I’m doing a double feature review for these two, since the internet decided that two films of differing genres releasing on the same day is the most interesting thing to ever happen in the history of the world… and they’re absolutely right because of the very fact that people have made this a “thing”. People’s mass interest in this double feature is in of itself evidence of the fact that it’s interesting, and so I too will indulge in this huge meme and review these films as a package deal, in the order in which I watched them.

It’s about one year ago, I’m in a cabin in the woods, invited by my friend Patrick to spend the weekend there. This is the third time he’s invited me to stay there, and he’s been insistent about it for years. With each request, my mind imagines a new sinister twist to my arrival, a new dark purpose to the invitation. Patrick wants me there because he wants to kill me in my sleep and feed me to his guests, or Patrick is a master criminal and me going to the cabin is part of his plan to make me the fall guy for one of his schemes. I don’t know what it is about me, but when someone asks something from me I immediately get suspicious, even if they’re just requesting my company. There’s also something about Patrick’s smile, and the way his eyes squint when he grins at you, it’s almost like he’s hiding a crucial piece of information and finds it amusing. Like he just watched you drink someone’s pee without you realizing it. Anyways, I finally arrive, and the events of the trip were transformative in many ways.

Tony Soprano is sitting alone in a booth as Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing is playing on a jukebox, and in walks Tony’s wife Carmela. They’re meeting at a diner tonight to eat, and Tony has some bad news to discuss, but before things can go further, their son AJ arrives and starts complaining about the tedium of his job. Tony assures him that he’s building contacts, that even the pointless stuff is all part of something larger for his career. Their daughter Meadow is late because she had to go to the doctor to switch birth control. AJ reminds Tony of something he was told years ago, Tony doesn’t remember it, but he thinks it sounds right. Meadow is having trouble parking her car, but she finally manages it and arrives. Tony looks up as the diner door opens – CUT TO BLACK. Thus ends The Sopranos. On its face, it’s a mundane evening with an American family, so how did it become such an iconic ending that it helped elevate this already lauded show into something of a legend?

Over the course of 2021, I played and beat Persona 5‘s gargantuan storymode. It took me over 110 hours, and that was without grinding for level ups to get through a challenge, as the fights for the most part were fairly easy, even on hard mode. No, a lot of that time spent playing the game was actually just watching cutscenes for said story mode. There was so much ground to cover because the game possessed soaring ambitions atypical of JRPGs. A lot of the time the story fell short on those ambitions, but in some of key ways, Persona 5 is a game with the most trenchant political critique on society since Metal Gear Solid 2. This really comes down to the story’s villains, which consist of specific corrupt individuals with institutional power, rotted institutions themselves, and ultimately, your everyday person. It’s that last step that really takes really takes Persona 5‘s critique to the next level, but we should start from the beginning.

Sex and the City probably qualifies as “underrated” these days. That’s a description that is probably too often applied to genuinely mediocre properties, but Sex and the City today is commonly used as a punchline. A show about women who talk like the middle aged gay men who wrote for them that’s frequently taken to task for “not aging well” by media illeterate Op-Ed writers. I could write a whole separate blog post about this that boils down to “having characters with wrongheaded beliefs isn’t the same as advocating for them”, but today I want to talk about Steve’s dark streak.

Probably weird that I’m coming back after almost 2 years of not posting to talk about a controversal adaption of the polarizing musical starring Ben Platt, Dear Evan Hansen. I’m gonna get real specific with this post though. I’m not going to talk about how Ben Platt looks too much like the Cryptkeeper to play a highschooler, I’m not going to talk about how weirdly bleak and sterile the whole vibe of the movie is, I’m not going to talk about how weirdly bad Amy Adam’s performance in this is, and I’m definitely not going to say a word about how goddamn creepy it is that Evan actually dates the sister of the suicide victim he’s basing his long term deception on. No, I’m going to talk about one song, and how everything wrong with the movie (and the broadway musical to a lesser extent) can be traced back to it.