Album of the Week: The Medicine

I'm not gonna go crazy asking you to vote for the RC summer album, because I don't have it in me. But if you have a moment, and haven't already, you should vote. It'll take 30 seconds. Please and thank you. Enjoy the music this week!

Record Club:

archives | supplemental

spotify playlist | youtube playlist

choose | writing

WEEK 391 — July 26-August 1, 2026

The Medicine

by the Jazz June

LISTEN:

Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp | Apple

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PICKED BY VOTE

CATEGORY OF VOTING: "Ring a Bell" — These are the albums that have the same title as previously covered RC albums. Basically, I'm scrolling down the list of past albums, and I'm trying to pick out some of the titles that have a more common name, and then searching for that name on RYM. That's how we got The Medicine, which is the same name as the album by Jeremy Renner. The funny part is, I think The Medicine by the Jazz June was the only pick out of the five albums here that is actually more popular and/or well-known than the RC album we originally covered (the album itself, not the artist, only because no one knows that Jeremy Renner made an EP besides us).

LOSING ALBUMS: But actually, The Medicine did not originally win the poll. That would be Fine Art by a band called Fine Art, whose self-titled shares an album name as the one we did with Kneecap. But a couple weeks ago, I got an email from our PoYB Contributor Tom, who informed me that Fine Art wasn't available online. The easiest solution is to just go with the second place album. And these two really were neck-and-neck for a while. The other three got wiped out—Healing by Todd Rundgren (same as In Love with a Ghost), Punk by Patricia Taxxon (same as CHAI and same as Young Thug), and Loaded by Brotha Lynch Hung (same as the Velvet Underground). The latter got zero votes, and hopefully that was on purpose, and not coincidental, because it proves once again that y'all know what you're doing; I didn't realize that Brotha Lynch Hung was basically a shock-rapper, and I'm glad we don't have to grapple with the subject matter he raps about this week.

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ALBUM DETAILS

GENRE: Midwest emo, post-hardcore, math rock

RELEASED: 2000 (unknown exact date)

LENGTH: 56:09

TRACKLIST:

1. Viva la Speed Metal
2. The Scars to Prove It
3. Excerpt
4. The Phone Works Both Ways
5. The Medicine
6. At the Artist's Leisure Part 2
7. Motorhead's Roadie
8. Death from Above
9. Fight like Sinatra
10. Get on the Bus
11. Balance

LYRICS: Genius.com

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ARTIST DETAILS

PRONOUNS: n/a

ABOUT: The members of the Jazz June all went to Kutztown University, and in 1996, they formed a band. Wikipedia is unclear about who was originally in the band, but I think it's Andrew Low (vocals, guitar), Bryan Gassler (guitar), Nat Duncan (bass), and Justin Max (drums). But Duncan left after the first album, and was replaced by Daniel O'Neill. Other members listed are Adam Gerhart (unknown what he played) and Tim Holland (guitar, trumpet, keyboards). The band was known for taking hardcore emo sounds and adding a healthy bit of experimentation to it. They broke up in 2003, after their third album, but reunited in 2006 for a benefit show, and in 2014 for a fourth and (as of now) final album. "Jazz june" is a phrase used in "We Real Cool," a 1959 poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. 

DISCOGRAPHY: This is the Jazz June's second of four studio albums. The first is 1997's They Love Those Who Make the Music. The third was 2002's Better Off Without Air. The most recent is 2014's After the Earthquake. They also released an outtakes compilation in 2007 called The Scars to Prove it. There are also two EPs.

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ADDITIONAL INFO

READING SOME SHIT: a 2014 oral history of the band via Vice

WATCHING SOME SHIT: the title track live in 2013

RECORD CLUB CONNECTIONS: The strongest connection was already mentioned at the top—we've already covered The Medicine by Jeremy Renner. Hey, did you know that in late 2025, Jeremy Renner was credibly accused of sex abuse? And that he threatened to call ICE on the victim when she attempted to confront him about the abuse? Just leaving this information here, in case you need it.

This album was rated as the 33rd-best emo album of all time by Rolling Stone. Other RC alumni featured on the list: Coheed and Cambria (#35), Paramore (#28), Weezer (#14!), Thursday (Full Collapse at #11), My Chemical Romance (#10), Fall Out Boy (From Under the Cork Tree at #9), and Sunny Day Real Estate (#1). We didn't cover that #1-ranked Sunny Day Real Estate album in RC, but I would probably point to the RC album as the closest match to the Jazz June, in terms of the Midwest emo sound and genre.

MENTIONS ON THE BLOG: None, but I thought there was going to be. For Summer Song Challenge Day 6, I chose a song from a compilation called Kickstart Audio Presents: Pennsylvania, USA Volume One. I thought for sure the Jazz June was going to be on that compilation, being from Kutztown, but no such luck.

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RECORD CLUB ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

This week's discography dive album: unhammerlike by Fibulator

This week's follow-up album: Unclouded by Melody's Echo Chamber

This week's keeping up album (probably): Everything I Ever Saw by the Menzingers

Listen with us! Keep your favorite Record Club artists in the rotation!

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COUNTDOWN:

69 Weeks Until Week 420

We are tracking and counting down every week from here on out till Record Club Week 420. We started this countdown 69 weeks out. During Record Club Week 420, we will be covering Donny Most by the esteemed Happy Days virgin Donny Most. The goal for Week 420 of Record Club is that it will feature 69 reviews from 69 different people. 

THIS WEEK: We are 29 weeks away from Week 420.

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Happy listening, RC family!
Have a great week!

Song of the Day: "Identity Crisis"

A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.

"Identity Crisis"

DARK THOUGHTS

from DARK THOUGHTS

2016

One of the thoughts I've had about Lizzo lately—what, you thought this was gonna be a blog post about West Philly greats DARK THOUGHTS? get your head out of your fucking ass, this is PoYB, of course a DARK THOUGHTS Song of the Day entry is going to turn into a blog post about Lizzo, psh—is that she is exploiting a misunderstanding about the dichotomy of Identity vs. Choice. Lizzo is not the first person to do this, nor will she be the last. I don't even think she has ever thought about her issues (her commercial and artistic issues, to be clear) in this way, or maybe she has and she's being purposefully obtuse about it. That's not what I'm here to determine. I'm just here to do the thing I usually do—bend over like Ace Ventura and grab my ass cheeks and mime talking out of my ass about whatever subject is on my mind lately. And this has definitely been on my mind.

So Lizzo's new album, the possibly but not necessarily ironically named Bitch—oh, and this officially counts as the RC f/u for this RC alumna, meet me at the bottom of this post for the official checkmark on that task—didn't really do all that well, commercially speaking. I assume it's not very good artistically, either, but that's neither here nor there. I've never thought her art was all that compelling and I didn't need to resort to self-aggrandizing but ultimately condescending courtroom fiction to make that opinion clear. The music is basic at best, lousy at worst, and always with a heavy stink of commercialism about it that's turned me off from the beginning.

But this time, unlike the past few times, her product hasn't sold all that well either. It didn't even make it onto the Billboard 200 chart. As of the typing of this paragraph, Bruno Mars' fourteen-year-old Unorthodox Jukebox is at #200, which means that an album old enough for me to have rolled my eyes at it while I was sitting on my girlfriend Pam's Center City apartment couch sold more copies than Lizzo's brand new album full of Corporate Boss Bitch® Product Placement™ Yas Gurl© summer jams.

What do we make of this? If you ask Lizzo—oh man, if only I actually could ask Lizzo myself, as opposed to having to hear her words through print on the snarky music blogs that I still read—then she'll tell you that they are OUT TO GET HER. She frames it like she always has: that she is a strong fat Black woman, and that the powers that be are doing everything they can do (manipulating the algorithms, basically) to keep her down. The irony is that there's probably more truth to that than we as a society seem willing to accept. I do think that institutional racism makes it so that artists like Lizzo are suppressed and held back. I do believe that your typical large Black woman with a strong voice is going to face more opposition than a classically attractive young white conservative male.

I'm talking here about the concept of Identity. In other words, what about "who Lizzo is" affects her life and people's reaction to her. When I talk about "racism," that's an Identity thing. When you hate someone because of the color of their skin, or treat them differently, that's a racist considering Identity. And that's wrong. I would condemn that, and have. If you're getting paid less because you are a woman, if you're getting kicked out of a coffee shop because you were born in Israel, if you are being made to feel less than because you are overweight, if you don't sell a lot of albums because the corporations that control the flow of music to the sheep who use streaming services are bending the algorithm toward their racist will, then that is identity politics! And it's fucked up!

And if I didn't know anything else about Lizzo, maybe we'd leave it there, shrug our shoulders and wish her the best. But that's not all we know about Lizzo. Here's what else we know: we know that she was credibly accused of being abusive. There were lawsuits accusing her of abuse her employees. This included such salacious allegations as forcing her employee to stick a banana up a stripper's vagina, against the employee's will. Lizzo's response to these allegations were the same as any other cishet white male abuser that we've seen countless times over the years: these are lies designed to take me down, but I won't let it, I will fight my accusers and call them liars and save my reputation. But we all know what all that shit ultimately means. We've gone through it countless times on this blog, what it means to be an abuser and what that might mean to the conversation about the art or lack thereof. Ultimately, someone who is credibly accused of abuse is not someone who I'm going to engage with on an artistic level.

Lizzo knows all this, though. That's the thing. She knows that she is an abusive piece of shit, and she also knows that people like her have verifiably been treated unfairly throughout history because of who she is. And so she uses that to her advantage. On purpose or just because that's how her mind has been trained to work, I don't know. Maybe a little of both. But what she's doing is mixing up the concepts of Identity and Choice. Her identity is that she is an overweight Black woman. Her choice was to abuse her employees. And when I consider her art, I am declining but ONLY because of her choice, and NOT because of her identity.

I'm actually inclined to give Lizzo the benefit of the doubt here, in that she just simply doesn't know, or can't understand, the difference between Identity and Choice. She has, rightly so, been conditioned to see any challenge toward her as a challenge of her Identity, and she's been conditioned that way because it's very often true! You can't let those fucking scumbag racists get away with that shit, you gotta stand up for yourself! And I'll stand right alongside of you in the fight to make sure that no one is punished simply because of who they are, and what their identity is! And if her music wasn't selling because of Identity, I'd stand up and fight! That's what Lizzo wants you to think, too! Come fight with me, she says! Buy my music, prove to them that an overweight Black woman can make great art too!

She's only saying that because she doesn't want you think about her Choice, though. Her choice to be an abuser. It's a completely separate thing. It has nothing to do with Identity. And, if she were to let anyone even once consider her Choice, then it robs her of her victimhood that she needs to survive the PR crisis of being an abuser. So it's really important that you think the albums aren't selling because of who she is! And not consider once that they might not be selling because of what she chose to do!

I guess what I'd ask is, one, do you see how fine of a line it is, between Identity and Choice? And two, do you understand how some people might take advantage of how fine of a line it really is? Lizzo is taking advantage of it for sure, attempting to tell you that she's not beloved because of her Identity, and completely ignoring the probability of the issue being due to her Choice. What other bad actors are muddying the water for you? Now that it's on my mind, I'm not going to lie, I see it everywhere.

What the purpose of all this is, understanding the difference between Identity and Choice, is that we can then understand how to respect and love Identity, and how to hold people accountable for their Choices. A person should NEVER be judged for who they are, and a person should ALWAYS be judged for what they choose to do. And if you start conflating the two, well then, you might just be a Lizzo fan in 2026.

Lizzo

Cuz I Love You — RC Week 15 — 2 pukes out of 5

Special — RC f/u #9 — 1 puke out of 5

Bitch — released June 5, 2026 — N/A, no grade assigned to abusers

Drop the Puck: Zach's Recap of the Start of the 2026 Stanley Cup Finals

An Oilers-Less Stanley Cup Final: Game 1

by Zach

The Vegas Golden Knights are a team to hate, for many reasons. 

Their starting goaltender, Carter Hart, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room in 2018 during the World Junior Championships, along with four other members of the Canadian team. He is the only player to have signed with an NHL team after the five were acquitted but banned from the NHL for a period of time as part of a reinstatement process. The details of the case are horrifying. The Golden Knights signed Hart this season, after saying they "remain committed to the core values that defined our organization from its inception." 

If that's true, well, I don't trust them at all, because Vegas's core values are questionable at best, as illustrated by the Hart matter but for other reasons, too. An expansion team in 2017, the Golden Knights benefited from a new NHL expansion draft policy that was intended to make them competitive in their first year but worked a little too well. They made the Stanley Cup Final in their first season, which should never happen. Thankfully, karma got them, and they were defeated by the GOAT, Alex Ovechkin, and the Washington Capitals in five games. They found themselves back in the finals in 2023, that year winning it all. Now they're back again. Fuck frontrunning teams, and fuck them. At least the Los Angeles Dodgers are working within the pre-existing system to become a dynasty.

That's not all. The team fired their coach, Bruce Cassidy, with eight games left in the regular season, and replaced him with John Tortorella, who is known for antics like threatening to fight a fan in the stands when he was coaching the New York Rangers during their 2008-09 first round series against the Capitals (he was suspended for one game). There are multiple job openings for head coaching positions around the league, but because Cassidy is still technically under contract with Vegas, the team has the right to prevent him from interviewing for other positions while the season is still going on (even though he is doing no work for the team right now). They also have the right to let him interview for other jobs. But they've blocked him from doing so, meaning he will likely be passed up for positions he might have otherwise gotten. Vegas is trying to hide behind the statement that their focus is currently on the playoff run. How, exactly, would allowing Cassidy to interview for other positions distract them? It's cruel and makes no sense.

So, yeah. Fuck Vegas. They do have former Capital Nic Dowd on their team (who was acquired at the trade deadline this season), as well as Mitch Marner, who choked consistently in the playoffs with the Toronto Maple Leafs (along with the rest of the team; what a sad organization) before finding a home in Vegas. I wouldn't mind seeing either of them lift the Cup, especially Dowd, who is a great guy, but not enough to excuse Vegas winning it all.

Ah, yes, there is another team playing in the Final this year, against Vegas. It's the Carolina Hurricanes, who aren't a very fun team to watch, but are very tough to play against. I don't particularly like the Canes—they knocked the Capitals out of the playoffs in 2019 and 2025—but I respect their coach, Rod Brind'Amour (a former Philadelphia Flyer), and I appreciate their hard-nosed, check-first style of play. Brind'Amour is trying to become the second person ever to win the Cup with the same team as a player and a coach (he captained the championship-winning Canes in 2006). He's been the coach for eight years, and he's experienced many playoff defeats with the team, after a few deep runs. I also like the Canes captain, Jordan Staal, who signed a ten-year extension with the Canes in 2012 in order, in part, to play with his brother, Eric.

We should all be rooting for the Hurricanes—hard—in this series.

As for Game 1 in Raleigh? It was a great game, back and forth, lots of goals. Carolina went up 2-0, then Vegas scored three unanswered. It was tied 4-4 in the third period, but unfortunately, Vegas won it, 5-4, on a late goal from Tomas Hertl. 

I'm sure future posts will talk more about the games themselves. But for now, consider this your guide to why you should hate Vegas.

Game 2 is tomorrow night, Thursday 6/4, at 8 PM.

A Year of Blind Spots: Easter

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Patti Smith's Easter is the Breakfast at Tiffany's of classic rock. One half of it is a stunning vision of what the medium can be. The other half is shockingly outdated, to the point that it threatens to topple both halves to the ground.

First, "Because the Night." I was aware of its existence, having functioning ears since 1988 and functioning radios almost as long. It's funny, I was also semi-aware that there was a song that Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith both had ties to, maybe even saw the title of it here and there. But I didn't make the connection until hearing "Because the Night" on the radio a couple months ago. I went from "wow, remember this song? what a song..." to looking up the song's Wikipedia page to having that sudden jarring realization that it was this song, they were one in the same. Wow. Wow.

What a fucking song! Hearing this song again was like that moment in the romantic comedy where the girl takes off her glasses in slow motion and the male protagonist realizes that the one he's been looking for has been right under his eyes the whole time. That chorus! Fuck! I read the Wikipedia page, and saw that Bruce Springsteen had a rough sketch of the song going with the E Street Band, but that a mutual friend suggested to Springsteen that Patti Smith deserved a hit, so Springsteen was like, I have this thing, maybe she can do something with it. She did! It's cool how you can hear echoes of the E Street Band in its sound, but it's far enough removed that no one could ever actually mistake it.

So I was excited to listen to Easter in full, just based on this album alone. Good album! "Glam rock" is probably a good way to describe it, but punk is there too. "Space Monkey" is adjacent to the Doors. "Privilege (Set Me Free)" is adjacent to the Stooges. I have known and liked Horses for a while, but Easter is the one that got me to sit up and take notice of Patti Smith's punk rock bonafides. This is some cool shit.

Except............... ah shit, yeah, let's see how long it takes me to talk about this one song before I'm satisfied. Maybe you already know the song I'm talking about. This album is almost 50 years old, and so we can definitely say it was a different time, but as always, it's more complicated than that. Okay, uh, the song title's first three words are "Rock n Roll" and the fourth word is the N-word. And there's not really any way to get around it. You can asterisk the title like I originally did, but then you have, like, the whole goddamn song to contend with. Patti Smith, a white woman, just yelling the N-word over and over, as loud as she can. Immediately this becomes the type of album that you can't just hit play on the office speakers and forget about it.

Smith provided an explanation, saying that she was using the term to mean a "rebellious and honorable outsider." She also made claim that she doesn't really think that words have power like that, and claimed that she could walk down the street and call someone the N-word and that would be okay. I get what she's trying to say about words, and in some respects, I agree. But at the same time, she's missing a key element of existing in human society—empathy. A Rolling Stone reporter tried to interview her about it, and she dismissed his question about (e.g.) growing up hard in Harlem, and how she could have the same experience as that. I think in the 50 years since, some people have come to take that a little more seriously, how yes of fucking course Black people have had more to content with due to personal and systematic racism, and so it's not really Smith's role as a white woman to try to move the definition of that word around.

To put it in simpler terms, she doesn't mean it to be a racial slur, but it is absolutely a racist slur regardless. There's just no getting around it. There's no explanation that softens the blow of hearing the worst racial slur you can hear. I didn't see if Smith had any updates on her personal feelings about the song, but I'll admit to you here that I didn't do much research. I couldn't! How could I possibly even search for that song title on a work computer? Even just having the Wikipedia page up made me nervous as hell.

I don't think that Patti Smith had bad intentions back then, but I also think that there's probably no use for this song now. If you use the word "cancelled" here, though, then I'm going to flip the fuck out. That's not how cancellation works. If I found evidence that this song was a manifestation of Smith's deep-seeded racism, then yeah, sure, I wouldn't be listening to this artist anymore. But that's not how it is. She tried to make a point about a word, tried to take it back, and it just didn't work, and fifty years later, it feels like a limp-dick attempt at it. That's time informing that decision, though. There's an alternate universe in which society makes actual strides toward racial harmony and Black leaders decide that a good way to aid in those strides is to cut down the power of the racial slur by changing its meaning, and there's Smith's song with an alternate meaning sitting right there.

I'm a white dude so I don't even know if I have the ability to speculate on any of that, and I certainly don't have the power to change the culture, and I do not have the ability nor the desire to defend Patti Smith's song. I listened to it a few times, just to see what was up with it. A disappointing aspect to this song is how goddamn good it is musically. Just a total fucking banger from our girl Patti. But lyrically, it is utterly indefensible. And you can see how this might create an issue within my own brain. I like a song, and I'm hearing that song replayed in my head, and then all of a sudden my brain is replaying the N-word over and over. Can't have that, and I don't want that, so my limited plays of this song have run out.

I am pretty unsatisfied with what I've written about this song so far, but I feel like whenever this subject comes up, I never feel satisfied completely. It's like I'm always missing something, some answer that is going to solve everything. There's no answer, though. It's just a misguided song destined for the trash bins of history, and the taint that it puts on Easter is neither negligible nor overwhelming. Just like I still look back fondly on my experience with Breakfast at Tiffany's, I still feel fondly toward Easter. It's just that the fondness is purposefully placing the terrible mistake to the side, and focusing on the good stuff. The mistake still remains, regardless of how I feel, or what I remember.

Monday Morning Mixtape 061: Next Thing I Knew She Was All Up on Me Screamin'

Welcome to Monday Morning Mixtape, a PoYB Contributor-curated playlist of songs, made just for you at the start of each week.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah!

"Next Thing I Knew She Was All Up on Me Screamin'"

Songs that go "Yeah!"

chosen by Joe

Spotify

YouTube

"Shine" by Collective Soul

from Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid, 1993

I think a lot about the idea that if you smile, the muscle you use to smile push more blood to your brain and make you happier. I don't know if that's scientifically true—and I refuse to do any research for a goddamn mixtape blurb—but I like the intention behind the idea. It's like, you're not happy, but if you force yourself to pretend that you are happy, then eventually you actually become happy. I'd like to propose the same idea to yelling Yeah! in a song. The '90s class of less-than-four-hits alt-rock wonders are a sad sack bunch, but how can we assume that Collective Soul remained sad? Their biggest hit features a few cathartic Yeah!s, and that must've done wonders for their mental health.  —Joe

"Ye" by Burna Boy

from Outside, 2018

Is Burna Boy cancelled? People are very upset at him, including me, for yelling at someone in his audience who was sleeping during a show. He actually had security kick her out. This opened the floodgates of people saying he is a dick in general. He does also have odd insta posts. Kinda angry and isolated themes. This is not upstanding behavior to say the least, but is this enough to cancel? I haven't decided yet? Is being an angry but non-violent man enough to be cancellable? Or at least enough to make me not listen to his music unabashedly? Idk. Remains to be seen.  —Galia

"Yeah! Oh, Yeah!" by the Magnetic Fields

from 69 Love Songs, 1999

But here, the Magnetic Fields put a twist on a Yeah! in ironic fashion. Yeah! Murder! This is a Top-23 song out of the 69 songs on 69 Love Songs. It makes me think about that fundamental idea in art criticism that the text and the intentions of that text are often directly opposed, on purpose. A happy song with sad lyrics, a movie featuring an outsized villain winning to make the audience appalled, that sort of thing. Life would be boring if we revealed our truth in a direct way every single time.  —Joe

"Family of Noise" by Adam and the Ants

from Dirk Wears White Sox, 1979

Is there a most famous Yeah!? I felt uncomfortable choosing my pick for most famous Yeah!, but I did manage to fit in a song that directly quotes that famous Yeah!. This song is fine. Adam Ant is fine. I'm glad I was able to do something with Dirk Wears White Sox on the blog, because I was unimpressed otherwise. Interesting, though, that I'd prefer Adam Ant over the Beatles on a mixtape. Choosing the Beatles would be like going up to a soda fountain machine with 45 different flavors, and hitting the button for water. You need water to live, but sometimes it nice to try something else.  —Joe

"Lithium" by Nirvana

from Nevermind, 1991

Maybe it's cliché to try to imagine what might have become of Cobain's career of he had lived past 27, but I find the thought exercise interesting enough that I lean into the cliché most times I find myself turning to Nirvana on the iPod. The easiest answer is that he would have been the Gen X Neil Young: prolific into his old age, steadfast in his ideals, not afraid to make his voice heard to his ever gradually shrinking audience, a strong body of work to build a legacy on. It's nice to think about all that, but also curious to realize how difficult it is to imagine Cobain in his 50s. How could someone possibly live into old age when the Yeah!s of their 20s are this sad?  —Joe

"Mony Mony" by Tommy James and the Shondells

from Mony Mony, 1968

I would love to have this explained to be one day, but this far it soars that the anomaly was truly random, something that cannot be explain. It's an ego thing, like my ego is bruised that I can't explain this little sliver of trivia in music history, and I'm just waiting for someone to give me a good answer, and I've never gotten one, and it hurts. I'm talking about the fact that, in the fall of 1987, Tiffany and Billy Idol went back-to-back with #1 hits that were both covers of Tommy James and the Shondells songs from the mid-'60s ("I Think We're Alone Now" and "Mony Mony," respectively). Why? Why?? I need to know how this happened. What about American culture in 1987 screamed a need for a Tommy James revival? As someone in 2026 who loves that Tommy James and the Shondells greatest hits comp with all his might, it bothers the fuck out of me.  —Joe

"Evil's Sway" by Japandroids

from Celebration Rock, 2012

We've examined so Yeah!s today: the healing, the ironic, the pastiche, the haunted, the coincidental. But now, witness the true Yeah!: the Yeah! of catharsis. A Yeah! that you scream into the night, either to mark greatness or a bottoming out, either way a Yeah! as a way to release, to feel infinity. C'mon now, scream it with me!!! YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!  —Joe

NEXT WEEK: "Family Reunion" — Songs that have family relationship terms in the title (mom, cousin, uncle, that sort of thing) (chosen by Joe)

Never Seen It #262: The Usual Suspects

After watching 400 movies he's never seen before, my guess is that you'll never hear from him again. The greatest trick the blog ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. And like that... it's gone. 

The Usual Suspects

1995

Bryan Singer

A cop told me one time that this was his favorite movie of all time. I don't like to openly speculate about people who have a greater-than-0% chance of reading this blog at some point (maybe, say, after Keyser Söze guns me down, and people rush to the blog to get a better sense of the murdered party), so let's not get too deep into it. I just genuinely think it's interesting that someone who chose that profession as a career would also choose this film as their favorite. Why? I've wondered that for close to a decade now, and it took me as long to actually search for some answers. 

Back when there was a decent chance that the cop in question was going to get a Your Favorite Movie interview, I wondered whether The Usual Suspects was going to end up being an anti-cop movie. Might seem impossible, but not really. Cops don't see themselves as "cops," necessarily. They instead see themselves as "the good guys." And so if a movie suggests that the good guys are getting one over on the cops, then that's who they are relating to. This might be more of a general human trait than a cop trait, but still... you ever wonder why so many cops have Punisher tatts and decals? Despite the fact that the Punisher has made it canonically clear that he despises cops who look up to him?

I wouldn't describe The Usual Suspects as "anti-cop," though. The cops are the good guys. Interesting, though, that the cops are outwitted by the bad guy. So this is just a matter of disassociation, perhaps. I'm not saying that a movie that paints people in your own profession in a certain light is grounds for making you dislike that film. But we're not just talking about liking a film, we're talking about saying a film is your favorite of all time. And so I don't think, if you're a cop and this is your favorite, that you can watch The Usual Suspects and give a single second of thought to what it's saying about your career and the people in it.

So I'm leaning away from that theory and toward the theory that the twist just gets you. It's an easy theory because the twist really is a good one. SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!! Spacey's character, Verbal, who till the end of the film acted as the unreliable narrator, is revealed to be the big bad. Which changes the entire movie, every second of it. I gotta imagine that this is one of the more famous twists in movie history, and it's pretty cool that I managed to get through my entire life and also the bulk of the movie without the spoiler being revealed (Se7en this is not). I can imagine, at a certain age, watching this movie and allowing the twist to blow your fucking mind. A good twist can make you believe in movie magic. I totally get that.

I understand it because I felt and feel that way about another famous twist, possibly the most famous twist in my lifetime—The Sixth Sense. That shit was absolutely stunning, as a kid. It's just so interesting when one secret can completely change your understanding of a film. Now, what's even more interesting is watching the film again, knowing the twist. I think this is an important aspect to any twist-ending film. Does it hold up on the second viewing?

I've only seen The Usual Suspects once, but I have my doubts. General consensus seems to be that it's a lot worse on the second viewing, because that means that everything that the narrator was saying was a lie, and it's harder to take the film seriously when you know none of what is being shown even happened. Maybe once more through to see if you can pick up any clues, but then what after that? How can you get emotionally invested in these characters when you have no idea how it really was for them? The Sixth Sense had clues, certainly, but it also had deep themes of grief and loss. You know what the best scene in that movie is? The second-to-last scene, with Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment in the car. Has nothing to do with Bruce Willis being dead the whole time. What can The Usual Suspects offer in that regard?

Now, it won Best Original Screenplay at that year's Oscars (beating Braveheart and Toy Story), and I'm not disputing its worthiness in that regard. I'm not saying that this is a bad movie! No, I enjoyed watching it, and I thought the script was pretty tight. There were no lulls in the action. On the first viewing, I enjoyed it—no sense speculating on subsequent viewings if I don't plan on rewatching it any time soon. With these kinds of twisty, double-crossing movies, there's always the risk that it's too complex for the audience to follow.

This appears to be the reason why Ebert only gave the film 1.5 stars, its so-called complexity. And since we watched the film over the course of two nights, Pam prefaced our second-half viewing by asking, "Do you understand what's going on in this movie?" I did, but it was the type of movie that it was helpful to stop in the middle and talk about it. How these characters came together and why, and then why they are still together and who they are up against. I understood enough to follow, but probably missed some shit, and can definitely see why it would be confusing. I don't think that's the film's fault, though. It's good to challenge the audience sometimes, to ask them to try to keep up. I guess the only problem is that if you're gonna motivate someone to watch this film more than once, then you gotta give them something to chew on during that second viewing. But we've already talked about that.

The other Oscar that this film won? Best Supporting Actor for Kevin Spacey. Yes, if you're following along at home, disgraced sex criminal Kevin Spacey has appeared in two Film Club movies, two days in a row. That's probably enough for now. I just went through his filmography, and it looks like he'll eventually show up in L.A. Confidential and 21. It makes me so tired to write about this fucking guy. Would've been cool if literally anyone else had won Best Supporting Actor that year (Ed Harris from Apollo 13! Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys! James motherfucking Cromwell from motherfucking Babe!), but what can you do. Mid-'90s moviegoers shouldn't be punished for what we only found out in 2017.

Considering Spacey in his role in The Usual Suspects is less interesting than his role in American Beauty. Only because I don't think The Usual Suspects is asking you to empathize with his character at all. Now, should American Beauty have asked us to empathize with Spacey's character? A privileged white middle-aged creep? Probably not. But it's interesting to consider the ask, and even more so knowing what we know now about the actor behind the character. The Usual Suspects doesn't ask us to do that. No empathy required. No self-flagellating required. Spacey is a terrible person in real life, Verbal Kint is a terrible person in the movie, Spacey's sex crimes are not reflected back to us through any of Kint's in-film crimes. 

And boy... wouldn't it be interesting to get the perspective of a maga-brained cop on all this, huh? I got so deep into my own shit writing this that I almost forgot that that was the original thesis of this blog post. I can imagine how feelings on Kevin Spacey might differ across political lines. I think I'd rather just not ask about it, ya know? Like, maybe it's just better that we stay in our bubble here at PoYB and I don't venture out and interview anyone about shit I would just rather not hear about. Let's stick to the script here. Twist? Pretty good. Movie? Also pretty good. Casting? Leaves something to be desired, but what can you do.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

STRAY THOUGHT: Whoops, sorry, one more thing. I didn't mention like I usually do how I original came to know about the existence of this movie. Looking back, I think it was that I was already familiar with the beginning scene where the five titular suspects are fucking around in the police lineup. Pretty fun acting! It definitely helped set the tone for what we were about to watch—that these are fucking characters, and that it's gonna be a puzzle for both the police and for the audience to figure them out. Maybe this scene, and not the twist, is the true key to figuring out why this could be a cop's favorite movie. "These criminals! We see guys like this all the time!"

NEXT TIME: No Kevin Spacey in Howard the Duck! I hope! Do us proud, Group F!

Never Seen It #261: American Beauty

I had always heard your entire blog flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time... For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars... and yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined our street... and watching 400 movies I've never seen before...

American Beauty

1999

Sam Mendes

Something I've written about before in this space is the idea that the movie might be saying something that the characters in that movie are not necessarily saying. Or rather, that the film's characters might be saying one thing but the movie itself is saying the opposite, and if we're saying what the movie is "about," then that might not be the same answer as what the movie is "trying to say." It could be that the characters are used by the filmmakers as an example of how not to think or view the world.

This is just a thought process that I've developed over time, having watched all these movies, and given some thought to them, and having been provided with much room for trial and error. Like is Scorsese attempting to tell us that Jordan Belfast is the hero of Wolf of Wall Street or is he a cautionary tale or is his story a satire of our propensity as human beings to lie and cheat to get ahead, etc. If I'm going off of what the extensive "themes and analysis" section of American Beauty's Wikipedia page says multiple times, then I think another way of defining what I'm trying to say is "finding a movie's center."

I don't know if that's a widely used term—a quick google would suggest that it's not—or if the author of this Wikipedia page took one critic's off-the-cuff quote as doctrine and repeated it five more times. Regardless, it fits my purposes pretty well, and so I'm probably going to repeat it myself in Film Club pretty often from here on out. Especially for movies like American Beauty, that definitely appear to be saying one thing but also might be saying the opposite thing instead, or too? And then is also complicated by who is saying that thing, and what that person is in real life, yes, yes, you know who and what I'm talking about, we'll get to it.

Count me as someone who was emotionally affected and possibly even enthralled by that ending monologue (I would warn for spoilers here, but 13/14 Film Club surveys had a check mark next to this movie title, so I'm assuming most of y'all have seen it already). The thing about beauty being here on this earth and how important it is to find that beauty and appreciate it. I was then taken aback when I was told the possibility of this being a satire of that beauty, that maybe this is a certain mindset of the white middle class and that seeing beauty that makes our hearts burst and finding beauty in a dancing paper bag is maybe not healthy and it'll lead to finding beauty in your girlfriend's dead dad's blood and brains splattered all over the table. Which, yeah, now that you say it.

What's cool is that you have a choice here. You can view it optimistically or pessimistically. You can confirm your own beliefs that there's beauty everywhere, or you can let the darkness creep in and start to tell you that maybe there are places in this world that lack beauty, that maybe a dude who oversteps boundaries and is generally an asshole to everyone in his life is not the person to be getting life advice from, or following the example of, emotionally speaking. Both sides of the coin feel legitimate, and the filmmakers have purposefully left you hanging, not saying what they intended one way or the other, and so you need to choose. Maybe that's the true beauty, of this movie, the ability to choose.

In other words, American Beauty either lacks a center or features multiple possible centers that are not agreed upon. And so figuring out what this movie means to you means that you are choosing something as your center. This is complicated, for a few reasons. It's complicated from a logistics standpoint because, well, a movie is a complicated thing, with many moving parts, and many hands involved. When I've said "what is the movie saying" in the past, that's an oversimplification. A movie could, in fact, be saying multiple things, because multiple people have had a large part in making it. Is writer Alan Ball the center? Is director Sam Mendes? Do the actors play a part in shaping what it says, and if so, do we need to consider the Kevin Spacey of it all?

I believe the allegations, and I believe that Kevin Spacey is a monster in real life. I believe that the dismissal of court cases has more to do with the impossibility of providing sufficient evidence in cases like this than it has to do with their being a lack of truth in the allegations. And I believe my Dazed and Confused pal Anthony Rapp when he says that he was abused by Spacey. Rapp has specifically drawn parallels between Spacey's character's behavior in this film and Spacey's behavior in real life, and this is ultimately what complicates a viewing of American Beauty the most today. 

It's complicated because I do not believe that American Beauty is justifying ephebophilia through the actions of its central (though not center) character, and yet there's the reasonable concern that Spacey was able to connect so deeply with the character and win a probably well-earned Oscar for Best Lead Actor because he was, in real life, analogous to Lester Burnham. So you see how this might create some dead ends when you're searching for the center of the film. If the "beauty everywhere" thesis gave any justification whatsoever to Lester's actions, then real world developments have made that aspect of the film extremely uncomfortable at best. Like, what to make of the fact that Lester ultimately chooses not to molest but instead "take care of" Angela, now that we know Spacey made no such decision in real life? What to make of Lester's murder and from-the-afterlife observations if Spacey will face no such retribution or punishment? Or that the character's murder was based on a misunderstanding, which tightens the window of justification for that murder specifically, and yet no such tightening exists for a man who forced his victims to do the very thing that his character was assumed to do and didn't actually do and was killed for anyway?

#MeToo does not mean that I shouldn't watch this movie, because ultimately I think that Sam Mendes and Alan Ball are responsible for this film's being, and I try not to make a habit of throwing out the entire piece of art if one arm of that art is "cancelled." This isn't like music, which has an easily identifiable center. I don't think Spacey or Lester are the "center" as we have defined it in this blog post. But I do think that the complications that Spacey's involvement brings can and should affect how we talk about American Beauty. I can still consider the idea that the world can be observed as beautiful, but I'll have to view it taking into consideration that the movie, both in the text and especially in the context, paints the opposite picture. That maybe the center is in Allison Janney's Barbara—silent witness to the cruelties that this world has to offer, and too numb to be able to make much of a difference one way or the other.

FUCK there's so much to discuss about this movie, and I hate that I don't have unlimited time. I mean, I do, but maybe that time can be transferred to the comments section, just to see if anyone else has any other centers they'd like to discuss. In the meantime, I'll leave it here: it's fascinating to me that this movie has apparently fallen out of fashion in recent years. If it has, then that lends credence to the idea that a movie about a middle-aged white dude who is unsatisfied with life and only finds purpose and motivation when he discovers that he wants to fuck a sixteen-year-old is maybe NOT the movie for these current times. And I see that, and mostly agree. But I would also posit that maybe it's possible to pull something important from the movie, despite everything else, and to find beauty in something that is clearly ugly, both in purposeful and retrospectively accidental ways.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Alright, fine, fuck it, let's just get it over with—Kevin Spacey returns to win another Oscar in The Usual Suspects.

A Year of Blind Spots: Blind Faith

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Blind Faith

Blind Faith

1969

We don't talk about album cover art too much in this column, or possibly ever? I forget. It's been a long time now. Possible I'm just forgetting something. For better or worse, the cover art for Blind Faith is going to have to be part of the conversation today. The original cover art—which is not included above—is a photo that depicts an eleven-year-old girl topless. This is the work of photographer Bob Seidemann, who would later defend his decision with some high-minded nonsense about "innocence bearing forth new technology." You know what I typically call it, sitting here at my work desk? Child abuse. There's a little button on my computer for "taking explicit photographs of children" and "disseminating pornographic material depicting children" and everything.

But I can't hit the button now. The statute of limitations is up, Seidemann is dead, and we're here to discuss Blind Faith, who only subcontracted Seidemann, and only made the poor decision to allow some fucking creep to take a nude picture of a child and put it on the cover of their supergroup's one and only album. Plus, there are probably different laws in Britain. Those people are fucking crazy over there.

Like this Eric Clapton fella. I'm not accusing him of being a child pornographer, but there is a very large swath of the population that falls in between the poles of "decent person" and "child molester," and Clapton has found it (our president has not, for different e.g.). He's not a good dude. But I think I've already written about this. Yeah, for the Cream entry in this column, many years ago. I guess the antivaxxer Eric Clapton was in a lot of bands.

I'm not interested in ever exploring his solo stuff, probably based on his political/conspiratorial views, but this is the fourth band on my iPod now that features Clapton. It might behoove us to write 'em out in paragraph form, especially if you're like me and was always curious as to the chronology but didn't actually care enough to look it up.

Clapton cut his teeth in the Yardbirds, then joined Cream. When Cream broke up, he and Ginger Baker joined Blind Faith (YOU ARE HERE says the figurative map of today's blog post), a supergroup with Traffic's Steve Winwood (Traffic broke up around the same time). They only last one album and one summer tour. Then Clapton did some solo work, and started to get momentum. He felt uncomfortable with the fame, so he formed Derek and the Dominos to prove that he could work just as well as a supporting player. Then he went out solo again, and slowly faded into the racist mist.

The Yardbirds is like Mick Foley—no gimmicks. Cream is Mankind—designed to be creepy but ends up being creepy in a campy, fun way (and also the most well-known). Derek and the Dominos is Dude Love—a purposeful flipping of the script, and one that sometimes feels like a façade. So Blind Faith is Cactus Jack—tough, uncompromising. 

These guys were greatly influenced by Jimi Hendrix, and you can hear it. The guitar solos are pulled off of Are You Experienced, and Ginger Baker goes toe-to-toe with Mitch Mitchell, especially on the wild, exquisite solo on "Do What You Like." Not sure what else to say about the music, though. "Supergroup" implies that these people are good at what they do, and they clearly are. If Blind Faith was trying to fashion a template for creating late-'60s and early-'70s psychedelic rock, then that's what they did, but that doesn't make it interesting for me. It just sounds like every other band that used the template.

I enjoy it. Even if I don't like Clapton, and even if I don't like child abuse. Those are easy work-arounds when it comes to an album like this—change the cover out for the American version, and close your eyes and focus on the fact that Clapton was a dumbass 24-year-old at the time, as opposed to the dumbass 80-year-old he is now.

Damn, I meant to make a joke about Blind Faith being the only true Blind Spot in this column, because, ya know, Blind Faith. You get it.

A Year of Blind Spots: Reign in Blood

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Reign in Blood

Slayer

1986

The Blind Spot albums were chosen years in advance. 2024's and 2025's (the non 1001 Albums albums, anyway) lists were made at the end of 2023. So Slayer's been patiently waiting in the queue. I'm only explaining this now because there's been some discussion on the blog in the meantime about this artist and a song on this album, and it remains relevant to today's discussion.

When Zach chose "Angel of Death" for YSC, he left the question about the song's themes open for the comment section. Basically, this song is about a nazi physician, and it goes into detail about the crimes against humanity that he committed during the Holocaust. I'm not in the business of quoting my own words in other blog posts unless I'm bringing some new to the table afterward, and I don't think I am today, so you can just go ahead and read the comment if you want.

I'm also not in the business of telling people what they can and cannot be offended by. All I can do, and all I've ever done, is report my own personal understanding and choices about whatever might offend. In this case, I'd say that it appears to me that this is a song about someone really bad, and the song does nothing to condone what the subject of the song has done. Some of the language (e.g. "sickening," and so on) would indicate that Slayer is against the actions of nazis.

It's wild that I have to type that sentence at all, but this is America in 2025. We have to make sure the artists we enjoy are not nazis. Wikipedia tabs like "Personal Life," "Political Views," and "Controversies" are all good sources when I'm trying to get to know an artist and figure out if there's anything that's going to make me uncomfortable while listening (to the point that I wouldn't listen at all). Slayer's, of course, speaks to "Angel of Death," and the band has defended their position on it. It's parody, according to them. I personally think that Slayer toes the fine line between parody and bad taste, but not so much so that I think they are lying or anything. 

And not that voting for trump would automatically disqualify an artist from my ears, but it does put me on guard, and depending on how severe the affliction is, it might get me to stop listening. So for Slayer, I'm told that one member is maga. Through the transitive property, we can assume that the rest of Slayer is not maga. Whether they are progressive or anti-trump liberal or fishhooked libertarian, it's unclear. I stand by my "handle with care" description.

All of this shit both desperately matters and also doesn't matter at all. It's a hurdle, but once cleared, ceases to make any difference in the music itself. Zach probably nailed it when he brought up Slayer originally as a cleansing ritual. This music is loud and fast and heavy and, when viewed in the right light, can make you feel at peace. I appreciate the leap from Napalm Death to this (a leap that, of course, only happens in my own personal head, since Scum was released one year after Reign in Blood, and so the leap actually happens in the opposite direction). That band felt impenetrable; Slayer feels accessible by comparison. Sure, I can't understand most of what's being hollered, but I can understand some, which makes all the difference. And the tempo is really fast, but not so much that I can't get a handle on the rhythm. 

It is said that Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax are the "big four" for thrash metal. Without having heard Anthrax yet (who knows if I'll ever need or want to get around to it), I can say that Slayer, to my ears (and maybe this is recency bias), has hit the target closest for me. Just in terms of being fast and hard and coherent. It gets my blood pumping the most without pushing it so far that I get confused. Because I do have my limits! Slayer pushes those limits without breaking them, and I think that's exactly where a metal band should be.

I don't have the language yet to explain heavy metal. Even if you've never purposefully heard any of these bands, you can still click Play below and expect a certain sound and have your expectations met. The speed, and also the subject matter—blood, gore, the devil, that kinda shit. If you're into metal, you're into Slayer. If you're not, then there's not really much I can say. Except maybe to make sure you check Wikipedia first before starting up with a new band.

Never Seen It #239: The Searchers

We? Why, you just staked me out there like a piece of bait. You built up the fire. You watched 400 movies you've never seen before. You fixed it so I could get my blogs blowed out! What if you'd missed?

The Searchers

1956

John Ford

In terms of "cancel culture" and its relationship to the movies I watch in this column, ideas such as "aging poorly" and "is it the movie or the character saying this," all that shit—in many ways, The Searchers feels like a final exam for me. I cannot say I enjoyed watch this film, and I will say that this is because the main character—played dutifully by John Wayne, the first film of his I've ever seen—was extremely unpleasant, an unrepentant asshole set in a world that seems to more or less accept his asshole ways, an abhorrent racist who is never quite called on his racism... at least by the other characters.

That last point is the most important, because the million dollar question for The Searchers is (drum roll please as I take a gun prop out of my satchel and point it directly at my own face and pull the trigger and it's one of those fake guns and it only shoots out a tiny message that unfurls and we read it together): does the movie itself agree with the views of its protagonist, or is it designed to ultimately tell the audience that the protagonist is wrong to act the way he acts and believe what he believes? Depending on where you fall, this is either a deeply flawed but ultimately worthy film, or a film that you'll never want to watch again and would rather it gets melted in its grave in the core of the earth.

There's pressure on my answer, you see, because by all accounts—at least the accounts we take seriously here on this blog and in this column—The Searchers is one of the greatest films of all time. AFI has it at 12th all-time best, and BFI has it at 15th all-time best. Really, only the go-to classics of these types of lists, e.g. your Citizen Kanes and Vertigos, perform better on the lists combined. And so, whenever I am faced with a film that all the professionals agree is one of the best, I am probably less inclined to push back against that and say something overtly negatively, since I know from experience that, over time, my own hot takes eventually start to feel like ignorance, because I should've just listened to the critics. I'm not saying I know nothing or that my opinions are valuable; I am instead saying that, ya know, 800 movies critics probably aren't wrong.

When critics talk about the achievements of The Searchers, those filmmaking moments that stand out, most begin with the iconic final shot of John Wayne framed in the doorway. Here's the leap that we need to take. We have to say that Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, is an intolerant bigot, an insane racist who spends the whole movie looking for his niece, and everyone assumes that his intentions are that he's going to kill his niece because she's "become one of them Indians." We have to say this because it's true, objectively speaking. But The Searchers presents this character as tolerated, but only to a degree. He also spends the movie like a wanderer without a home. There are overarching themes of Ethan not belonging anywhere, and shut out of anywhere that might have once had him. The final image confirms this—Ethan framed in a doorway, the look on his face knowing full well that he'll never be allowed through that door, destined to be locked out forever.

The leap you need to take is that this is The Searchers presenting its own opinion about Ethan Edwards and his behavior and his racism and his refusal to "get with the times." That his way—don't forget that this is a man still sworn to the Confederacy, refusing to concede or surrender even when the traitorous cause that he swore his life to collapsed—was on the way out. That he was wrong for the entire movie, in which he goes on murderous rampages and kills as many Indigenous People as he can, even trying to kill their buffalo when that doesn't work. Is The Searchers trying to say this? That he was wrong? Should be even extend it further, and say that this is John Wayne attempting to atone for all the thousands of Indigenous characters that his various movie characters over countless westerns had killed up to that point?

I think I'm probably willing to concede that this was the intention of that final shot, as well as the action immediately preceding it (Ethan catching up with his niece and deciding not to kill her, but instead rescue her), was to present a new and more enlightened state of the world in the 1950s. I don't find it hard to believe that this film is known universally as "great" because it is "important" and that its importance stems from the way it marked a 90-degree turn from how films might typically operate prior to then, with the anti-Indigenous racism and whatnot. If this is the start of a better way (and I have no evidence that it wasn't, despite that new way being rocky and not necessarily straightforward over the subsequent 70 years), then I'll agree with the importance of the movie here.

Probably what's bothering me so much is that it took the film two hours to get to that point, and there really wasn't much in the first 99% of The Searchers that indicated that this is where we were headed. For the majority of its runtime, Ethan Edwards was still the main focus, the ostensible hero, and the white actors who wore redface and portrayed the Comanche were the entire time presented unquestionably as the evil villains, their only motivation proving that they were indeed evil. Was it fucked up that Ethan's whole family was slaughtered? Absolutely! But see, that's the problem. You start asking why they were slaughtered in this film, and the main character says that they were murdered by Comanche and that the Comanche did that because they are evil, it's in their blood, they aren't like white people, we have to kill all Comanche in revenge, etc. etc. etc. That makes the character racist, but by allowing him to justify his racism, the movie itself becomes racist.

The final minutes do so much heavy lifting, and I think where I'm at right now, I just think it tries to do too much lifting, too much backtracking, too much of a U-turn. Feels like The Searchers is like the Titanic, frantically turning away from the glacier but clipping it all the same. The writings I've read about this film all mention the ugliness of the main character and the fraught line that the movie itself walks, but those writings are littered with the word "despite." Shit like "despite the fact that Ethan's racism rankles modern audiences, the film presents a stunning portrait of life in the expansive western unknown." Ebert's four-star retrospective touches on the same questions mine blog post here does: is the final scene enough to justify what came before it? But note that his question is embedded in a review with the highest score possible, indicating perfection despite the questions. I just don't know if I can do that yet.

I don't want to say anything like "I don't get how all these critics like this movie so much," because in many ways, I very much get it. This is absolutely a visually stunning movie, and it's a fascinating one to think about, and it (I assume) manages to elevate its genre, and it features a world-famous legacy actor doing what I'm told is his best work, and that last scene really is iconic, and I've been thinking about it nonstop since it ended so obviously that's something. I understand its place in cinema history and in the history of America. I don't fault anyone way smarter than me that they would say that this is the twelfth-best film of all time.

But it is perhaps true to say here that I am watching movies and processing them through a brain that doesn't focus quite so much on "how well it was made" so much as "how does this art piece make me feel about being human." Even putting it that way sounds highfalutin and that's not what I'm trying to say... I am not presenting myself as "better" than anyone else. I'd actually like to present myself as worse, honestly. I'm not enlightened enough that I can watch something like The Searchers and not be distracted by its ugliness and accurate portrayal of thoughtless, uncaring men. 

It might sound trite to say this, but I'll say it: this might come down to the difference between "best" and "favorite." With "best" being films that are well-made and important both as an isolate piece of art and as one piece in the canon of important art, and "favorite" being "this made me feel really good, subjectively speaking." I don't know how else to say it. I can read all the bullshit I want about this film, read every word praising this film from every well-respected critic, but all that does is speak to the fact that this is one of the best films. None of it says anything about why I need to like that. I didn't like this. Sure, I can see why it's one of the best, but I did not like watching it.

To answer Ebert's question—no, The Searchers does not do enough to justify its ending. And that's okay. It's okay to be challenged by a movie, even if that challenge is speaking more to your thoughts about the human condition than about the movie itself. I was really glad to watch The Searchers, and I don't know if I'll ever be glad enough to watch it again. I wonder, though, if this is the type of film that I should be watching again, and again and again. Maybe it would play better if I knew what the ending was going to try to do; maybe some of the uglier aspects to the film could be flipped with dramatic irony. I don't know. I just don't know.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We have new small groups, and our first one, Group D, has selected Love & Basketball for your enjoyment.

Never Seen It #232: Tropic Thunder

First, take a big step back... and literally, FUCK YOUR OWN FACE! I don't know what kind of bullshit power play you're trying to pull here, but the blog is my territory. So whatever you're thinking, you'd better think again! Otherwise I'm gonna have to head down there and I will rain down an un-Godly fucking firestorm upon you! You're gonna have to call the fucking United Nations and watch 400 movies you've never seen before to keep me from fucking destroying you. I'm talking scorched earth, motherfucker! I will massacre you! I WILL FUCK YOU UP!

Tropic Thunder

2008

Ben Stiller

"Back when comedy was allowed to be comedy!" This is something I overheard at a party the other day. It was exclaimed by... not gonna write who it is this time, I probably do that too often on this blog, let's give them a break. You can probably make a good guess who, though. And you can also guess that I rolled my eyes over it. I think that liberal puritanism is a mild concern when it comes to art in the 2020s (e.g. the Sabrina Carpenter kerfuffle a few weeks ago), but I more emphatically believe that anyone who is complaining about "wokeness killing comedy" is probably not very funny themselves. If something isn't funny, it's not funny. There are no boundaries besides a comic's ability. If you can't find a way to a taboo subject funny, then that's not on your audience, that's on you.

Do you know why Tropic Thunder hasn't been cancelled? Because cancelling doesn't exist. But do you know why conservatives aren't even pretending like liberals want Tropic Thunder "cancelled," à la jimmies or an advance of panties? Because it's a funny movie. It manages to take a subject that could be—and, c'mon, 99% of the time has been—handled poorly, and threads the needle. Robert Downey Jr., a white actor, wears blackface for the majority of Tropic Thunder. It's funny.

But it's only funny in this very specific way. I'm not trying to educate anyone here, I'm just documenting my thoughts for posterity. It's funny because the joke isn't the blackface. The act of a white person putting black makeup on their face so as to appear Black—this is never funny. The joke in Tropic Thunder is that the white character in the film is so ignorant, so obtuse, so perversely driven by the desire to "push boundaries" in his "art," that he thinks it's okay to wear blackface. Crucially, everyone else in the movie calls him out on it. The movie itself is not trying to say that the act of donning blackface is funny, but instead is trying to say that the act of making fun of someone who wears blackface is funny. When Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus in blackface says "what do you mean 'you people'?", that's not the punchline, that's the setup. The punchline is when Brandon T. Jackson, a Black actor, playing as Alpa Chino, a Black character, says "What do you mean 'you people'?"

The jokes about Kirk Lazarus being an asshole aren't the funniest jokes in the movie, but they are pretty funny. They are funny because they manage to portray something racist but make the racism the joke. Would you see a movie like Tropic Thunder, making these same jokes, in theaters in the year 2025? Possibly not. But I'll argue that this isn't because comedians "aren't allowed" to make such jokes in 2025. It's more because comedy is all about finding new avenues and fresh spins, and the joke that goes "haha look at this stupid asshole who thinks that blackface is funny" has already been done. But you can find them if you look for them. It's Always Sunny had an episode where Danny DeVito's Frank Reynolds drops the hard f-slur multiple times, but not only is the joke that Frank Reynolds is an out-of-touch asshole, but the show also managed to spin it further by having the slur spurn Mac to come out of the closet is a shockingly tender moment for this otherwise wild show. There is an audience for this humor, the kind that deftly balances taboo and awareness.

I think this sort of humor is also intimately tied to the idea of "meta humor," i.e. comedy that is making fun of comedy. The entire premise of Tropic Thunder is what drew me to it in the first place (the morbid curiosity as to whether they pulled off the blackface thing being secondary). It's a movie making fun of the art of making movies. Actors are in Vietnam, filming a Vietnam war movie. Their director tells them that they are going to film it guerilla-style, so when they get dropped in a completely different country and a local gang of heroin producers capture them, everyone assumes that this is part of the movie. Tropic Thunder is a movie about how stupid and silly the Hollywood system is. This is where is ties into the blackface—what is, in that absurd Hollywood system, there was an actor who took his method acting so seriously that he did something incredibly ill-advised and absolutely racist?

I love that slightly twisty meta shit. It adds so much to the comedy through dramatic irony. There was scene in which Stiller's character Tugg Speedman was being interviewed Reggie Lee as Byong, part of the Flaming Dragon gang. If this interrogation was in a war movie, it wouldn't have been funny, and it wouldn't have been very unique or dramatic or important even. But in Tropic Thunder, here's what was actually happening—Speedman thought he was acting and didn't know Byong was a real gang member, Byong thought he was conducting an interrogation with an American spy and didn't know Speedman was an actor, and we the audience knew everything. The context of this being specifically about the film industry also allows us to laugh at certain moments that I personally wouldn't have found funny otherwise. A good example is the character of Les Grossman, a large hairy obnoxious movie exec. Is it funny that this guy is an over-the-top asshole to everyone in his vicinity? Kind of. Is it funny that this over-the-top asshole is played by Tom Cruise in a fat suit? Much more so, yes.

There were actually a few "controversies" regarding Tropic Thunder's handling of taboo topics, one of which had to do with the Cruise of it all. I don't even think people were all that upset at the blackface; I wasn't "defending" it above, because it doesn't need defending. Everyone who cares about this stuff understands how Tropic Thunder threaded the needle. Downey Jr. was even nominated for Best Supporting Actor at that year's Oscars (where he lost, understandably so, to the late Heath Ledger). The two accusations that actually have legs—depending on who you ask—are ablism and Antisemitism.

Let's start with the latter. Did you get the sense that Tom Cruise and Tropic Thunder were making fun of Jewish people through their use of Les Grossman in the film? I don't know. I didn't get that sense, but that's only because I wasn't aware of this and apparently wasn't paying attention enough to know that he was supposed to be Jewish. Like, apparently Grossman mentions Purim at one point, which I definitely know about because of this blog, but I didn't catch it when he said it. I take the accusation seriously, and am curious to hear from any Jewish readers / blog contributors out there. It's probable that it's offensive and also that I was unobservant. It's also possible that the blackface had everyone on high alert, like gave the impression that ALL taboo subjects were on the chopping block, but that in reality, Tom Cruise's character was ridiculous and villainous and obscene for reasons that really had nothing to do with religion.

The accusations of ablism are more founded, but seemed to me to be of the same variety of jokes as the blackface. Speedman and Lazarus have a long conversation about actors portraying mental disabilities in films, and they use the r-slur a lot. I would like to think that the overall impression that Tropic Thunder was attempting to give regarding this slur is that you probably shouldn't be saying it, because these two fucking idiots keep using it, and it sure doesn't sound okay for them to be using it. It would be an issue if the word was the joke. It wasn't. The joke was that two fucking assholes were using a word that they shouldn't be using, and certainly not as casually as they were using it. And the fact that there's probably some truth to what they were saying means that the joke is still on Hollywood, and not on the victims of the Hollywood system.

Could this movie be made today? I hate this question, because the implication of the question being asked is that "no, you couldn't, because comedy isn't ALLOWED anymore." That's stupid. I'm more inclined to agree with Ben Stiller, who said in 2024 that he didn't believe a movie like Tropic Thunder could be made today, but only because studios are no longer willing to finance comedies on this scale anymore. Does their unwillingness have anything to do with the taboo nature of some of the subjects that are pierced here? Probably! It's not whether it's possible that such subjects can be mined for humor (since Tropic Thunder proves that they can), but whether it's probable that the filmmakers are going to be able to thread that needle and get it exactly right. Most people would probably just end up being racist if they wore blackface. It's not a matter of trusting the joke, it's a matter of trusting the person to tell the joke correctly. And with all these C-rate has-been comedians whining about wokeness out there, why take that risk? I get it. I get that most movies are not going to be as skillful at this shit as Tropic Thunder.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Another classic comedy! Let's see if Bringing Up Baby features the equivalent of a half-naked drug-crazed Jack Black with a knife.