Everyone's Autistic

Film: The Phoenician Scheme
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

Wes Anderson is one of those directors whose films are immediately recognizable. I was trying to figure out exactly what it is in terms of his composition and characters that makes his film so distinctive and I’ve finally figured it out—it’s the title of this write-up. Everyone in Wes Anderson films is autistic. In his early films, it was only some of the characters, but now, everyone in his films has got a touch of the ‘tism, and they’ve all got the same variety. It wasn’t until I finished The Phoenician Scheme that I finally understood this.

The Phoenician Scheme is mid-level Wes Anderson, and I don’t like having to say that. I tend to like Wes Anderson films pretty well, although I can only take a bit of him at a time. Now that I’ve seen this, I probably won’t watch another of his films for six or seven months. When Anderson is good, he’s really good. When he’s off, even a bit, everything feels like it falls apart. The Phoenician Scheme just never feels like it gels in the way his films normally do. It might be simply because the characters here, almost to a person, are unlikeable.

Presents Beneath the Tree

2025 has been probably the worst year of my life, and as a capper, I got COVID for Christmas, which means I’m spending the day alone, separated from my family. It also means that I’m not spending the days between Christmas and New Year’s in St. Louis with my family. This years sucks and I can’t wait for it to be gone.

On another note, it appears that at some point, 15 movies were added to the List, which (according to IMDb) is up to 1260 total entries, so I suddenly have a touch of work to do on that—I’ve seen most of them already. So I’ll be getting through few that I’m missing soon. That being the case, I’m going to suggest my yearly addition of 10 movies. I won’t include anything from 2025, but I will likely touch on 2024. As always, these are not ranked, just in the order I thought of them.

EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that one of my original picks, BlacKkKlansman, has been on the 1001 List before, so I am replacing it.

Muscle Mommy

Film: Love Lies Bleeding
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on gigantic television.

I am someone who has a lot of hard and fast habits, but not a lot of hard and fast rules. There are a few solid rules that tend to work really well for me, though. One of the rules that does work for me is that if you find something that manopshere podcasters and gym bros hate, it’s almost certainly going to be something great. Case in point: Kristen Stewart. Because of the popularity of the Twilight series among teen girls for years, Stewart, much like Taylor Swift and boy bands, became the focus of intense hatred of guys who seem to do everything specifically to impress other men. So when a film like Love Lies Bleeding shows up, they’re going to hate it by rote without looking.

It's such a weird way to live, and it seems to be only Kristen Stewart who gets this treatment from those films. Robert Pattinson, Michael Sheen, Anna Kendrick, Edi Gathegi, Rami Malek, Graham Greene…all of them emerged unscathed eventually (okay, maybe not Taylor Lautner). But Kristen Stewart has been doing interesting work for the last decade, and Love Lies Bleeding, made by Rose Glass, who also directed Saint Maud, is a great case in point.

Inching Through Life

Film: Memoir of a Snail
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

One of the issues with Best Animated Feature specifically at the Oscars is that the winner is pretty much always going to be a movie for children. There are movies that are nominated that are clearly for adults, and this is a trend I like, even if I don’t always like the movie in question. It’s how we got nominations of films like I Lost My Body, Anomalisa, and Persepolis (and it doesn’t explain why Waltz with Bashir was robbed). Memoir of a Snail was never going to win this award, but I love that it got nominated, and it certainly partially makes up for the fact that Adam Elliot was denied a nomination for Mary & Max.

Make no mistake—while the Claymation looks like it would appeal to kids, Memoir of a Snail is clearly made for an adult audience. This is not merely for a couple of minor moments of animated nudity, but because of the adult themes—religious abuse, sexual kinks, suicide, and more. This is not a movie to sit the kiddies in front of while you go about your day. The bland color palette might be the first indication of this, but then again, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie exist.

Laura Palmer

Film: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on gigantic television.

This might well be the shortest review I have written for this site other than those I do in the monthly wrap-ups. There’s an inherent problem in looking at a movie like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The problem is that there is an inherent audience for this film, and you are either a part of that audience or you aren’t. Furthermore, you already know if you are in the audience for this movie or not. Did you watch the 1990s Twin Peaks television series? If you did, congratulations—this movie is for you. Have you not watched that series? You won’t have any interest in this.

In fact, the problem is even more significant. If you’ve watched Twin Peaks, you’ve almost certainly already seen Fire Walk with Me. The only reasons you haven’t seen this if you’ve seen the show are that you just finished the first two seasons of the show (I finished them on Thursday), or you were forced to watch the show by someone else and you didn’t like it, so the movie didn’t interest you. In any event, you’ve seen this, plan to see it in the immediate future, or have absolutely no interest in seeing it.

Naruto Runners

Film: Weapons
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

We’re at the time of year where people are starting to put together their year-end movie lists, both in general and in terms of specific genres. For some people, it’s also the time of year to put together lists of movies they were disappointed in. For whatever reason, it’s become quite trendy to list Zach Creggar’s Weapons on the list of disappointments for a lot of horror movie bloggers and commentators. I have to think that while some of that is likely honest, some of it genuinely feels like rage farming. Weapons goes in an unusual direction, certainly, and it might not be what people expected, but the seeming outrage I’ve seen from a couple of streamers really feels unbalanced.

The basic story is that one day, in the town of Maybrook, PA, 17 of the 18 children in the third grade classroom of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) don’t show up for school. Only Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) shows up for class. The 17 children are missing; parents of some of the houses check on their cameras and all of them confirm that at 2:17 in the morning, their children got up, left the house, and ran out into the street, all running off in the same direction, arms wide, not unlike Naruto.

The Pink Opaque

Film: I Saw the TV Glow
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on massive television.

There are times when I watch something, and I realize I am not the target audience. I felt this significantly with a number of Blaxploitation films from the 1970s. I felt it culturally when I watched Celine and Julie Go Boating. In a lot of cases, these are movies that I liked, but I felt like there was something there that was preventing me from fully getting the sense that the filmmaker intends. That’s definitely the case with I Saw the TV Glow.

What is the deal here? This is very clearly and very obviously a movie about someone coming to term with (allegorically in the sense of the movies) with being transgender. The film is very much about living a lie and living your own personal truth regardless of the consequences and despite the risks. I certainly have felt this way in some respects, like the world that we live in is broken and that I was supposed to be something other than what I am, but at least I feel at home in my own body. Because of this, while I can appreciate and understand I Saw the TV Glow, I don’t know that I can fully understand it at its deepest level.