The Week That Was - April 21, 2025
Boring Housewives, bonkers Ozploitation, 20 years of a Jane Austen classic, and an eight-time Oscar nominated film that I LOATHED.
In addition to closing out RHOBH and the start of the NBA Playoffs (go Wolves) over the weekend, we started the new seasons of Dark Winds and The Last of Us—the first of which is going strong in its third almost-complete season on AMC and the second of which just seriously upped the ante on what the show is capable of in terms of spectacle. We also started watching Season Two of Hacks after a couple years where we just hadn’t gotten back on the ball. Pro-tip as inspired by the second episode of S2 of Hacks, unless you’re sober, if the person you’re dining with orders a drink, order one too.
TV
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (Season 14) - First things first, that this season forced both my wife and I to repeatedly side with Dorit is unforgivable. I’ve been watching this since the day Season 1 premiered, owing to my old pop-culture blog’s Tuff Turf-related connection to Kim Richards, who I’d had a decade-displaced crush on since I saw the Witch Mountain movies twelve years after their release as a seven- or eight-year-old . It’s been a long time since she’s been on (and frankly, she was a mess), but I’m somehow still watching this despite being nearly entirely irritated by this show for at least five years. Just when you think a season can’t possibly tell you any less about these people while mining three minor kerfuffles for a full Bravo-sized season of television, you are treated to a cast member walking off the show for good at the end of the reunion for inscrutable perceived slights that may have boiled down to not having been smiled at enough during the taping of the reunion.
It’s hard to imagine a show being about less than RHOBH at this point. It’s like Seinfeld without jokes or interesting characters or crazy hijinks or anything that could be construed as interesting at this point. At least they added Jennifer Tilly to the mix this season.
Oh, and I can credit this season as having coaxed me into watching the first episode of Law & Order because way back in 1990, Erika Jayne was the 18-year-old actress who had her blouse ripped open to discharge a defibrillator on her strategically covered bare chest in an ER to give the pearl-clutching grandmothers in Peoria a bit of partial nudity to titter over in the cold open that kicked off the entire series. She appeared in a second episode in Season 1 which I’ve not watched yet. Peacock, Bravo
Abbott Elementary (Season 4) - I haven’t really thought of this show in terms of discrete seasons where one is better or worse than the others. I really liked this season, though, and I’m glad we more or less had the gang together for the whole run of the season. Ava growing into a functional and capable if wildly unconventional principal is the show’s greatest adjustment, but it hasn’t had to make a ton of serious alterations as the show was pretty completely this by the end of Season 1.
There aren’t many shows on network television that are this good. There are maybe two comedies worthy of even watching on network television (this and obviously Ghosts). But Abbott Elementary continues to be an ultimately kindhearted joke-machine of a show that seems to exist in a very real world of inner city public education that unlike most of the mock-documentary shows of its ilk is rooted very much in the systemic rot and unmitigated disaster that late-stage capitalism has us drowning in.
The arc to close out this season and the bow tied on the season that was the finale with its fantastic close to the trip to the Please Touch Museum were really great ways to close out a sitcom that is reaching its zenith, a feat that’s all the more impressive when considering this is the first season in which Quinta Brunson’s Janine Teagues and Tyler James Williams’s Gregory Eddie are finally together after the perfunctory three years of will-they/won’t-they time that all workplace sitcoms are required to play out on network television. ABC, Hulu, Disney
Law & Order: Organized Crime (Season 4) - It feels like this show will always be hampered by a braintrust calling the shots that doesn’t know how to tell serialized stories. This season ended slightly better than it started, but OC just never feels like it knows how to execute what it’s trying to be. That this show has had more showrunners than seasons can’t help things on this front, but there were at least some moments in the arc to close out the season that washed the acrid taste of that Long Island hamlet arc that preceded it. Peacock
Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing - This is at least the second docuseries that I’ve seen diving into a monstrous parent abusing their child and multiple other children on top of that on the path to building their child’s brand on YouTube. This focuses on teen influencer Piper Rockelle, whose mother, Tiffany Smith, has fallen under a ton of public scrutiny after being accused of child abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, and a slew of other improprieties while making six-figures-a-month off of her daughter’s telegenic gifts that were clearly a point of emphasis in her upbringing from an early age, where mommie dearest had Piper in the pageant game at three years old. This is effectively a cult documentary, as Tiffany seems to exhibit all the behaviors of a cult leader. It didn’t need to be three episodes totaling two-and-a-half hours, but it cast sunlight on a supremely horrifying situation that is surely far worse than the filmmakers (Kief Davidson and Jenna Rosher) were legally allowed to discuss, as is usually the case when the offenders being investigated have not yet been prosecuted for their wrongdoings and the full extent of their crimes are a matter of public record—as was likely the case with Quiet on Set. Netflix
Film
Snapshot (1979) - Leading with the titillating exploitative promise of a model encountering an obsessive presence after posing topless for an ad shoot, this Ozploitation flick helmed by Simon Wincer (D.A.R.Y.L., Quigley Down Under, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, and Free Willy) is pretty paint-by-numbers for the first 70 minutes or so. I don’t want to say too much, but you should watch this and you should power through to the end. You won’t regret it. This definitely made me want to check out his next film, Harlequin, along with reinvigorating my desire to watch the 1988 Lonesome Dove miniseries, which he also directed. Kanopy, Prime
Prizzi’s Honor (1985) - I’ve now seen a dozen John Huston films, at least a few of which I’d consider near-masterpieces (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo). This is both the worst and most baffling John Huston film I’ve seen, all of which is compounded by the fact that The Academy nominated this mess of a film for eight Oscars. Genres are being blurred, but the result feels blackout drunk. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Jack Nicholson in a film and asked myself, what is he doing and how can he be this bad? And, yes, I’ve seen Wolf.
The only performance that didn’t strike me as bad was Anjelica Huston’s. Having seen a slew of uniquely terrible films by octogenarian directors over the past few years (looking at you, Megalopolis, Ferrari, House of Gucci, and Gladiator II), this feels very much at home with those disasters. Granted, Huston was 79 when this film was released, but 79 in 1985 is like 94 today.
Trying to be both a film set in 1940 and 1985, Prizzi’s Honor manages to do little more than confuse in its quest to be of two times at once. Tonally, it tries to be a black comedy version of a mafia film and fails to work as either a black comedy or a convincing mob flick. William Hickey is woefully miscast as the aging Don here, having the old part down but never feeling remotely like he’d have been a mob boss. It feels like Nicholson would be failing the Simple Jack test, only he’s playing a character who is not afflicted in any of those ways. Kathleen Turner is fine, I guess? Not good, but not nearly as bad as Nicholson here.
Nicholson is so bad here that it is evoking memories of Julianne Moore in Next where I was forced to reckon with the fact that this person really can’t leave their comfort zone, usually where they’re playing what boils down to a marginally altered version of themselves. I’m trying to think of Oscar-nominated acting performances this struck me as this bad, and the ones that come to mind are Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies, Eddie Redmayne in either of his nominations, and Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County—THAT is an Italian accent? I’d wanted to see this for years because of all the nominations but hadn’t because it was never available to watch anywhere. I honestly wish I hadn’t seen it. This is BAD. Prime
Pride & Prejudice (2005) - This is my wife’s favorite movie. The instant this was slated for a limited theatrical re-release for its 20th Anniversary, Jackie was weighing which theater to see this in—something given more importance based on the fact that she has never seen this in the theater. She opted for the Alamo Drafthouse in Woodbury, which is a solid theater (if, of course, we ignore the larger labor issues that have been popping up at other franchises in the country, and the myriad other issues that have arisen since the Leagues stopped running the show back when we lived across the street from the third Alamo Drafthouse location that ever opened ~20 years ago).
When this first came out, it felt like Keira Knightley was in every single period piece with a British female character, and I held my Keira Knightley Period Piece Fatigue against this film for a long time. You could say I was prejudiced against this film for a long time. The literal minutes of screen time filled with either Brenda Blethyn shrieking or Carey Mulligan and Jena Malone vapidly giggling surely didn’t help its cause in my mind and clearly got in the way of a more measured and objective view of Joe Wright’s debut feature.
I’m not breaking any new ground in saying this film is achingly, staggeringly beautiful. Of the various iterations of Jane Austen adaptations that I’ve seen (mostly) on account of my wife, Joe Wright easily manages to give the most modern and realistic take stylistically while still holding thematically true to the source material—changes are made, but they all make perfect sense to me, and I’m not generally a fan of truly faithful adaptations that don’t consider changing the source material for the medium in which the adaptation will live.
I don’t want to like this. I definitely don’t want to love it. But it’s a great film. Full stop. Knightley deserved her Best Actress nomination. I’d posit this should easily have been nominated for Best Picture over Crash and Capote. Seeing it in the theater was definitely a more overwhelming experience, and after it first broke through my calcified heart a few months ago, I definitely cried way more than I’d anticipated, though this wasn’t the first time and surely won’t be the last. It is bonkers to me that this hasn’t had a 4K Blu-ray release yet, with the last home video release happening 15 YEARS AGO. Theatrical re-release, Netflix
Better Man (2024) - This film starts from the flawed vantage point that 1) we all know Robbie Williams, and 2) we all care about Robbie Williams. I know who he is. I’ve seen him covered in various things, including some episodes of that docuseries about him from a few years back. I knew one of his songs coming into this. I quite actively avoided the genres in which his music existed for the first 20 years of his career. Gimmick aside, this film utterly failed to give me anything to care about, any traits of Robbie’s to draw me in, any heart to gain an iota of sympathy.
The gimmick? Ugh. You know what we really needed? A Planet of the Apes mo-cap take on the music biopic, which is increasingly one of the most grating genres of film in this exceedingly risk-averse major motion picture climate we’ve been stuck in for two decades now. Planet of the Rocket Man did not work for me. AT. ALL. I was thoroughly bored, and when I wasn’t bored, that ennui had given way to befuddlement. I didn’t choose to watch this, but virtually everyone I follow on Letterboxd who’d seen this loved it, so I was open to liking it. It didn’t work for me, but it also didn’t work for the person who chose to watch it. Netflix