2025, Q4 - Entertainment as Observed in a Stressful Quarter

2024's Nosferatu is a really interesting retelling of a classical vampire story. I've never seen the original Nosferatu movie, and there's some difference to Bram Stoker's Dracula, so I'm going to treat it as its own thing for now, though I should arguably take a look at the original at some point. Nosferatu's strength is primarily in its set design, and the performances. The directing, I'm sure is also good, but I don't recall any stand-out shots in cinematography, which is primarily how I notice that particular craft. The performances in the movie however are very good. The leads, played by Nicolas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard all have a very convincing screen presence, even though Skarsgard's presence here seems somewhat routine for his filmography. What makeup they did for him, did obscure his face enough, so I had to look up the credits again to be sure. As far as the horror aspect is concerned, I feel that it's not the tensest horror film I've seen in recent years, but that makes it very palatable for non-horror fans, just looking for a nice period-drama.

2025's Novocain is a simple, fun action movie. It's premise could be reduced to a single sentence - and one that doesn't reference another movie. It's something I can appreciate. It follows an assistant manager of a bank with a genetic condition that prevents him from feeling pain, trying to rescue a love interest, kidnapped by bank robbers. Many plot beats are not particularly novel, but the movie is readily carried by the performances. There's something fun about watching someone stumbling through an action scene with the affect of someone unfamiliar with the setting, but detached, as if not worried about the damage they're doing to themselves. It's nothing I've not seen before at all, but it at least strikes me as an execution that has thought put into it.

Poor Things is likely still in many peoples' memories from last year. It's a beautifully shot movie, where each style decision has clearly readable intent behind it. It's also a bit awkward to talk about without making it sound creepier than it's depicted. It's subject matter is one that rightly is a little bit uncomfortable, just by the virtue of the fact that feminism can still be a contentious topic, depending on the time and the people one finds oneself in the company of. There are heavy class undertones in many of the later scenes of the movie as well, but they take a back-seat to the thesis. Most of the movie depicts a young woman experiencing the many ways she is objectified, without having the understanding to name the process or understand why it's wrong. Even into late stages of the movie, she is meant to have an adolescent mind - or brain, to essentialize the issue - and reacts in a childish way to these situations. In most cases, this childishness is characterized primarily through a sincerity that would have been filtered out of "polite society", which the protagonist finds herself contrasting against constantly. The set design is also easy to get lost in. There's a lot of odd machinery and heavily stylized architecture. There's also a use of colour that opens up as the protagonist gains the ability to move in a world of her own accord (though this doesn't innoculate her against manipulation), and the set design grows more grounded, as she grows up, and regards the world around her with less and less childish naivety.

Invisible Kitties by Yu Yoyo I picked up on vacation, to add to my ever-growing collection of books about cats written by Japanese authors, only to later discover that this is in fact a book about cats written by a Taiwanese author. There are also very tangible differences in style, when compared to I am a Cat or If Cats Disappeared From the World, linguistically, though I suspect that is less of a language characteristics, but rather something that emerges from the fact that Yoyo writes a lot of poetry. The edition that I own mentions her winning poetry prizes, and that explains a lot of the literary texture that this books is absolutely dripping in. It's not a difficult book to read, by any means. The text itself consists of two to four page vignettes that describes living with and around cats, but it approaches it with a sense of wonder that is almost child-like if only it weren't content to just sit and watch. It's genuinely cozy and heartwarming to read. At the same time, I probably couldn't even emulate the style of the prose that Yoyo puts to paper in what is otherwise an easy read. It's light, but leaves a very clear impression in a way that I suspect will stick with me for a while. I also want to mention that there's little doodles every other page that, while not technically impressive, so very well match the style of prose they accompany.

JoJo's Part 4 is significantly longer than the preceding parts, and it's mostly detached from Dio for once. While I felt like the Manga found its identity in Part 3, in Part 4 it begins experimenting with the formula. It's main antagonist, for all intents and purposes, does not have an overwhelmingly strong ability, when compared to the cast of protagonist. What sets him apart is arguably experience in the realm of stand battling, which consists mostly of finding novel ways to solve a problem. It made for a similarly entertaining read as Part 3, but I think that the extended length had the early chapters drag a bit on occasion. This part was also less focused on the titular JoJo in favor of highlighting an ensemble cast. Said JoJo is also notably more of a child, when compared to the Kintaro-esque hyper-masculine protagonists in the preceding parts. There's a really charming beginning of a family dynamic, now with three generations of JoJos around.

I picked up Black Bag (2025) on a whim, not knowing it was a Soderbergh joint. I've liked enough of his previous works that his name stood out to me in the credits, but evidently I've not liked any of it enough to pick up on his directorial style in any way. The story of Black Bag is relatively straight forward. It's a spy story with a clear-cut villain, who gets revealed at the end, and it somewhat invites following along with the story. Neither performance really stood out to me, and the cinematography was standard for this kind of story. It's perhaps even a little disappointing, considering the names attached to this project are all fairly big.

Red Valkyries is one of the more fun works I'm aware of within Kristen Ghodsee's bibliography. Ghodsee is a prolific historian specializing in Socialist history, and in this work she's done the newcomers to political theory a huge favor. I've heard recently that reading biographies or memoirs is a good way to get into reading history or theory, and in that vein, this book primarily presents a broad and brief overview of the lives of notable women in Soviet history. The way it's written makes it easy to continue ones own research into the stages of these women's lives to get more detail. There is some theory (or rather, reflection on praxis) at the end of the book, but the memorable entertainment value is definitely in the biographical sections. For those intimidated by Kapital and not up for any one of Lenin's works, this could be a neat starter into Socialism from an almost cultural perspective.

The Amateur (2025) is a movie in the tradition of the Jason Bourne franchise, with all its strengths and its trappings. Rami Malek has been somewhat unfortunate with roles in my opinion. He is clearly a very good actor, as evident in his early TV career, and even when the script is lacking, his performance is usually quite good. This film lands squarely in the middle ground as far as his scripts are concerned, but the style suits him.

I find detailed retellings of history interesting in my age. I know I didn't use to, perhaps mainly because the parts of history presented to me never had much of an angle that was directed for me. That's a story for another time. Either way, Catlick (2020) is a series of loosely connected snapshots of Atlanta's history as a southern US state, that I found thoroughly enjoyable. It tells stories that are often unconcluded at the time of recording and it features a bunch of characters that one could probably make a deep dive on alone. One of said stories ends in a Wafflehouse parking lot, which is demeaning in a way only the US can be, but as a whole, this series shows a rich history of Atlanta's Cabbagetown that, while not comprehensive is quite intriguing. As a fun little bonus, it also happens to include the historical roots of the word "Hustler", which happens to be one I'm not sure the people that use it nowadays would sign off on.

Better Man (2025) had been sold to me as a really great take on the modern Biopic. I really like the approach that this, and that Rocketman took, that is to say: Turn the movie into a musical by weaving the artist's music into the scenes. Better Man feels like a labour of love from everyone involved, and I think the piece by Patrick H. Willems probably addresses most of my thoughts on the film, so I would direct the reader there for a more detailed reading. I'm not personally a listener of Robbie Williams' music, nor was I every the intended audience for boy bands of the ninetees, up to the twenty-tens. Still, the story is told compellingly, and the choreography is fun in the setpieces. I think overall I still prefer Rocketman, because I gel better with the music, so its setpieces are overall a little more memorable. Still, arguably Better Man has the better climax with Let Me Entertain You.

The second season of Hazbin Hotel (2025) is a definitive upgrade over the first in terms of music. I'm not sure whether it's just had the time to develop the musical numbers more, or whether their composers have just improved so drastically in the year it's had, likely using Helluva Boss as an opportunity to practice. Maybe I'm predisposed toward 2000s Emo/Punk, which are genres that have clearly influenced this season's music, and I've obviously started loving the stage tunes more and more, as I have started participating more and more in that culture. Most of this season's tunes are very well written, if not always immaculately placed. On the other hand, the character writing is perhaps only tolerable, because it was a second season. I didn't really get a sense that most people had much of an arc, apart from Vox, and perhaps Charlie and Vaggi to a lesser extent. Most of the rest of the cast is mostly just along for the ride. That can be fine, knowing only that we will eventually return to the cast. What does worry me somewhat are the cases of Abel and the romance between Cherry and Pentious. The latter has its development happen mostly between seasons and is primarily present through a lovely ballad early in the season, and the former just kinda... happens in between verses of a song, I guess. Suffice to say that it could have used some more process. Vox on the other hand is the undisputed star of this season. He is compelling as a villain in a way that Adam didn't quite manage to be in the second season. His flaws are clearly signaled, and pay off entertainingly, and beyond that, his Leitmotif does a lot to drive things forward. I also like to think that his tendency to express himself in typical musical showtunes as an embodiment of his penchant for theatrics.

A Palace Near the Wind (2025) by Ai Jiang primarily caught my eye through its cover art. I can only encourage the reader to check it out. It's a lovely turqoise with golden embroidery and a style inspired by traditional east asian paintings. The story reads like a retelling of colonization by a technologically advanced faction, but it seems like it was probably meant to frame it as a nature vs. industry question. I can read the same melancholy from the prose that appears in translated poems by indigenous people. The book presents a world building in which the colonized people are inseparable from the earth they came from, in which they inhibit the characteristics of their chosen surroundings, which gives everything a touch of hyperreality. The story itself, I'm not sure I would have picked up if it were pitched to me directly, but I'm glad that I did. Maybe I'll take a look at future volumes once they come out.

Books like Hawkeye by Fraction & Aja (2021) are probably the only way I can really get into comics. It's a comprehensive story, likely stretched over several issues, and the story has an ending, albeit the typical open end that the medium requires for it to go onto different runs and whatever. I'm not personally very interested in Hawkeye as a character, nor Kate Bishop, who seems like a more charming Batman-like, along with all the different moral issues that come with the rich vigilante kind. What made me pick up this book specifically was that I heard it contained a chapter written entirely from the perspective of a dog. I loved the idea, and I also quite liked the execution. The overarching story of the thing is okay, I suppose, but perhaps I'm not entirely acclimatized to the medium yet. I find it somewhat hard to find the finer details in comic book writing, but I also feel like I'm not getting the entire picture. Part of it is that I have to live with the fact that everybody in that book is a preestablished character and not every story has the time to properly characterize them for every newcomer. I found, for example, Madame Masque somewhat difficult to wrap my head around, until fairly long into the volume, and I was never sure it was meant to be that way. Overall though, I had my fun reading it, especially for the art, and sometimes for the banter, though that, too, is something that I think will need some getting used to.

King of Spies (2025) written by Mark Millar and drawn by Mateo Scalera was not an enjoyable read. Honestly, I like checking out graphic novels, partially, because they're usually finished. I don't feel equipped to keep up with image comics, because of a weekly release that depicts a tiny fraction of a story, and because they don't have very well defined starting points. What can save the attempt is reading Omnibuses of finished runs, but whether I have the patience to track one down is a different question altogether. That being said, the names of the authors weren't attached in the file I read from, otherwise I might not have made the effort. As someone who doesn't really engage with video games a lot, and someone who has largely checked out of blockbuster movies, I've grown distant from the djingoist undertone of conservative Americana. This work, despite depicting an Englishman, is filled with it. It's probably what a loyal adaptation of James Bond might have been in the era of gritty remakes, and I firmly dislike it for it. I assume it was written to showcase the action scenes, but I find it difficult to enjoy those, if I can't bring myself to care about anyone on the page. What's tragic is that the art is kinda cool at times. Shame about the writing though.

Doppelganger (2023) was my first Naomi Klein book. Arguably, someone of my persuasion should have started with Shock Doctrine, but this one was the one that was available, due to being relatively recent. It's also very topical in the way that theory rarely is. At the same time, the book didn't exactly read like theory. I think most of it is that it was written recently, and is divorced largely from the pseudo-academic tone that plagues left-wing theory, often to its detriment. It made it a read that was still digestible on a commute at entirely too early times of the day. The book is a blend of contemporary culture, which seems so centered on preception and being perceived. What I find impressive about the work is that Klein manages to connect the all these things that have been christened as symptoms of the social media era as deciding factors in important developments made far before, and far beyond the social media realm. It's a deeply personal work, which I'm not used to for non-fiction. There's autobiographical sections that while certainly anecdotical, are haunting enough to embody the theses made in their respective chapters. If this is the standard of her writing, I will definitely have to go through her bibliography, perhaps in the next year, and the ability to weave analysis with compelling writing is something to aspire to.

Engels' Anti-Dühring (1887) is maybe the most difficult read I've had this quarter. It's several hundred pages of dense philosophical critique of a text I haven't read, and while I believe I have an approximate understanding of Dühring's philosophy now after having read it, I don't think it's an entirely fair picture. I find myself largely agreeing with Engels in other works of his, but that is far from a good reason to let this work alone shape my idea of Dühring's specific work. I do think that the critique leveled here is meant to address a kind of text though, not necessarily limited to Dühring's philosophy of a "universal scientific approach". Engels has created here a study in "scientific socialism" and has made a case that in scientific dialectics much of such a dogmatic appeal to pure logic can not survive a simple treatment under its own contradictions. I don't think it's a problem we've fully freed ourselves of. The standardized education system and stark stratification that is associated with elite institutions, the mathematical practice of arriving at complex statements from simple axioms has found itself often misused in settings were there simply speaking are no such axioms one could reasonably apply. It's a common malpractice in armchair philosophy and the base of a lot of pseudoscience. Is scientific socialism a good cure for this problem? I'm not sure. I think Engels certainly thinks so. The method that would later be formalized as dialectic materialism is supposed to directly explore the dynamics of contradictions in process and idea, but I find myself cautioning against universalism, lest one make the same mistakes that Engels spends just under 600 pages taking apart. A note on the writing style though. I've always thought of Engels as a fairly good author. He delivers ideas concisely and memorably, but this isn't so much the case here. I feel reminded of thr chapters in State and Revolution in which Lenin addresses Kautsky directly. It's an almost personal attack that is often difficult to parse without having the cited material available to reference. I think there's probably better ways for a modern reader to understand the ideas contained in this book, and perhaps there would have been a better way for Engels to present them even at the time, but seeing as Critique of Pure Reason for example was written with very similar trappings, I suspect this is more of a feature of the form, and I can only remedy my discomfort with it by reading more philosophy of the time.

Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) was my first Goldman, but not my first anarchist theory. As an avid reader of theory, I think that at this point I really do have developed preferences most of all. There is an abundance of anarchist poetry and written word that can be considered art, and the prose that Goldman writes her theses in are artistry in a way that I feel could be well enjoyable. My art-brain and my theory-brain don't really want to work together though, which makes these reads difficult for me. This collection of essays centers primarily the structures of family as they existed at the moment. The role of the woman in society was undergoing heavy change at the time, some attaining the right to work, to vote, the things now commonly considered integral parts of ones emancipation, but Goldman had already seen the issues inherent in such concessions coming, and points out the first self-replications of the structures that were being rejected in name, if not entirely in praxis. At this stage of the work, I find myself agreeing mostly with her observations, though not entirely with some of the references she chooses. There is also a much closer intertwining with art and theory, especially in the last essay, in which she reflects on the adolescence literature of her time and how it was beginning to struggle with the contradictions that had begun to rear their heads, partially under the banner of enlightenment thinking, partially as a reaction to it.

I saw the trailer for The Life of Chuck (2025) when I watched the Snail movie in theaters. It seemed like an interesting film, but upon watch, I suppose the trailer buried the lead somewhat. The second half of the film makes it a much more straight-forward watch, with the usual bits of Stephen King-ian's usual literary trappings. It's not immediately a horror story, despite the author of the short story the movie is based on, and I suppose it could be considered life-affirming, though I think that might be too grand a descriptor for the experience of watching the film. It is roughly structured like a short story, and leaves a lot open, which I really did miss in more recent screenwriting.