grief, sadness, longing, and despair. The world has reached such a sad nadir that it almost feels like God is doing the universe a favor by snuffing out our dim light permanently.

Everything has gone sideways. Stars and planets disappear from the sky. Mighty states crumble into the sea, yet the milquetoast visage of Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), the titular Chuck of the title, can be seen everywhere, along with the words, “39 great years. Thanks, Chuck.”

Chuck is a cipher. He’s at once a bean-counting nobody and the most famous person in the world. He’s a sentient meme in a world where cruel destiny has robbed us of our beloved online ephemera as well as an idea.

The Life of Chuck articulates the joys, pain, and anguish of life through the uncommon story of an ordinary man who represents nothing less than humanity itself.

Chuck is a ubiquitous presence in the first act, but as much an idea as a man.

Hiddleston makes Chuck cinema’s most charismatic accountant. He may look like any other number cruncher, but when the mood hits him, he dances like Fred Astaire. There is a gorgeous set piece in which a black female busker pounds out a beat that inspires Chuck to wow everyone with an unexpected burst of fancy footwork.

The joy that Hiddleston takes in movement is palpable and infectious. In a world that is dying and filled with death, dancing is a rebuke to the grim certainty of the grave.

God gave us these miraculous bodies. We might as well make good use of them while we can.

The Life of Chuck has a structure similar to that of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We begin at the end, with the 39-year-old Chuck dying of a tumor while surrounded by his wife and daughter.

We then skip back to Chuck’s tragic childhood. Our eminently relatable protagonist loses his father and his pregnant mother in a car crash. The earnest young man is raised by his grandfather, Albie (Mark Hamill), and grandmother Sarah (Mia Sara).

They’re a study in opposites. As played by Hamill in an Oscar-worthy supporting turn, Albie is a depressed alcoholic who deals with his grief through excessive drinking. In sharp contrast, the ebullient Sarah is a bright light in a dark world who instills in her grandson a soul-consuming love of dance, which, unfortunately, does not leave him with the confidence to ditch the bland certainty of accounting for the impossible odds of pursuing a dance career.

If Stephen King’s name were not in the credits, I never would have guessed that it was based on his work. I watched Pet Sematary: Bloodlines after this because I needed the distraction. The Life of Chuck audaciously argues that sometimes dead isn’t better. Sometimes life is a goddamn miracle that passes way too quickly if you’re not savoring every moment.

The Life of Chuck reminded me of the quirky, erudite philosophizing of Kurt Vonnegut, most notably through Nick Offerman’s narration, which plays a huge role in establishing a tone that is at once wry, sad, and full of humor and humanity.

Yes, The Life of Chuck is a profound and profoundly moving experience, even if your beloved father didn’t die while you were watching it. I’ll always associate The Life of Chuck with my dad and my dad’s death. That’s less melancholy than bittersweet, because this is precisely the kind of movie that made me fall in love with film as a movie-mad boy indulged by a father who understood that movies meant more to me than school or religion.

The Life of Chuck speaks to art’s ability to move us with stories that are at once specific and universal.

Like All That Jazz, The Life of Chuck is a movie about death roaring with life. It maintains a mood of transcendent exhaustion, yet paradoxically overflows with energy, ideas, and momentum.

Four and a half stars out of five

Check out my new merch store at

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Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my just-released magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here

Sign up for an annual paid subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and get a free copy of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al for free!

After a series of close calls, Stephen King and Steven Spielberg were supposed to collaborate directly on an adaptation of the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House. The project fell apart, resulting in 1999’s The Haunting, which Spielberg executive-produced but wisely chose not to put his name on, and the King-penned, equally hokey 2002 haunted-house miniseries Rose Red.

I will nevertheless always associate King and Spielberg in my mind because they share a similar first name, are roughly the same age, and are two of the most successful, best, and important American entertainers.

It would be impossible to imagine pop culture without the contributions of both men. They are also among the most American of American filmmakers and authors. Spielberg and King also share a rare gift for grounding the fantastical and horrific in the mundane reality of everyday life that is on full display in Spielberg’s Disclosure Day.

I’m writing up every movie, TV movie, miniseries, and television series rooted in King’s voluminous work in multiple media. It’s an ambitious project that will take years to complete.

I most recently wrote up the 1993 miniseries The Tommyknockers, which was based on the last novel King wrote before getting sober. King hated his 558-page 1987 bestseller because it was fueled by cocaine and sweaty desperation rather than inspiration. He wasn’t a fan of the miniseries either, which was an enormous ratings success despite being terrible.

In The Tommyknockers, King attempted Lovecraftian horror in the terror tale of a small town transformed by the malevolent presence of alien technology that first enhances the lives of its residents through miraculous inventions and eerie psychic powers, before it reduces them to slaves with a zombie-like pallor and no will of their own.

Spielberg’s new science fiction drama Disclosure Day is a very different, more optimistic movie, but it shares with The Tommyknockers a vision of a world transformed by extraterrestrials who grant people extraordinary telepathic powers.

Emily Blunt stars in Disclosure Day as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist eager to make the leap from weather girl to serious national anchorwoman. The ambitious television personality is surprised to discover that she somehow speaks languages she never studied and is able to read people’s minds and discern, then solve, their problems. One day, she’s eye candy on local news. The next, she’s the next step in human evolution, albeit with an assist from an unlikely, otherworldly source.

On television, one eventful day, Margaret finds herself communicating through percussive sounds rather than any discernible human language. This puts her on the radar of the WardEx corporation, a furtive division of the United States government roughly analogous to “The Shop”, the sinister agency that figures prominently in multiple King books, including the novel The Tommyknockers, and its devious CEO, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who uses supernatural powers stolen from aliens to help oppress non-humans.

Josh O’Connor costars as Dr. Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert and the subject of a massive manhunt after he purloined evidence of alien life, then went on the run with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter), with an eye toward sharing his information with a world that may not be ready.

Dr. Kellner has an ally inside Wardex in the form of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a whistleblower who knows that the government has been experimenting on aliens and reverse-engineering their technology for decades.

Dr. Kellner and Margaret realize they were previously visited by aliens who took the form of cute, Disney-style animals to avoid coming off as threatening. The world is on the verge of a world war with the power to obliterate the planet due to our cruelty and inability to look beyond our own selfish needs.

What follows is a fierce battle to control information, hence the title, and to control the narrative.

The science-fiction and conspiracy films of the 1970s and 1980s lingered in the endless shadow of Watergate and tapped into the paranoid but potent idea that the powerful lived in a murky world of secrets and lies that the ignorant rabble knew nothing about.

It’s not coincidental that in Disclosure Day, Richard Nixon is shown impressing a celebrity by showing him proof that we are not alone in the universe. That is not the only secret he withheld from the American people. If Trump was shown evidence of alien light forms, I have no doubt that he’d use it to try to impress Joe Rogan.

Donald Trump’s war on the Deep State paradoxically revealed the concept of Deep State to be a right-wing fever dream/fantasy that society could advance by leaps and bounds by destroying the government’s ability to help people domestically and abroad and firing public servants. It turns out those sinister Deep State agents were just ordinary people who valued their jobs and were good at them because they had a lot of experience and training.

At the heart of the MAGA mindset is a fear and hatred of the unknown, unusual, and different, and a reactionary worship and deification of the powerful and familiar. Disclosure Day is driven by a Spielbergian sense of optimism and hope, as well as a conviction that we can be the heroes of our own story by embracing the new and the unknown rather than exploiting it for our own nefarious purposes.

Disclosure Day feels like the concluding entry in an unofficial trilogy that began with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, continued with E.T., and concludes here with another artful exploration of our complicated relationship with visitors from another planet and all that they represent.

The film’s idealism feels poignantly out of step with the cynicism and despair of our current cultural moment, when we’re bracing ourselves for more of the worst rather than working toward something better, because better feels impossible right now.

Disclosure Day benefits tremendously from comparison to The Tommyknockers. At the risk of being controversial, Spielberg is a better storyteller than John Power, the journeyman director of the Clinton-era miniseries. In Spielberg’s film, we are the monsters, and adorably old-fashioned aliens are heroes whose sophisticated technology is no match for our capacity for thievery and self-dealing.

Spielberg believes in humanity and human nature enough to propose that good can defeat evil and people and institutions can change for the better, a belief that feels both poignant and at least moderately deluded.

3.5 Stars out of 5

Check out my new merch store at

https://nathans.dashery.com

Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my just-released magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here

Sign up for an annual paid subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and get a free copy of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al for free!

Warren Oates was a key member of Sam Peckinpah’s repertory company. If you seemed like you might have killed someone in a bar fight, Peckinpah knew how to use you better than anyone else.

As Bennie, a pianist and bartender, Oates is magnificent in his dissipation. Bennie is doomed; his tragic air suggests he’s all too aware of his imminent demise.

Bring M…

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I want to do more watch-alongs here because I desperately need human contact, and I want to promote The Fractured Mirror and paid subscriptions, but mainly because I crave human interaction.

Ha, ha! Just kidding (I’m not kidding). Join me!

At 9 PM EST, I will press play on Overnight on Tubi, the classiest and best streaming service (suck it, Criterion Channel), and we will collectively delight in Troy Duffy’s downfall!

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The Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs finds the iconic filmmakers revisiting the Western setting of True Grit with darkly comic tales of murder, greed, and cruelty in the Old West.

First up is the titular vignette, a savagely funny goof starring Tim Blake Nelson as a sociopathic singing cowboy who is cavalier, if not downright giddy, about deat…

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I feel like I have been in a good groove creatively here and at my other site, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I had not been giving the Happy Place the love and attention that it deserved because I’d been focussing on building this newsletter and the endless process of finishing my ninth book, The Fractured Mirror, which took four long years to write and research.

Commercially, the only problem is that I’ve reached one of those dry periods when I can’t get a new paid subscriber or sell a copy of The Fractured Mirror to save my life. Because I’m a weird, completely independent recluse, if I don’t aggressively promote my work, I sell nothing; but if I DO aggressively promote my books, website, and now merch, then there’s still a pretty good chance that I’ll still sell nothing; but there’s also a chance, however slim, that I’ll make some money. That’s great, because we live in a society where you need money to survive, but psychologically, there’s something very satisfying about people being interested in your work, and that’s what this is largely about: trying to engage with the world and your readers, to make a connection, and share your strange little literary universe with the world.

I was frustrated that my paid subscriber count had plateaued at 415. Oh well, I consoled myself, at least I wasn’t losing paid subscribers at a steady clip. Then, of course, I started losing paid subscribers at a steady clip. I’m down 5 paid subscribers and 250 dollars in annual income this month.

In an effort to halt this slide, I’m reiterating some of the offers I’ve created to entice y’all to embrace the Nathan Rabin movement. If you get an annual subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas for just 50 dollars (that’s less than a dollar a week!), in addition to thrice-weekly Fractured Favorites suggestions and the ability to vote in polls and other paid subscriber-only endeavors, you get free signed copies of The Fractured Mirror, a massive, 548 page encyclopedia of American movies about filmmaking that it took four years to write and research and has a foreword by legendary filmmaker Joe Dante and illustrations by the great Felipe Sobreiro AND a signed copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al, a 125 page coloring book collaboration with Felipe that’s literally days of fun for the whole family. You don’t even have to pay taxes or shipping. That is free as well.

For my 50th birthday, my wife’s family got me this stamp, so every copy of a book that I sell through the site’s shop will have this seal to ensure that it is a genuine autographed item straight from my personal library, not one of the many books with fake signatures that are flooding the market.

To further encourage sales of The Fractured Mirror, the next 60 people who buy it directly from me will have a handwritten “Fractured Favorite”
recommendation on the first few pages. That’s called the personal touch, baby!

I want to have more direct interaction with my paid subscribers, so tomorrow I’m hosting two events: at noon EST, I’ll go live to answer their questions. At 9 PM EST tomorrow, we’re going to do a Tubi watch-along of the classic Troy Duffy documentary Overnight. I did one earlier on Freddy Got Fingered that went really well, except there appeared to be only one other person. Oh well! Like Ray and Dave Davies’ personal trainer, I’m working out the Kinks.

Finally, last week I launched my official merch store at Dashery, featuring my ideas and Felipe Sobreiro's work. We had a solid first month, except that 80 percent of the sales were from me. What can I say? I really love the designs.

So please do consider supporting the Nathan Rabin movement at this crucial juncture. It would mean a lot to me.

Buy my books here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

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Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas

Movie Reviews, Stephen King, Autism in Entertainment, Joy of Positvity and Weird-Ass Side Quests