Against all odds, 2025 was another year where I watched movies. Once again, I kept track of each one and compiled them into tiers for the satisfaction of my brain; and once again, I have written brief thoughts on each of them for hopefully the gratification of you, dear reader. Like last year, I hit exactly 60 films, which is my annual goal.
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Just Trash
Wag the Dog, dir. Barry Levinson (1997)
The more movies I see that David Mamet wrote, the more convinced I am that Glengarry Glen Ross' scintillating script was an aberration. Wag the Dog is smug and pointless, a film in which every event on the news is framed as a psyop. Mamet reveals himself to be a moron every time he talks about politics, driven by pettiness and reactionary, conspiratorial thinking, so it should not be a surprise that he wrote a film about politics that, beyond some barely funny cracks at jingoism, is more or less nihilist.
A nihilist message is not necessarily a bad thing, but you still have to do something with it. One of my favorite comedies, Burn After Reading, mocks humanity's self-importance in the face of our lives' ultimate insignificance and absurdity. Wag the Dog's message is that The Powers That Be use The Media to lie to you, but its skepticism is so shallow and goofy — again, without being funny — that it becomes useless. When the United States government has illegally interfered with and waged wars on actual countries, hiding behind patriotic slogans and lying to its citizens, that government fabricating a brief military campaign to hide a scandal just does not serve as the prescient farce Mamet believes it to be.
Did Not Enjoy
The Lost Weekend, dir. Billy Wilder (1945)
A film as empathetic toward alcoholics as The Lost Weekend must have been revelatory in 1945. Eighty years later, it comes off more like a noble but imperfect first step. The simplicity of its portrayal of addiction, from the causes to the symptoms to recovery, did not work for me. Though far from a failure, the film just was not my thing.
