The Fountain of Salmacis

Film: Together (2025)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on massive television.

The trailer for Together from 2025 doesn’t really hide what is going to happen in this film, or at least it hints pretty heavily toward a particular main plot. Even the cover art on the disc combined with the name are going to lead your thoughts in specific directions. For someone like me, who frequently likes to analogize, I’m in a quandary. There are so many different allusions and connections I can make to books, music, and other movies that I was at least temporarily overwhelmed by the possibilities.

That said, if I can find a way to both reference my earliest prog rock musical roots and a more obscure Greek myth, I’m a happy dude. The issue here for me was the fact that I knew where the film was going before I put the disc in the spinner. The trailer gives it away, as does the cover of the DVD. That being the case, this becomes more about how the story is told rather than where the story is going.

Wait...It Has a Plot?

Film: Tenebrae
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

I’ve long had a sort of love-hate relationship with Dario Argento and the giallo style in general for years. Argento’s films are all about the style and often light on substance. My knock against him has been, for years, that it feels like a lot of his films come from his visualization of a couple of outstanding scenes, and the rest of the movie is made to connect them. For as good a visual masterpiece as Suspiria is, it does seem like it started from the stabbing/hanging death and the barbed wire room and went from there. This is much less the case for Tenebrae (Tenebre in Italian, evidently), where there is an actual plot. That’s a low bar, but for gialli it’s a necessary one.

True to the style, Tenebrae is a horror movie in the guise of a mystery. Horror author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) has come to Rome on his latest book tour, promoting a book called Tenebrae. Coming with him on the trip are his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and his agent Bullmer (John Saxon). He will eventually discover that his ex-fiancée Jane (Veronica Lario) has followed him to Rome as well. What Neal doesn’t know is that just before he arrived, a young shoplifter named Elsa (Ania Pieroni) has been brutally murdered.

What I've Caught Up With, November 2025

I didn’t watch a lot of movies in November. I’ve been more or less struggling to return to normalcy in my own life, and that’s meant finding ways to disconnect from things that have been stressing me out. In some odd ways, this blog can be a real stressor—trying to keep up with films and catch up with films has me constantly feeling like I am always behind. That’s silly, but we put stress on ourselves in different ways and for different reasons all the time.

I spent far more time catching up on TV shows, although I only finished a couple. I did a rewatch of the NetFlix/Disney Daredevil since I realized I had never seen the third season. I also watched Helstrom, which is the one Marvel-based show you can easily skip if you decide to watch all of the Marvel content. My wife decided she wants to watch the new Dexter, so we temporarily have a Paramount account; I’m using this as an opportunity to finally watch Twin Peaks.

Madden NFL 2025

Film: Him
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on massive television.

Movies like Him present a problem for me. I generally only do a full review of a movie from the last few years if I think it’s worth the time and effort, and Him isn’t. But I also know that the They Shoot Zombies list is still being updated pretty much every year, and there’s a non-zero chance that this will show up on it in the future. It shouldn’t, but it is better than some of the movies that have made that list. And, honestly, it’s not a movie I necessarily want to watch a second time. I don’t say this to dissuade anyone from watching on their own. Him has a lot of promise; it just doesn’t fulfill that promise.

This is very much a sports movie, and it’s one that revels in the idea of football as a sort of religion. That’s a fair position to take. It is close to a religion for a lot of people, and as someone who still lives in the shadow of Chicago where the Bears are resurgent, it feels like a lot of people are seeing the light. But it’s not just “football as religion” that makes the film go. This is football as cult, and it gets into some pretty culty places.

Time Off

Film: Nobody 2
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

One of the issues with modern action movies is that they have expanded in length over time. The genre used to be pretty straight forward. You could sit down with The Terminator or Predator and be out in under 2 hours, or go with Die Hard for a bit longer than two hours. The John Wick series is a solid example of what I’m talking about. The first film runs 101 minutes, the second is 122, the third is 131, and the fourth is a whopping 169. And why? Nobody 2 is a return to normalcy. It’s a tight 89 minutes including credits, and actually a touch shorter than the original film.

It helps to know the basics of the original film. Seeming average guy Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) has what seems like an average life but is distant from his family. In reality, he’s a former assassin, who gets dragged back into the life when he beats the snot out of someone who turns out to be connected. Mayhem ensues, and it is a glorious 90 minutes or so of absolute ass kicking. So here’s the sequel.

That's What Voicemail is For

Film: One Missed Call (Chakushin ari)
Format: Streaming video from AMC through Amazon Prime on Fire!

Takashi Miike is a legendary horror director, but not every good or great director gets a hit every time they step up to the plate. I knew going in to One Missed Call (or Chakushin ari) the basics of the story. Essentially, people get a cell phone call from themselves that they invariably miss. The call they get is from the future, and essentially that call predicts their death. When the time arrives from when the call came, they die horribly, and someone from their list of contacts is called, and the cycle begins again.

I also knew about the American remake from a few years after Miike’s film. The American version of One Missed Call is legendarily bad. It’s remake of Pulse/The Wicker Man/The Uninvited levels of bad, scoring a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Honestly, the best thing I can say about Miike’s original is that it’s not the remake, but few movies are.

Origin Story

Film: The Apprentice
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on massive television.

I’m desperately behind on finishing up the Oscar movies from 2024, having five to knock out in the next 31 days if I’m going to get them all done by the end of the year. It’s more than I’d like, and I will admit that a part of this is that I’m dreading the length of The Brutalist and I’m not that interested in Anora. But of the films I need to finish, it’s The Apprentice that I have dreaded the most. The last thing I want to spend time with is watching some sort of attempt to reform the character of Donald Trump. I have no interest in offering him any sympathy.

This is a movie where the title is doing double duty. The Apprentice, of course, is the name of Trump’s old television show, and arguably the one that truly made him accessible to the masses, and more than anything paved the way to his misbegotten presidencies. The real meaning of the title, though, is that this is essentially the origin story of Trump (Sebastian Stan, who was Oscar nominated for this, and the reason I’m watching it), who was essentially taught to be the man he is by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Essentially, Trump learned at the feet of Cohn, who is almost certainly in the top-5 of the most genuinely evil people from the 20th Century.