So think up some questions! If this is anything like the last few attempts, you could very well be the only person on the stream. Like Ray and Dave Davies’ personal trainer, I am still working out the kinks!

For his 1952 comedy Actors and Sin, writer-co-director Ben Hecht turned his keen wit and incisive gaze toward worlds he had conquered: theater and film.

Actors and Sin consists of two unrelated vignettes about show-business egos. In the first, ham Maurice Tillayou (Edgar G. Robinson) stage-manages his actress daughter Marcia’s (Marsha Hunt) life as if it were a theatrical melodrama.

In the second story, agent Orlando Higgens (Eddie Albert) becomes the reluctant representative of Daisy Marcher, the red-hot screenwriter of the lurid melodrama Woman of Sin, a script studio head J.B Cobb (Alan Reed) is eager to buy.

J.B. doesn’t realize that the writer of the ultimate adult romance is a bratty nine-year-old with an abrasive honk of a voice and equally off-putting personality.

Hecht perversely cast his daughter Jenny as a maniacal moppet who mastered the art of being a Hollywood hack before puberty. The younger Hecht has a unique presence. It’s rare to see a child actor so disinterested in being likable. She seems less like a child than a weird old lady in miniature.

Actors and Sin feels like the cinematic equivalent of a short story collection or a pair of one-act plays full of witty banter.

The master of multiple mediums takes pleasure in the possibilities of words, some of which he delivers as narrator. Actors and Sin is a misanthropic gem from a man who understood Hollywood intimately.

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Considering the direction his career subsequently took, it's easy to forget that Ron Perlman rose to fame not as a towering badass who could crush skulls with his bare hands, but rather as a romantic leading man, albeit of the beastly variety, on a cheesy 1980s television show. It’s similarly easy to forget that Linda Hamilton achieved her second greatest fame as the female romantic lead on the aforementioned cheesy television show.

Beauty and the Beast was never a smash, but it was a cult hit with a devoted following that began to abandon it when Hamilton left during the third season after getting pregnant. It’s strangely forgotten these days, perhaps because it was the television equivalent of a romance novel, and those have never commanded respect or proven particularly enduring.

Perlman would go on to even greater fame as a tough-guy character actor whose height and physique made him a natural for villain roles, including the juicy part of Collie Entragian, the sheriff of a small Nevada town with a dark history, in the 2006 television movie Desperation.

Desperation’s full name is Stephen King’s Desperation, which feels like an unintentional self-own. King adapted his own 1996 novel for the teleplay, and it was directed by his frequent collaborator Mick Garris, who also helmed the King adaptations Sleepwalkers, Riding the Bullet, The Shining, Bag of Bones, and Quicksilver Highway, and co-wrote the story for the 1996 short film Michael Jackson’s Ghosts, a characteristically bizarre and self-indulgent short film, with King and Jackson.

I’m excited to revisit Michael Jackson’s Ghosts for this project, even if the only critic referenced in the “Reception” part of its Wikipedia page described it as “clunky, leaden, and overblown” and said it was a “staggeringly blunt” allegory for Jackson’s life and pop culture status.^[He attributed its failure to Jackson’s place in the public imagination at the time, following his recent divorce from Lisa Marie Presley and the 1993 child molestation allegations against him. The critic in question is, of course, Nathan Rabin, and that creep is wrong maybe 100 percent of the time.

Desperation is based on the 1996 novel of the same name, which is apparently a “mirror” novel to The Regulators, released the same year under King’s Richard Bachmann pseudonym, and features many of the same characters.

The Regulators apparently began life as a screenplay King was writing for legendary Western director and fellow boozehound Sam Peckinpah that was abandoned when the action auteur died. King then reworked The Regulators as a vehicle for rapper Warren G and singer Nate Dogg about a young Black man who is robbed of his Rolex and rings during a dice game gone awry, but is bailed out by his tough, gun-toting, yet smooth-singing pal, at which point they celebrate by taking some horny tricks to the Eastside Motel for sex.

King had some creative differences with his collaborators. He insisted that G and Dogg’s characters be geeks off the street, but they insisted on playing characters that were proficient with guns and able to earn their keep. Dogg’s 2011 death spelled doom for this new iteration of The Regulators.

Of all the King-Garris collaborations I’ve seen, Desperation is easily my favorite, and I’m intrigued by the existence of The Regulators to the point where I may read it at some point, if I have the time.

Desperation has a terrific cast that includes Henry Thomas, Annabel Gish, Charles Durning, Steven Weber, Tom Skerritt, and Matt Frewer, but Perlman dominates the proceedings with his scenery-chewing turn as a literal sheriff from hell, a maniac cop possessed by evil.

That makes it unfortunate that Perlman departs the proceedings halfway through when the earth demon that had taken over his body chooses a different, less physically imposing host.

The second half of Desperation suffers from Perlman’s absence and some seriously cheesy business involving a helpful ghost child and a demon, but it remains chilling and intense despite its occasional missteps.

Desperation opens with Peter (Thomas) and Mary (Gish) Jackson getting pulled over by Collie Entragian (Perlman) in the middle of the Nevada desert. The outsized lawman/law-breaker plants a comically oversized bag of marijuana in the couple’s car, then drives them to Desperation’s jail.

From the beginning, something is terribly wrong. Actually, everything is terribly wrong. Collie, an over-the-top caricature of a red-state bad cop, slips, “I’m going to kill you,” into the middle of reading the duo their Miranda Rights. Also, Desperation is full of dead animals, primarily dogs.

Collie makes good on his threat by killing Peter before they even reach the jail. A horrified Mary discovers that Collie has an unfortunate predilection for killing innocent people. All cops may be bad, but this one is positively demonic.

Collie previously murdered a little girl nicknamed Pie and imprisoned her devout brother, David Carver (Shane Haboucha), a pious child of unshakeable faith, and David and Pie’s father, Ralph (Frewer), and mother, Ellen (Sylva Kelegian).

The jail’s other inhabitant is Tom Billingsley (Charles Durning), a local veterinarian with a drinking problem who knew Collie before he became possessed and knows all about Desperation’s dark secrets and demons, both literal and metaphorical.

Elsewhere, roadie Steve Ames (Steven Weber, a year before starring in the King-penned and Garris-directed adaptation of The Shining) picks up hitchhiker Cynthia Smith (Kelly Overton) and gets a desperate call from his employer, Johnny Marinville (Skeritt), an author successful enough to employ him as his soundman during speaking engagements.

Collie fucks with the famous writer by pretending to be a huge fan, only to beat him up and imprison him in a jail surrounded by savage animals, seemingly under the control of Collie, or rather, Tak, the earth demon possessing him.

In Desperation, Steve and Cynthia are horrified to discover an unending series of corpses that, needless to say, did not die of old age or natural causes but were instead brutally murdered by Collie, or rather, the exemplar of pure evil controlling him.

Even for a Stephen King horror movie, Desperation is brutal and overflowing with death and corpses. It’s so unrelenting in its nastiness that I found myself worried about the psyche of Haboucha, whose role forces him to see things no child should have to witness, even for the sake of a movie, primarily in the form of the vast army of dead bodies that represent Desperation’s mostly murdered population.

Perlman is clearly having a blast playing an outsized figure of Satanic evil. There’s a deep streak of pitch-black comedy coursing through Perlman’s electrifying performance that does not compromise the terrifying viciousness of the character actor’s virtuoso performance.

If Tak had not decided to jump from Collie’s body to Ellen’s, the film’s villain would have ranked as one of the most terrifying and unforgettable bad guys in King’s oeuvre. Unfortunately, Perlman is missing in action for nearly all of Desperation’s second half.

Desperation opens much stronger than it closes, and would benefit from pruning a few unnecessary subplots, but it’s nevertheless a compellingly lurid B-movie that exploits our fear of empty spaces and lawmen who got into the business to abuse power and terrorize the very people they’re supposed to protect and serve.

Despite a modest budget and the constraints of appearing on network television, Desperation is a talky yet engaging terror tale distinguished by a wildly overqualified cast and a riveting central performance by Perlman that leaves us hungry for more.

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I like to think that there is a furtive blessing in every trauma I experience because it broadens my frame of reference and makes me a more experienced and authoritative writer. For example, when a car with the headlights off barreled into my wife’s BMW on Thanksgiving night and sent me to the hospital for nearly a week with a punctured lung and broken ribs, it hurt like hell, but it also gave me firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be in a car accident, and then to recover in a hospital bed while being pumped full of painkillers.

Then again, you do not need to be in a car accident to understand just how painful they can be. But when you’ve experienced that trauma yourself, you understand it on a deeper and more painful level.

Last night I watched The Furious, which sounds like a weird spin-off of a famously family- and car-focused franchise but is actually a badass Hong Kong action movie. In it, protagonist Wang Wei (Xie Miao) runs after the truck containing his beloved daughter and some nefarious child traffickers.

Miao resembles Robert Patrick’s unstoppable, shape-shifting android killer T-1000 from T2: Judgment Day as much as he does a flesh-and-blood human being. People under tremendous, life-altering stress are capable of seemingly superhuman feats, like the proverbial slight, unassuming mother who lifts a car off her child in the aftermath of a car crash because she’s so overcome with adrenaline.

Witnessing his daughter’s abduction has a similar effect on Wang, who races after the truck while wearing flimsy sandals, which he discards so he can run faster. Wang seems to be going about thirty miles an hour despite running barefoot over broken glass.

Then our underdog hero is hit by a car. He’s hit hard. It is not a love tap or a minor collision. A car slams into him when he should be so exhausted that he can’t move another inch.

I could feel the poor man’s pain in a way that would not have been possible if I hadn’t experienced something similar myself. For neither the first nor the last time, I let out an involuntary “Oh shit!” or “Damn!” because The Furious is a profoundly visceral experience that will make you feel like you’re being hit by a speeding truck of awesomeness.

I wanted the poor man to go to the hospital to recuperate, but he walks it off because there would be no movie if he did the smart thing and spent a few days in the hospital rather than pursue his goal with relentless, single-minded focus. It’s The Furious, not The Reasonable.

Instead of seeking timely medical treatment, Wang goes home, downs a fistful of painkillers, and pours some cold water on his injuries. I also staggered away from my car accident, convinced that I could handle the excruciating pain until I woke up in the morning with my face horrifically bloated from random air surging through my body after I punctured my lung and went to the hospital, where they confirmed that my shit was all fucked up, and I wouldn’t be going home any time soon.

Rather than spend time in a hospital bed recuperating, Wang engages in hand-to-hand combat with hundreds of henchmen. In the process, he racks up a body count in the triple digits.

Compared to the steroid-addled jocks of American action, Miao is slight and small to the point of being Lilliputian, but he’s superhuman in his speed, power, and agility. He’s a goddamn superhero in everyman garb, a ferocious force for good in a cartoonish realm of ultimate evil.

In the fast-paced The Furious, Wang is a simple man whose life revolves around spending time with his adoring daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), and teaching her everything he knows about martial arts, which appears to be everything.

Then one awful day, Rainy is bamboozled by a seemingly injured child seeking help. It’s a cynical ruse to lure innocent kiddies into a trap so they can be kidnapped and then trafficked by the sinister forces of Paklung (Joey Iwanaga), the ambitious son of a powerful crime lord who masks his evil with a veneer of upper-middle-class respectability.

Wang has an ally in his quest to bring down Paklung’s reign of terror in Navin (Joe Taslim), a chain-smoking journalist who has been going undercover as a criminal degenerate ever since his muckraking reporter wife Matia (Yanin Vismitananda) disappeared mysteriously while investigating Paklung’s trafficking ring.

Wang goes to the police with a physical description of the kidnappers and their license plate number, but they’re in league with the child traffickers and consequently of no help.

The Furious has the structure of a beat-em-up video game, with each bone-crunching, spine-snapping, mind-melting action setpiece bringing our heroes close to the Big Boss and victory.

From a plot, dialogue, and characterization standpoint, The Furious is nothing special. It shares the same premise of seemingly half of all action movies: traumatized heroes get revenge on the monsters who hurt someone they love. Whenever Wang and Navin are not destroying vast armies of heavies with their feet and fists of fury, the movie feels as cheesy as a 1980s Cannon B-movie.

The Furious is a corny exploitation movie with some of the most incredible action sequences ever committed to film. The movie’s boilerplate aspects cease to matter once the fighting resumes, and it instantly morphs into a stone-cold masterpiece of pure action.

Director Kenji Tanigaki’s background as an in-demand fight choreographer is apparent in every impeccably designed melee and beautifully executed fistfight. The Furious is a balletic bloodbath, a soaring symphony of slaughter, the ultimate in ultra-violence.

It’ll bring in a heavy like Ho (Brian Le), a hammer-wielding brute who seems even more massive and intimidating due to the small, slight stature of the other characters, who seems like the baddest motherfucker in the history of film, only to top him with a villain who is even more of an unforgettable, iconic badass like Tak (Yayan Ruhian), a skilled assassin in a red track suit who is handy with a knife and even handier with a bow and arrow.

Paklung at first appears to be a businessman content to let others handle the dirty business of kiddie abduction and mass murder, but he turns into a seemingly unstoppable fighting force when angry. The Furious has its overmatched heroes square off against dozens of enthusiastic killers, often at the same time, but the movie’s extraordinary climax finds Wang and Navin squaring off against Paklung and Tak, with Ho in the mix as a wild card.

The Furious takes Robert McKee’s famous line about action being character to a cartoonish extreme. We learn NOTHING about Wang except that he’s better at killing people and avoiding death than anyone in the history of film. We don’t need to know anything about Wang for him to be a great character. He’s defined less by a hacky backstory than by his extraordinary fighting ability.

Like pornography and horror movies, action movies aspire to a physiological response. I was so blown away by The Furious’ action that I found myself issuing so many grunts of astonishment that I was worried that I would annoy the other three people in the theater.

Believe the hype. The Furious will bring out the kid in you, even if it’s so violent that it probably merits an XXX. It’s full of brutality, but its violence is anything but gratuitous. It’s the other elements of the movie that feel unnecessary. The violence, in sharp contrast, is absolutely essential, as is the film itself.

4.5 Stars out of 5

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A really great podcast can get you interested in subject matter you otherwise wouldn’t care about. I started listening to Maintenance Phase because I’m a fan of co-host Michael Hobbes’ If Books Could Kill, an essential podcast about timely, then hilariously dated tomes that captured the cultural zeitgeist, hurt people, groups, and institutions, then were mostly forgotten. I’m talking about books like Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, a massively influential guide to winning a man’s heart that encourages anxious women to abandon their identities and personalities and change into whatever their husbands most desire that they haven’t gotten around to covering.

I will write about If Books Could Kill here, but I love writing about terrible books in part because terrible book culture isn’t anywhere near as evolved and ubiquitous as bad movie culture. Some of my favorite episodes of Maintenance Phase, which Hobbes hosts with Aubrey Gordon, are devoted to diet books from a delightfully random assortment of celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Ed McMahon, and Mike Huckabee.

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For the last month or so, my sick father’s impending death has cast a long, dark shadow over every aspect of my life. I did not realize that death, grief, and mourning play a central role in Bring Her Back and The Life of Chuck.

Last night, roughly half an hour before Father’s Day, my father died after 77 great years. Thanks, Dad! He died while I was watching a movie that is about the death of Chuck and the world, as much as it is about his life.

It seems fitting that I was at the movies, very late on a Saturday night, in a nearly empty theater watching an unusually emotional and poignant exploration of the joy, pain, and confusion of being human in an unfathomably complicated world, when my old man passed away, because movies were something we shared. Pop culture was an intense bond between us for as long as I can remember. He loved movies. He loved the blues. He loved his family. He loved life.

My dad would take me to the movies and the video store. Instead of Chevy Chase or Eddie Murphy movies, I watched classic musicals, like my dad’s favorite, Meet Me in St. Louis. I’d play hooky to see movies instead of suffering through the Chicago public school system. He’d always write me a note facetiously attributing my absence to sickness or a family emergency, not an urgent need to continue my life’s work: finding out which movies had boobs in them and which did not.

My dad always took tremendous pride in my career as a writer. I felt bad that, after a certain point, there wasn’t much success for him to take pride in because I struggled professionally the way he did after he left his secure but soul-crushing government job.

Dad understood that movie theaters were a special place. They were sacred. They were a place where I didn’t have to mask or pretend to be neurotypical, where I could be alone with movies, my eternal special interest, as well as popcorn and a big cup of Cherry Coca-Cola.

The Life of Chuck is a Stephen King adaptation about death, dying, and a slow-motion apocalypse that’s also, surprisingly but delightfully, about life’s fragility and the life-affirming joy of dance.

King has written his share of non-horror novels and novellas, most notably the novellas that inspired Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, but he’s never written anything quite like this.

The Life of Chuck opens at the end of life as we know it. The internet is down permanently. Rather than inspiring a paradise where humanity rediscovers the simple pleasures of an offline existence, confusion and despair reign.

A world addicted to technology that pushes us further apart while promising to unite us doesn’t know how to deal with an analog world, so it undergoes painful withdrawal symptoms.

As “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” illustrates, human beings, as a species, tend not to deal well with emergencies and uncertainty.

Sad-eyed teacher Mike Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) copes with the breakdown of civilization and the possibility that he is living in end times by clinging to the comforting ritual of work and repetition.

With the end of the world seemingly imminent, Mike tries to reconcile with his ex-wife Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan). The Life of Chuck originated as one of four stories in If It Bleeds, released in April 2020.

If It Bleeds was released early during the COVID-19 pandemic and filmed after it had profoundly changed the way we live, in unsettling ways.

The Life of Chuck captures, on a visceral level, the culture-wide sense of dread and confusion that ensued when confronted with a public health crisis beyond our imagination. Would the pandemic ever end? How many people would it take? What would our world look like after it?

Like us, the characters here are cursed to live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, never knowing when it will all end. In the first act of The Life of Chuck, Earth is a science project a vengeance-crazed god chose to end because the results displeased him.

Can you blame him? If I were God, I’d be contemplating a Great Flood-type scenario to punish humanity for its wickedness.

Ejiofor lends an understated humanity that grounds the dark fantasy in human emotions such as grief, sadness, longing, and despair. The world has reached such a sad nadir that it almost feels like God is doing the universe a favor by snuffing out our dim light permanently.

Everything has gone sideways. Stars and planets disappear from the sky. Mighty states crumble into the sea, yet the milquetoast visage of Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), the titular Chuck of the title, can be seen everywhere, along with the words, “39 great years. Thanks, Chuck.”

Chuck is a cipher. He’s at once a bean-counting nobody and the most famous person in the world. He’s a sentient meme in a world where cruel destiny has robbed us of our beloved online ephemera as well as an idea.

The Life of Chuck articulates the joys, pain, and anguish of life through the uncommon story of an ordinary man who represents nothing less than humanity itself.

Chuck is a ubiquitous presence in the first act, but as much an idea as a man.

Hiddleston makes Chuck cinema’s most charismatic accountant. He may look like any other number cruncher, but when the mood hits him, he dances like Fred Astaire. There is a gorgeous set piece in which a black female busker pounds out a beat that inspires Chuck to wow everyone with an unexpected burst of fancy footwork.

The joy that Hiddleston takes in movement is palpable and infectious. In a world that is dying and filled with death, dancing is a rebuke to the grim certainty of the grave.

God gave us these miraculous bodies. We might as well make good use of them while we can.

The Life of Chuck has a structure similar to that of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We begin at the end, with the 39-year-old Chuck dying of a tumor while surrounded by his wife and daughter.

We then skip back to Chuck’s tragic childhood. Our eminently relatable protagonist loses his father and his pregnant mother in a car crash. The earnest young man is raised by his grandfather, Albie (Mark Hamill), and grandmother Sarah (Mia Sara).

They’re a study in opposites. As played by Hamill in an Oscar-worthy supporting turn, Albie is a depressed alcoholic who deals with his grief through excessive drinking. In sharp contrast, the ebullient Sarah is a bright light in a dark world who instills in her grandson a soul-consuming love of dance, which, unfortunately, does not leave him with the confidence to ditch the bland certainty of accounting for the impossible odds of pursuing a dance career.

If Stephen King’s name were not in the credits, I never would have guessed that it was based on his work. I watched Pet Sematary: Bloodlines after this because I needed the distraction. The Life of Chuck audaciously argues that sometimes dead isn’t better. Sometimes life is a goddamn miracle that passes way too quickly if you’re not savoring every moment.

The Life of Chuck reminded me of the quirky, erudite philosophizing of Kurt Vonnegut, most notably through Nick Offerman’s narration, which plays a huge role in establishing a tone that is at once wry, sad, and full of humor and humanity.

Yes, The Life of Chuck is a profound and profoundly moving experience, even if your beloved father didn’t die while you were watching it. I’ll always associate The Life of Chuck with my dad and my dad’s death. That’s less melancholy than bittersweet, because this is precisely the kind of movie that made me fall in love with film as a movie-mad boy indulged by a father who understood that movies meant more to me than school or religion.

The Life of Chuck speaks to art’s ability to move us with stories that are at once specific and universal.

Like All That Jazz, The Life of Chuck is a movie about death roaring with life. It maintains a mood of transcendent exhaustion, yet paradoxically overflows with energy, ideas, and momentum.

Four and a half stars out of five

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After a series of close calls, Stephen King and Steven Spielberg were supposed to collaborate directly on an adaptation of the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House. The project fell apart, resulting in 1999’s The Haunting, which Spielberg executive-produced but wisely chose not to put his name on, and the King-penned, equally hokey 2002 haunted-house miniseries Rose Red.

I will nevertheless always associate King and Spielberg in my mind because they share a similar first name, are roughly the same age, and are two of the most successful, best, and important American entertainers.

It would be impossible to imagine pop culture without the contributions of both men. They are also among the most American of American filmmakers and authors. Spielberg and King also share a rare gift for grounding the fantastical and horrific in the mundane reality of everyday life that is on full display in Spielberg’s Disclosure Day.

I’m writing up every movie, TV movie, miniseries, and television series rooted in King’s voluminous work in multiple media. It’s an ambitious project that will take years to complete.

I most recently wrote up the 1993 miniseries The Tommyknockers, which was based on the last novel King wrote before getting sober. King hated his 558-page 1987 bestseller because it was fueled by cocaine and sweaty desperation rather than inspiration. He wasn’t a fan of the miniseries either, which was an enormous ratings success despite being terrible.

In The Tommyknockers, King attempted Lovecraftian horror in the terror tale of a small town transformed by the malevolent presence of alien technology that first enhances the lives of its residents through miraculous inventions and eerie psychic powers, before it reduces them to slaves with a zombie-like pallor and no will of their own.

Spielberg’s new science fiction drama Disclosure Day is a very different, more optimistic movie, but it shares with The Tommyknockers a vision of a world transformed by extraterrestrials who grant people extraordinary telepathic powers.

Emily Blunt stars in Disclosure Day as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist eager to make the leap from weather girl to serious national anchorwoman. The ambitious television personality is surprised to discover that she somehow speaks languages she never studied and is able to read people’s minds and discern, then solve, their problems. One day, she’s eye candy on local news. The next, she’s the next step in human evolution, albeit with an assist from an unlikely, otherworldly source.

On television, one eventful day, Margaret finds herself communicating through percussive sounds rather than any discernible human language. This puts her on the radar of the WardEx corporation, a furtive division of the United States government roughly analogous to “The Shop”, the sinister agency that figures prominently in multiple King books, including the novel The Tommyknockers, and its devious CEO, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who uses supernatural powers stolen from aliens to help oppress non-humans.

Josh O’Connor costars as Dr. Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert and the subject of a massive manhunt after he purloined evidence of alien life, then went on the run with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter), with an eye toward sharing his information with a world that may not be ready.

Dr. Kellner has an ally inside Wardex in the form of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a whistleblower who knows that the government has been experimenting on aliens and reverse-engineering their technology for decades.

Dr. Kellner and Margaret realize they were previously visited by aliens who took the form of cute, Disney-style animals to avoid coming off as threatening. The world is on the verge of a world war with the power to obliterate the planet due to our cruelty and inability to look beyond our own selfish needs.

What follows is a fierce battle to control information, hence the title, and to control the narrative.

The science-fiction and conspiracy films of the 1970s and 1980s lingered in the endless shadow of Watergate and tapped into the paranoid but potent idea that the powerful lived in a murky world of secrets and lies that the ignorant rabble knew nothing about.

It’s not coincidental that in Disclosure Day, Richard Nixon is shown impressing a celebrity by showing him proof that we are not alone in the universe. That is not the only secret he withheld from the American people. If Trump was shown evidence of alien light forms, I have no doubt that he’d use it to try to impress Joe Rogan.

Donald Trump’s war on the Deep State paradoxically revealed the concept of Deep State to be a right-wing fever dream/fantasy that society could advance by leaps and bounds by destroying the government’s ability to help people domestically and abroad and firing public servants. It turns out those sinister Deep State agents were just ordinary people who valued their jobs and were good at them because they had a lot of experience and training.

At the heart of the MAGA mindset is a fear and hatred of the unknown, unusual, and different, and a reactionary worship and deification of the powerful and familiar. Disclosure Day is driven by a Spielbergian sense of optimism and hope, as well as a conviction that we can be the heroes of our own story by embracing the new and the unknown rather than exploiting it for our own nefarious purposes.

Disclosure Day feels like the concluding entry in an unofficial trilogy that began with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, continued with E.T., and concludes here with another artful exploration of our complicated relationship with visitors from another planet and all that they represent.

The film’s idealism feels poignantly out of step with the cynicism and despair of our current cultural moment, when we’re bracing ourselves for more of the worst rather than working toward something better, because better feels impossible right now.

Disclosure Day benefits tremendously from comparison to The Tommyknockers. At the risk of being controversial, Spielberg is a better storyteller than John Power, the journeyman director of the Clinton-era miniseries. In Spielberg’s film, we are the monsters, and adorably old-fashioned aliens are heroes whose sophisticated technology is no match for our capacity for thievery and self-dealing.

Spielberg believes in humanity and human nature enough to propose that good can defeat evil and people and institutions can change for the better, a belief that feels both poignant and at least moderately deluded.

3.5 Stars out of 5

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https://nathans.dashery.com

Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my just-released magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here

Sign up for an annual paid subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and get a free copy of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al for free!

Warren Oates was a key member of Sam Peckinpah’s repertory company. If you seemed like you might have killed someone in a bar fight, Peckinpah knew how to use you better than anyone else.

As Bennie, a pianist and bartender, Oates is magnificent in his dissipation. Bennie is doomed; his tragic air suggests he’s all too aware of his imminent demise.

Bring M…

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I want to do more watch-alongs here because I desperately need human contact, and I want to promote The Fractured Mirror and paid subscriptions, but mainly because I crave human interaction.

Ha, ha! Just kidding (I’m not kidding). Join me!

At 9 PM EST, I will press play on Overnight on Tubi, the classiest and best streaming service (suck it, Criterion Channel), and we will collectively delight in Troy Duffy’s downfall!

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The Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs finds the iconic filmmakers revisiting the Western setting of True Grit with darkly comic tales of murder, greed, and cruelty in the Old West.

First up is the titular vignette, a savagely funny goof starring Tim Blake Nelson as a sociopathic singing cowboy who is cavalier, if not downright giddy, about deat…

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I feel like I have been in a good groove creatively here and at my other site, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I had not been giving the Happy Place the love and attention that it deserved because I’d been focussing on building this newsletter and the endless process of finishing my ninth book, The Fractured Mirror, which took four long years to write and research.

Commercially, the only problem is that I’ve reached one of those dry periods when I can’t get a new paid subscriber or sell a copy of The Fractured Mirror to save my life. Because I’m a weird, completely independent recluse, if I don’t aggressively promote my work, I sell nothing; but if I DO aggressively promote my books, website, and now merch, then there’s still a pretty good chance that I’ll still sell nothing; but there’s also a chance, however slim, that I’ll make some money. That’s great, because we live in a society where you need money to survive, but psychologically, there’s something very satisfying about people being interested in your work, and that’s what this is largely about: trying to engage with the world and your readers, to make a connection, and share your strange little literary universe with the world.

I was frustrated that my paid subscriber count had plateaued at 415. Oh well, I consoled myself, at least I wasn’t losing paid subscribers at a steady clip. Then, of course, I started losing paid subscribers at a steady clip. I’m down 5 paid subscribers and 250 dollars in annual income this month.

In an effort to halt this slide, I’m reiterating some of the offers I’ve created to entice y’all to embrace the Nathan Rabin movement. If you get an annual subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas for just 50 dollars (that’s less than a dollar a week!), in addition to thrice-weekly Fractured Favorites suggestions and the ability to vote in polls and other paid subscriber-only endeavors, you get free signed copies of The Fractured Mirror, a massive, 548 page encyclopedia of American movies about filmmaking that it took four years to write and research and has a foreword by legendary filmmaker Joe Dante and illustrations by the great Felipe Sobreiro AND a signed copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al, a 125 page coloring book collaboration with Felipe that’s literally days of fun for the whole family. You don’t even have to pay taxes or shipping. That is free as well.

For my 50th birthday, my wife’s family got me this stamp, so every copy of a book that I sell through the site’s shop will have this seal to ensure that it is a genuine autographed item straight from my personal library, not one of the many books with fake signatures that are flooding the market.

To further encourage sales of The Fractured Mirror, the next 60 people who buy it directly from me will have a handwritten “Fractured Favorite”
recommendation on the first few pages. That’s called the personal touch, baby!

I want to have more direct interaction with my paid subscribers, so tomorrow I’m hosting two events: at noon EST, I’ll go live to answer their questions. At 9 PM EST tomorrow, we’re going to do a Tubi watch-along of the classic Troy Duffy documentary Overnight. I did one earlier on Freddy Got Fingered that went really well, except there appeared to be only one other person. Oh well! Like Ray and Dave Davies’ personal trainer, I’m working out the Kinks.

Finally, last week I launched my official merch store at Dashery, featuring my ideas and Felipe Sobreiro's work. We had a solid first month, except that 80 percent of the sales were from me. What can I say? I really love the designs.

So please do consider supporting the Nathan Rabin movement at this crucial juncture. It would mean a lot to me.

Buy my books here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Buy my merch here: https://nathans.dashery.com

Subscribe to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas here:

Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas

Movie Reviews, Stephen King, Autism in Entertainment, Joy of Positvity and Weird-Ass Side Quests

On paper, it makes all the sense in the world for Steven Spielberg to executive produce the Transformers movies. As a cartoon, toy line, and comic book series, Transformers peaked in the 1980s, a decade when Spielberg became synonymous with science fiction, fantasy, and adventure movies about suburban kids encountering creatures from another world as a director, writer, and producer.

Spielberg’s vision for a big-budget tentpole blockbuster based on the shape-shifting toys was “a boy and his car.” Spielberg was apparently fairly involved in the creation of Transformers. He read drafts of the screenplay and gave notes before making a terrible choice that ensured that the movies would fucking suck: hiring Michael Bay as the director of 2007’s Transformers.

The notorious hack was initially reluctant, dismissing it as a “stupid toy movie,” but he wanted to work with the most successful filmmaker of all time, so he signed on.

Bay, unfortunately, had a take on the series that deviated wildly from the elegant simplicity of “a boy and his car.” He wanted Transformers to feel like a proper Michael Bay movie, so he made the military a central presence and added a whole bunch of crap that doomed the franchise, including teen sex comedy, T&A, and inexplicably racist characters and jokes.

From a commercial standpoint, giving Bay the keys to the franchise worked. It’s the fifteenth top-grossing franchise of all time, having grossed over five billion dollars at the box office.

From a creative standpoint, however, Bay was a terrible choice. His entries in the series were violent, cynical monstrosities, soulless commercial product, helmed by a vulgarian who inexplicably thought he was too good to direct movies based on toys.

The Transformers franchise did not realize its potential until Bay was replaced on the 2018 spin-off Bumblebee by Travis Knight, a former novelty rapper, stop-motion animator, Laika executive, Kubo and the Two Strings director, three-time Oscar nominee, and nepo baby, as his father is Nike co-founder Phil Knight.

Knight’s Bumblebee marked a return to Spielberg’s “a boy and his car” idea, only Knight’s overachieving science-fiction sleeper focused on a girl and her car. Hailee Steinfeld played the girl. Unlike Transformers alum Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox, and Mark Wahlberg, Steinfeld did not seem ashamed to be starring in a movie about shape-shifting robot cars from outer space.

Bumblebee is the only entry in the Transformers franchise that feels like a Steven Spielberg movie. It did not hurt that it takes place in 1987, a year after 1986’s Transformers: The Movie famously gave Orson Welles his final and best role as Unicron, a planet-sized robot monster so rapacious it devours entire planets.

Bumblebee similarly benefited from focusing on one car and one girl, rather than a whole bunch of cars and people that are so poorly developed that it’s hard to even keep them straight, let alone care about them. Bumblebee has a Spielbergian sense of wonder and awe, as well as a sense of humor that was actually funny rather than stupid and juvenile like Bay’s films.

The director formerly known as Chilly Tee returns to live-action filmmaking with Masters of the Universe. I was not looking forward to Masters of the Universe, on account of it being an adaptation of a toy line from the Reagan decade, until I saw that Knight was directing.

Masters of the Universe feels like a movie that I would have seen and loved when my dad dropped me off at the movie theater in the mall in 1986, when I was ten years old, and he worked in a Caldwell Banker office. It hit me smack dab in my nostalgic sweet spot.

Unlike Bumblebee, Masters of the Universe is not set during the 1980s, but its 1980s vibe is one of its biggest strengths. It’s shiny, candy-colored, neon eye candy that finds the perfect tone for the material, at once tongue-in-cheek, self-aware, and surprisingly emotional.

Knight’s vision for his big-budget fantasy epic is essentially Bumblebee, but with He-Man. He brings the same light, deft touch to the material. Like the Transformers spin-off, it has a wonderful sense of its own ridiculousness. Masters of the Universe is so delightfully goofy that it sometimes feels like a parody of the toy line/cartoon as much as a straight adaptation.

Then again, very little about Masters of the Universe is straight in both tone and sexuality. It’s full of gay innuendo and raging homoeroticism. In what is essentially a voice performance, since the character is overwhelmingly CGI, Jared Leto plays Skeletor as a screamingly theatrical queen who gets off on his own outsized villainy and makes no attempt to hide his lust for Nicholas Galitzine’s Adam Glenn/He-Man.

Everyone has a boner for Adam Glenn/He-Man here. With his loincloth, rippling muscles, and aversion to wearing clothes, particularly pants and shirts, the protagonist is sexualized far more intensely than any of the female characters.

Masters of the Universe earns its PG-13 primarily through double entendres and innuendos. A less ballsy adaptation of the Mattel toy line would have eliminated the supporting character of Fisto on account of him being a dude named Fisto who earned his moniker by virtue of having a giant fist. Not Masters of the Universe! Knight’s delightfully silly fantasy comedy makes delicious satirical sport out of Fisto’s titular eccentricity. It’s bold and brave enough to make so many fisting jokes that it’s hard to believe it avoided an R rating.

You’d have to journey all the way back to Cruising to find a movie with so much fisting and so much homoeroticism.

Incidentally, it wasn’t until I was researching this review that I realized that the reason Galitzine looked familiar is that he’s the journalist in The Sheep Detectives. That means that he’s been in two recent unpromising-seeming, wildly over-achieving fantasy movies with supporting characters whose defining characteristic is that they love to ram things. In The Sheep Detectives, the supporting players are Reggie and Ronnie, Norfolk Horn sheep voiced by Brett Goldstein, while in Masters of the Universe, it’s Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang), a warrior who earned his name through his enthusiasm for ramming things.

Masters of the Universe opens with a prologue in Eternia, the planet where young Adam Glenn (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) is the undersized spawn of King Randor (James Purefoy), a harsh and demanding ruler, and the trainee of Duncan/Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba).

The kiddie monarch’s life is changed forever when Jared Leto’s Skeletor takes King Randor and Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley) prisoner and takes over Eternia, instantly transforming it into a grim dystopia.

Li’l Adam escapes through a portal to Earth, where he eventually secures employment in human resources in small-town Oklahoma. A physically unassuming He-Man working in HR while still dreaming of his heroic destiny in Eternia sounds like a Funny or Die sketch, or the kind of bit that would air in the last half-hour of Saturday Night Live, but Knight makes it work.

Like Christopher Reeve in Superman, Galitzine is a mega-hunk with a surprisingly direct relationship with his inner geek. He’s got great comic timing and the rare ability to exist both inside and outside of the proceedings, to the point where it sometimes feels like he’s heckling his own movie, both through narration and surprisingly funny dialogue courtesy of a screenplay by brothers Adam and Aaron Nee, blockbuster specialist David Callaham, and Chris Butler, who worked with Knight extensively at Laika.

The corporate dork dreams of Eternia and a mythical Sword of Power that he’s convinced will be his ticket out of a life he does not want and back to his home world in a way that would indicate profound mental illness and a complete break from reality if it were not rooted in genuine memories.

Adam eventually tracks down the Sword of Power at a comic book store, at which point Duncan/Man-At-Arms’ heroic daughter Teela (Camilla Mendes) helps transport him back to Eternia. He’s tossed into a dungeon, where he reconnects with a broken-down alcoholic he’s surprised and disturbed to discover is Duncan.

Masters of the Universe reconceives He-Man as a nerdy office worker, Man-At-Arms as a crusty drunk, and Skeletor as a foppish dandy with a hard-on for Adam and an indulgent sidekick in Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie). The aptly named Evil-Lyn is an obsequious JD Vance to Skeletor’s grandstanding Donald Trump.

Leto’s performance here is self-deprecating and funny, two qualities I do not generally associate with my least favorite actor.

Masters of the Universe’s comedy is strengthened by performances from such comic professionals as Community star Brie, Saturday Night Live alums Sasheer Zamata as Adam’s smarmy boss and Kristin Wiig as the voice of Roboto, a sassy robot. Elba is also very funny in a surprisingly meaty role, but he also has an unexpectedly poignant emotional arc.

Where Bumblebee was a Spielbergian return to the kid-and-mythical-creatures movies of the 1980s, Masters of the Universe feels like a proud descendant of Star Wars knockoffs such as Flash Gordon and The Ice Pirates, particularly in its colorful make-up, practical effects, and loopy character design.

The 2026 Masters of the Universe is a much better and more authentic 1987 version of Masters of the Universe than the actual Cannon adaptation that came out that year, and is referenced here in a campy cameo from original star Dolph Lundgren. That’s setting the bar awfully low, however, and this doesn’t need to be compared to a notorious disaster to register as a nifty retro surprise.

4.25 stars out of 5

Check out my brand-spanking-new merch store at

https://nathans.dashery.com

Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my just-released magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here

Sign up for an annual paid subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and get a free copy of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al for free!

If 1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape marked Steven Soderbergh’s arrival as a major voice in independent film, 1996’s Schizopolis marked his rebirth.

The prolific filmmaker had reached a crossroads. He stumbled commercially with 1991’s Kafka, 1993’s King of the Hill and 1995’s The Underneath.

With nothing to lose, Soderbergh made a film for himself. He shot 1…

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I vividly remember watching Scary Movie with a packed audience while I was in Las Vegas for the Video Software Dealers Association Conference. The audience wasn’t just laughing at everything; they were guffawing. Their laughs were so loud and so long that they could be detected from outer space.

I did not feel the same way. I didn’t just dislike Scary Movie; I fucking loathed it. I despised it. Watching moviegoers lose their shit over the Wayans Family’s hard-R shenanigans made me lose faith in humanity. It fueled my misanthropy. The movie’s inevitable success wasn’t just a sinister omen for horror, comedy, and parody; it reflected poorly on mankind as a species.

With the benefit of hindsight, that was probably an overreaction. I didn’t think Scary Movie was funny, but it did not murder my dog or kidnap my family. It was ultimately just a movie, but it did have a negative effect on comedy in that it led to the cinematic crimes of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who were credited as two of its six screenwriters.

Friedberg and Seltzer were briefly the kings of the morally empty and deeply unfunny pop-culture-reference-as-punchline school of comedy. They were too lazy to write actual gags, so they relied on the cheap buzz of nostalgia and recognition.

The Wayans were involved in the surprise blockbuster’s quickie sequel, 2001’s Scary Movie 2, which was released less than a year after the first film. I was tempted to describe the first film in the franchise as the original, but there’s nothing remotely original about Scary Movie.

When the Wayans rejected what they saw as an insulting offer to return for Scary Movie 3, the Weinstein Brothers handed the keys to the franchise over to a member of another family legendary for spoofery: David Zucker of ZAZ fame, who directed Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 and co-wrote Scary Movie 5.

The Wayans return to the franchise for the first time in a quarter century with Scary Movie, which was co-written by Marlon, Shawn, Craig, and Keenan Ivory Wayans but directed by Michael Tiddes, who earned the gig by helming a series of unspeakably awful Marlon Wayans vehicles, including A Haunted House, A Haunted House 2, Fifty Shades of Black, and Naked.

Marlon and Shawn return to starring roles as stoner Shorty Meeks and homosexual Ray Wilkins. It might seem strange to describe a lead character solely as gay, but that’s all there is to the character: he’s a man who really enjoys having sex with members of the same gender, something the film, and the filmmakers, find inherently hilarious.

Anna Faris and Regina Hall return to the series as Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks, respectively, after having betrayed the Wayans by appearing in Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, but opting out of the fifth entry in the series.

Scary Movie begins with an homage to the opening set pieces of the Scream movies, featuring One Battle After Another star Teyanna Taylor playing herself. The central conceptual problem with the Scary Movie series is that they’re parodies of satirical horror movies that mock the cliches and conventions of the slasher genre, but in a much funnier, sharper, and more satirical way.

Scary Movie doesn’t break the fourth wall so much as it does not acknowledge that it exists. It never stops winking at the audience, acknowledging that it’s not just a fictional film but one that brought the Wayans back into the fold after two and a half decades.

Scary Movie benefits from Scream, its primary comedic target, roaring back to life in 2022 with a legacy sequel simply titled Scream. Legacy sequels give Scary Movie a juicy new target for parody, thanks to their cynical calculation and nostalgic appeal.

The first Scary Movie was a stupid parody of a smart satire. Scary Movie, in sharp contrast, is better than Scream 7 because that sets the bar so low that Scary Movie clears it simply by virtue of not being completely worthless/laughless.

The Wayans ostensibly have a quarter-century of horror movies to parody, but the filmmakers realize that their audience is young, stoned, and possess a short attention span and a limited frame of reference, so they largely limit themselves to films from the last decade or so. This puts them in a bit of an odd place; goofing on the biggest movies of the recent past feels obvious and exhausted, but riffing on relative obscurities can come off as pointless and counter-intuitive as well.

For this entry, and this entry only, for example, Brenda Meeks is a parody of the title character Octavia Spencer played in 2019’s Ma. Ma was a commercial success, grossing over $60 million on a $5 million budget. Despite its healthy box office haul, it’s the kind of film many moviegoers haven’t heard of, let alone seen.

I love horror movies. I need only the flimsiest excuse to watch them, so I found myself thinking that I should watch Ma so that I could retroactively appreciate Scary Movie’s references to it.

In what passes for the film’s plot, Brenda, Shorty, Ray, and Cindy reunite when Ghostface, the masked slasher from the first film, returns. The mysterious murderer with a weakness for voice distorters is eager to add some stupid teenagers and ignorant adults to his already impressive body count.

The core four are joined by a younger generation, the same age they were when the series began. Scary Movie benefits from the participation of Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, and Regina Hall, all of whom are better than the material they’re saddled with.

The same cannot be said of Dave Sheridan, who returns as Officer Doofy. The character is a parody of David Arquette’s dopey lawman from Scream, but instead of being merely dim-witted, he’s mentally challenged. Once upon a time, such a performance would be deemed tasteless or politically incorrect. Now it qualifies as anti-woke, one of the dreariest conventions in contemporary pop culture.

Scary Movie’s attempts at cultural relevance already feel dated. Jokes about COVID and pronouns are about as fresh as Viagra and O.J Simpson jokes were to earlier generations.

The Scream movies provide a through-line for a film that otherwise lurches from scene to scene and parody to parody. Scary Movie draws heavily on the Wayans’ background in sketch comedy. It’s as if the filmmakers made a list of the top-grossing horror movies of the past decade and biggest pop phenomenon, and then shoe-horned them into a script that barely holds together.

Like the initial entry in the series, Scary Movie does not limit itself to horror movies. One of the funniest gags is a parody of Michael with Kenan Thompson as a less-than-legendary Jermaine Jackson.

Scary Movie dutifully gives M3GAN, Heart Eyes, the Terrifier series, Sinners, Get Out, Longlegs, The Substance, and Weapons the business and makes a parody of Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday—creatively named Tuesday—a central character.

Some of the most clever bits are relegated to the background, like a Final Destination-themed amusement park featuring a roller coaster that’s constantly flying off the rails and threatening riders and patrons with the kind of colorful, violent death that is the series’ raison d’etre.

I expected nothing from Scary Movie. I assumed that I would hate it, but I actually found myself mildly amused by many of the gags. I even laughed out loud a few times at Marlon Wayans’ extremely confident portrayal of a stoner.

Then again, I have a certain sympathy for the filmmakers because my first novel, Five Nights at Freddy Got Fingered, is a parody of Five Nights at Freddy’s, which is surprisingly not among Scary Mov satirical targets.

Scary Movie cost a mere $30 million. That ensures that it will turn a sizable profit and spawn yet another sequel. I’m sure there’s a Wayans already working on parodies of Obsession and The Backrooms. I’m not eagerly anticipating the inevitable follow-up, but due to this mildly overachieving legacy sequel, I’m not dreading it either.

2.5 Stars out of 5

Check out my brand-spanking-new merch store at

https://nathans.dashery.com

Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my just-released magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here

Sign up for an annual paid subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and get a free copy of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al for free!

Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum were very different men and very different performers. Peck epitomized stoic dignity and virtue, most notably in his iconic performance as Atticus Finch in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The outrage that greeted the publication of Go Set a Watchman, a controversial early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that depicted Atticus…

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a “Weird Al” Yankovic fan. One of the first albums my dad bought me was his towering 1984 masterpiece In 3-D. I was mesmerized. It was Mad magazine in musical form, a gift to misfit kids of the world from someone with a peerless gift for reaching children like myself and adults who did not take themselves or life too seriously.

The first concert my late father took me to was “Weird Al” Yankovic opening for The Monkees in their 1987 tour. I was a huge Monkees fan, but I could have left the show after “Weird Al” Yankovic’s set and felt satisfied.

My dad, who died just before Father’s Day last year, was equally blown away. It boggled his mind that one group could confidently perform seemingly any musical genre.

The next time I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic was in 1999. I was working as the head writer of The A.V. Club when a suspiciously familiar-looking figure entered our office and asked for my boss Stephen Thompson.

It took me a minute or two to realize why the man looked familiar: he was my childhood hero, and he was at my workplace as a fan. That was one of the many surreal aspects of working at The Onion during its heyday.

That night my coworkers and I went to see Al perform with the same stellar backing band that he tours with today. We got to go backstage and talk to Al. I had no idea that would become a fairly regular occurrence later in my life.

About a decade later, I got a Twitter DM that would change my life forever: Al told me that, of all the writers in the world, he had chosen me to tell his story in a coffee-table book for Abrams Image. I was deliriously happy. It was, and remains, the honor of a lifetime.

I vividly remember jumping up and down with joy at the opportunity to collaborate with my childhood hero. When I told my literary agent about the offer, he asked if I wanted to do it.

I felt like screaming, at the top of my lungs, “Are you kidding me? I want to do that more than anyone has wanted to do anything, ever, in the history of the universe!” but probably replied, “Yes, I definitely want to do that.”

Part of the research for Weird Al: The Book, which would be credited, incredibly, to Nathan Rabin & Al Yankovic, involved going to a handful of his concerts, a professional obligation that thrilled me.

When I started dating the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my children in 2009, one of the first things she said was that she felt like she was put on Earth to have children. She’s a brilliant, kind, beautiful, and very funny woman, a successful therapist with postgraduate degrees from Brown and the University of Chicago, but she was right: being a mother is what she does best. We’re lucky to have her.

I wanted to have children in part because my conception of fatherhood entailed taking my children to see “Weird Al” Yankovic the way that my father took me to see him perform live.

I started dreaming about going to shows with my children long before I became a father. I couldn’t imagine anything more wholesome than taking my kids to see someone I am proud to call a collaborator, friend, and favorite artist.

I was so obsessed that writing one book about/with Al just wasn’t enough. When I started my own website, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place in 2017, one of its core features was a column torturously titled The Weird Accordion to Al.

It was a title that Scott Aukerman genially mocked one of the many times Al was on Comedy Bang Bang. I felt seen rather than insulted because I had to admit it was a painful bit of wordplay that almost, but didn’t quite, make sense. The title of the third Al-themed book I put out, a coloring book collaboration with the great Felipe Sobreiro entitled The Weird A-Coloring to Al, made even less sense, but that did not keep it from selling robustly.

I turned the column into a massive book that covered every song on every album. That still somehow wasn’t enough, so I expanded that book to include Al’s TV work, his films, the 1985 mockumentary, and his 2018 The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour for an extended edition 516 pages long.

I went to something like eight or nine of his concerts for the book, traveling throughout the Midwest and the South and seeing as many shows as humanly possible for someone without a car and with limited resources.

By that point, I’d had the pleasure of taking my oldest son Declan to see Al as his very first concert. On Sunday, the tradition continued when I took my music-obsessed seven-year-old Harris to see Al as his first concert.

I’d crisscrossed the country on planes, trains, Greyhound buses and automobiles to see Al perform. I was fortunate that Al’s Bigger & Weirder tour took him to the Ameris Bank Amphitheater in Alpharetta, Georgia, roughly four and a half miles from my home.

It’s a lovely outdoor theater with a seating capacity of 12,000, surrounded by trees. I was a little worried about how long Harris would be able to last, because he is a seven-year-old with autism and ADHD, just like his brother and me, who had never been to a concert before.

Furthermore, one of Harris’s neurodivergent quirks is that when he sees a stage, he wants to run onto it, and when he sees drums, he feels an unstoppable compulsion to play them.

He’s absolutely obsessed with drums, possibly because they’re Animal of the Muppets instrument of choice. That seems appropriate, since he was named after the late Harris Wittels, who was a drummer as well as a prodigiously gifted comedian, writer, and podcaster.

Earlier that day we’d gone to an event my brilliant sister-in-law Romy puts together called Streets Alive, which featured a number of bands performing in a five-block radius. More than once, we had to pull Harris away from empty drum sets.

I was concerned that Harris had tired himself out at Streets Alive, and wouldn’t make it far into the concert. I was also concerned that he and his brother wouldn’t know what to make of the opening act, a towering musician and funnyman in a sad clown get-up calling himself Puddles Pity Party.

I had nothing to worry about. Harris liked Puddles Pity Party so much that, when Al came on, he would ask my wife where the clown had gone, and she would tell him he was taking a nap. When he came out later to perform a duet of “Happy Together” with Al, my wife explained that he must have woken up from his nap.

When I was watching shows during Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, I would periodically turn around to watch the audience and the childlike joy on their faces. Al’s music has a profound impact on his fans. It reconnects them with the happiest moments of their childhood and the carefree kids they used to be.

Throughout the concert, I would look over at Harris’ face. He was clearly tired, but he also transfixed. He was mesmerized. It was the most incredible thing he’d ever seen. The idea of taking pictures of what was happening onstage never even occurred to me because I was living in the moment and did not want to miss a thing. I didn’t even go to the bathroom.

As much as I loved the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tours, there was something deeply satisfying about Al performing his biggest hits on a huge stage in a massive venue for a sell-out crowd with the people I love most in the world.

The spectacle was soothingly familiar. I knew every word to every song and sang enthusiastically along. For the first time in my life, I was seeing a concert through Harris’ eyes. It was everything that I’d hoped it would be, an evening that none of us would ever forget.

I told Harris that if he made it to the end of the concert, he’d be able to go backstage and meet “Weird Al” Yankovic, someone he draws almost as much as he does the Muppets. Harris sees the world in a unique way. I don’t know if he knew exactly what that entailed, but he made it nearly to the end. As the night wore on, his expression increasingly combined exhilaration and exhaustion.

The “problem” was that Al and his band were giving the crowd too much entertainment. It was overwhelming. If they’d only played for an hour and a half, Harris would have made it to the end of the show, but Al and the band showed no signs of stopping as the two-hour mark approached.

I kept trying to assure my family that the show had to be over soon, but the band just kept cranking out the hits. An hour and forty-five minutes in, my wife left the show with my sons because they were absolutely exhausted. It was the best kind of exhaustion, where you’re tired from being entertained intensely for an extended period of time, but it was exhaustion all the same.

My Star Wars-obsessed oldest son, Declan, would have loved to see Al close the show with “The Saga Begins,” “Yoda,” AND “The Yoda Chant,” but he was home by that point.

After the show, I was let in backstage. I could be wrong, but it seemed like I was the first person to see Al after the show, which was an honor. I told him what an incredible experience the night had been for my family, and marveled that the tour had only just begun, yet he and his band were already firing on all cylinders.

I took some selfies with Al, congratulated him on a job well done, and returned home.

I was a little disappointed that my wife and sons weren’t able to accompany me backstage, but there’s always next time.

Al is ageless. He seems to have gotten younger in the 16 years or so that I’ve known and worked with him, so I have no doubt that we’ll have plenty more opportunities to experience his unique brand of magic.

Purchase my many “Weird Al” Yankovic books, signed, directly from me, at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

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Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my just-released magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here

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