April '26 Wrap Up!
What did you almost do in high school? Does box dye count as being a redhead? The rapture or late-stage capitalism?
Finished this over the weekend and never pressed send. Oh well!
As always, hit me up on my letterboxd!
48 Hrs. (1982)
Nate and I needed something to watch on a random Saturday and we ended up choosing Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs starring Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Nolte plays Jack Cates, a rough cop, who teams up with paroled criminal Reggie Hammond (Murphy) to catch a madman who’s on a killing rampage throughout San Francisco.
There are aspects of 48 Hrs. that have not aged well, but we live in the context and 48 Hrs. was Eddie Murphy’s performance for the taking and he did take it. This movie was yet another stepping stone to his movie stardom, especially since Beverly Hills Cop comes out two years later.
San Francisco is always fun to see on screen and Hill utilizes it exceptionally. There is a scene where Nolte steps out of the steam in an alleyway with neon signs behind him that feels simultaneously so noir, but pseudo-vaporwave, and just cool as hell. Also this movie set the stage for the “buddy cop” action comedy era.
Watched 4/4 3.5⭐️
Tango & Cash (1989)
A truly elite 80’s movie. Elite elite elite. I watched this like 4ish years ago with Nate (before we were together) and our friend Ivy. I thought it was good then, but it’s only gotten better with age.
Sylvester Stallone plays buttoned-up (I guess?) trust-fund-plays-the-stock-market-but-also-brilliant-cop Tango while Kurt Russel plays rough and tumble rival cop, Cash. The two can’t stand each other or their methods, but low and behold, they have to pair up to defeat criminal mastermind Perret who, frustrated with their constant foiling of his plans, has them framed for murder sent to a maximum security prison.
Obviously Tango and Cash escape and then must team up to capture Perret and clear their names. Tango & Cash rips right along with all the 80s ridiculousness you would expect, but with the added chemistry of Russel and Stallone. It’s kind of astounding there was never a sequel.
This is a stay in have two beers Friday night watch.
(re)Watched 4/6 4⭐️
Ronin (1998)
Nate and I watched this movie because there was a Rewatchables on it. Ronin is an odd duck. On the surface it feels a little like a Heat ripoff, but that is doing it a slight disservice as it’s obvious that director Frankenheimer had a very specific perspective on the action/thriller genre that he was trying to accomplish. Ronin was shot on location in France, with Paris and the French Riviera being main locations.
I will be dead honest, I don’t remember that much of Ronin other than a group of freelance intelligence agents are thrown together and charged with tracking down a briefcase that both the Russians and the IRA want. Regardless, it’s got a good cast; De Niro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, and a younger Stellan Skarsgård who is absolutely terrifying in this movie.
Ronin isn’t the greatest and feels like it was lost in the fray of other action thrillers, but it has a strong enough cast and dedication to on location shooting and practical action scenes that it was still fun to queue up.
Watched 4/11 3⭐️
The Drama (2026)
Loooooooved this movie and love Robert Pattinson and Zendaya for just consistently taking interesting roles and then just going for it, both on screen and in press. It really doesn’t feel like A24 did that much heavy lifting when promoting The Drama, but both of them (especially Zendaya) more than picked up the slack which helped skyrocket The Drama to $120M+ at the global box office. No small feat for a drama (maybe dramedy? I was definitely laughing) that focuses on the week before a couple gets married after a secret from Emma’s (Zendaya) past surfaces, threatening to derail the whole wedding and relationship.
Also, the general public did a decent job of keeping the twist of this movie under wraps and I really commend ya’ll for that. Because when it hit it hit. Definitely a movie that you talk about in the lobby afterwards. I’m happy to say that my group was firmly on the right side. Alana Haim’s Rachel? Booo 🍅👎🏼
Watched 4/12 4⭐️
Jerry the Ginger Eater (2026)
This is a written and directed Connor Storrie1 short film that was released this month so I checked it out. Shoutout to me and my delusions because I thought there would be thousands of rabid fans rating and reviewing it but nah, I was sixth. The sixth person to rate this on Letterboxd. Do you know how that made me feel? At 31? I beat Club Chalamet to the review.2 I really had to sit with myself and realize that the Venn Diagram between fanatical 20’s something twitter user and Letterboxd user is probably pretty small.
For the first few minutes of this I was a little like, “Oh god. Okay here we go our over-saturated jerky handheld art house film. Okay it’s fine.” But after the prostitute (Bailey Tate) gets into the car and Jerry reveals that he’s going to eat her, the film really takes off and I was laughing. Jerry and the women then go on a quest through LA to find someone he can eat since she’s “not a natural red head.” A fun mix of absurdity and gore, I genuinely enjoyed Jerry the Ginger Eater and will always show up for Storrie’s indie work because regardless of how I feel about it (I had a blast) because it’s genuinely really exciting and hopeful to see a newly minted Hollywood ingenue be so invested in the art and dedicating themself to contributing to it on multiple levels both in front of and behind the screen. I feel the same way about Big Hud and his deranged YouTube channel. They are just both doing it for pure love of the game and it’s so refreshing to see and follow.
FYI instead of the trailer i just linked to the whole short film
Watched 4/13 3.5⭐️
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
My friend Ryan is writing a chapter of his dissertation on David Fincher and so it’s been a staple of a lot of our conversations lately, especially since Fincher is my favorite director and I can fully riff on him for hours. We talked about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for a bit one evening over drinks and I felt it was about time that I revisited it.
I have an odd relationship to this movie because it’s a deeply deeply disturbing book and movie. The scene that I am directly referencing in my 2021 Halloween costume is a part of the most disturbing portion. I skipped this part in the book and I usually fast forward in the movie. And yet. There I am, dressed up as Lisbeth Salander when she sexually assaults Bjurman, her state-appointed guardian who raped her first.
I don’t know why, but this movie sat in my Letterboxd top four for years. I didn’t watch this movie constantly, but the reality is is that there is something about Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth that constantly draws my eye. She’s captivating on screen. She’s everything I want to be; sexually ambiguous, mysterious, skinny, aloof, androgynous, feminine, masculine, hard, soft, pierced, tatted, broken, capable, layered, rageful, etc. Maybe saying that I want to be these things is sorta a half truth. I don’t want to experience the torment that she has. I cannot move through the world like Lisbeth, but she wears all of these markers so openly on her body and I think that type of freedom, even when it results in immense pain and suffering on her side, is what snagged me. There’s a scene with no score or dialogue, just the white noise of the subway station, where a man tries to steal her bag and she chases him down on the escalator, shoves him against the side of the elevator and hits him back. While he’s lying dazed on the moving stairs her face contorts and she screams right in his face. As she makes her exit down the opposite escalator people stare at her in terror, a wild animal free on the subway. I think about this scene a lot.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came out in 2011 when I was a senior in high school, a semester into the film class that would lay the groundwork for the next fifteen years of my life. I had been aware of tabloids and movies and actors and best dressed for a while but this is about the time that I really start paying attention. The big news with this movie was that Rooney Mara, previously seen in Fincher’s The Social Network, had actually gotten all the piercings for Tattoo. This was the buzz and I ate it up. And then I saw the movie, having read the book, and saw Lisbeth Salander on screen, in all her rageful glory. Love it. On top of that, you have Daniel Craig firmly in the middle of his Bond run playing a reporter, who at one point is shot at, and reacts with true adrenalized terror. This movie just hit me at the right point in time, plus it was just so adult. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was made for adults and with adults in mind. There is no irony in this film.3 I don’t know, it all felt so fresh to me. That coupled with Fincher’s color palette and exacting nature, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feels right at home with Fincher’s other masterful procedurals, ie Zodiac and Se7en.
Also Tattoo has one of the best opening credit sequences ever.
(re)Watched 4/18 4⭐️
This is the End (2013)
This movie came out in June after my first year of college when I was working at my local Krikorian theater. I got two free tickets to any movie I wanted to see so I took two friends from high school and had a freaking blast. My mom and I had a subscription to Entertainment Weekly which I would devour every week. I was Up To Date on celebrity and film culture and my preferred mode of comedy was doing a bit/riffing. All of this meant that This is the End hit like cocaine for me. In ways that the other Rogen/Franco/Apatow movies did not.4 The best part of This is the End is that it was so uniquely positioned in the heart of millennial cringe that watching it now there’s a burst of nostalgia at play. Plus, I’m not sure how many movies prior did the “ironic needle drop” popularized by Guardians of the Galaxy that is now so expected in any comedy/action movie. I will say that This is the End did it first with “I Will Always Love You” and the end credits sequence with Backstreet’s “Everybody.”
This is the End plays off the personalities of every character featured and is just a raucous time that takes the prompt of “how would the most self-involved A/B-tier celebrities you know handle the apocalypse?” Felt fresh and toed the line then and still feels that way. Danny McBride is batting 1000 in this movie.
(re)Watched 4/20 4⭐️
# of movies watched: 7
Avg. rating: 3.7⭐️
Best Score: The Drama
Best Soundtrack: This is the End
Honorable Soundtrack/Score Mention: Jerry the Ginger Eater
Best I-Can’t-Believe-They-Said-Yes-Cameo: Channing TateYum
Yes. I am still in the Heated Rivalry Hudson William Connor Storrie Hudcon pit. Anything you’ve sent me, love it thank you, but I saw it days ago. I’m basically back off twitter but for a month or two there I was deep in it. While I never really left Tumblr…I’m back on it in full force. I’m meeting people online, I’m chatting, I’m posting, I’m back back back so yeah. I checked out the Connor Storrie short film the day it released because I thought we would all be doing that because my echo chamber was loud as hell in April.
This is also in the footnotes because it’s massive inside baseball, but ClubChalamet, longtime Gen X Timothée Chalamet online pseudo-stalker, is fully moving her attentions to Connor Storrie. Big news. She is so rotten in such a specific mid-40’s way. Her delusions tickle me endlessly.
Fincher is so deeply unironic and winking in all his films tbh.
I have revisited Pineapple Express and didn’t find it that great a second time around. I need to revisit Superbad but I didn’t like it when I was in high school. There’s a world where that’s changed for me though.
What I love most is that you consistently watch cop movies on an almost monthly basis
For how complicated your relationship is to Lisbeth, the costume slapsss