lessons in how to be more annoying than bret easton ellis
from quentin tarantino
I’m working on my favorite books/albums/films of 2025 newsletter(s), but until then: a recap.
We’ve reached the point in the year where everyone is extra insane and proud of it. I feel right at home. Like, okay, for instance: last week I read the transcript of the call between Steve Witkoff, fellow Pisces (alas) and man who earlier this year was appointed Trump’s special envoy for peace missions and special envoy to the Middle East (a multi-hyphenate!) despite having no diplomatic experience hhhwhatsoever, and Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy adviser.
On this call (leaked, natch, and everyone say thank you, Bloomberg, I guess), Witkoff, who I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn is Trump’s close personal friend (?) from the real estate world (?), gives Ushakov advice on how Putin can butter up Trump and generate goodwill for his side ahead of the Ukraine peace negotiations. You know, normal things.
To be clear, the advice is nothing extraordinary. In fact, I’d be pretty annoyed if I bribed someone and all the intel they came back with was “Trump is a narcissist and you can use this to your advantage.” You’re telling me this for the first time. Because I mean, you don’t even need to have observed Trump in his natural habitat, as Witkoff presumably has for decades now, to intuit that calling the former Apprentice host a winner is the best way to garner his sympathy.1 One might imagine a team of McKinsey junior consultants coming up with a similar strategy in a 39-slide deck for approximately nineteen million dollars.
Oh, Trump responds well to praise? You shock me. Quick, someone get Maggie Haberman on the horn: I have news fit to print.
Anyway, this week the Witkoff-Ushakov conversation is already but a footnote in the reporting, which otherwise informs us that Witkoff is in Moscow for peace talks. I bet! Everything about this administration is too The Death of Stalin (2017) coded for me to even wrap my head around sometimes. There’s on the nose and then there’s beating a dead horse. We’re on dead horse beating territory. Have been for a while now.
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I watched the new Wicked on Monday night, and it delights me to tell you that the Spanish chose not to bother with the For Good and instead chose to translate the title as Wicked: Parte II, which makes sense when you consider that the first movie IS SUBTITLED PART I. Were that this little gaffe was the worst I saw on Wicked: For Good, which in its defense is visually superior to its 2024 counterpart, but this second installment lacks the heart (and the songs) that made an optically lackluster Part I a more enjoyable film for me.
Sure, Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero is fighting for his life to make something out of nothing every time he’s on screen, which as Wicked fans know is not often in the second half; sadly, this time around he’s got no “Dancing Through Life” (just like Ariana Grande as Glinda has no “Popular” and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba has no “The Wizard and I”) to lift the story from the sludge of Act II.
(A small note: as gifted as she is, it was also nearly impossible for me not to notice Grande’s protruding ribs and collarbones every time she showed up in her strapless pale pink gowns. I’m not villainizing her for it, and because I’m tired, I’m not making any sort of Grand State of Our Culture statement about it either; I’m just saying that in my personal experience as an audience member, it certainly took away and distracted from the film. Call me anti-feminist if you must.)
I wrote about Wicked at length last year, and to be honest I was kinda mean about it because it drives me crazy when people—especially those paid to observe culture—are lazy and simplistic in their cultural criticism.
But just because I like a film does not mean I delude myself into thinking it’s Great — we can all be self-assured enough to understand that enjoying something is not what makes it great. Yes, taste is subjective, but art has standards.
Like I said … kinda mean. Deserved, though!
Unless the critics go haywire again and in different ways, I doubt I’ll write about Wicked: For Good. My thoughts from last year remain, although I might have attempted a slightly more dulcet tone were I to draft them today.
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Couple other films I watched recently:
The Mastermind (2025), following in La Chimera’s footsteps and starring Josh O’Connor as a depressed art school dropout in the 70s trying to make a living via less than honorable means and, if I might, lagging where the earlier film soars. It’s impossible to follow La Chimera, which I remind you is a perfect movie that not enough people have watched, and yet the comparison inevitably draws itself given the period and the subject matter. The Mastermind was not as beautiful, not as weird, not as arresting. Great costume design, though.
Bugonia (2025), even though, as I’ve now mentioned several times, I’m a bit tired of the Emma Stone/Yorgos Lanthimos Industrial Complex. (Chris Fleming has a good bit on this.) We can’t get Stone back in a romcom? Why do actors feel like they have to be alternative to prove they’re Good™? Like, no, actually, I knew Meg Ryan was Good™ when she sang “horses, horses, horses” on the drive back to Baltimore on Christmas Eve. And that’s herstory. But! Nevertheless! Bugonia was better than I expected. Low expectations are good, actually. Jesse Plemons, we need to get you in a romcom, too.2
They’ve yet to be released here, so I haven’t seen Hamnet or Sentimental Value. As you might imagine, this has been very hard for me.
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Now—stay with me—I don’t really believe in auras. Who am I to say anything about all that, given that seven times out of ten, people who eventually become my friends will tell me, unprompted, mind you, “yeah so I thought you were a bitch when I first met you.” That being said, I feel like one can identify loser auras. The kind belonging to someone who was (rightly) bullied in high school and then spend the rest of their adult life in adolescence-infused bitterness. And one of the biggest possessors of said auras is—if you close your eyes and focus for a minute, you can almost predict the lipless man I’m about to name—Quentin Tarantino.
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