Mean Girls is one of those movies I can watch over and over without getting tired of it. And I enjoyed watching this new version, which felt like Tina Fey punching up one of her best scripts with a few new jokes and having fun with it with a new cast, who can never really compete with the originals but are a lot of fun to watch, Busy Philipps and Renee Rapp playing mother and daughter was some inspired casting. And while I was open to the idea of Mean Girls as a musical, that ended up being a kind of forgettable aspect of the movie. Even though I'd listened to the soundtrack album before seeing the movie, and I'm a big fan of Rapp's album, the songs here didn't really stick with me, they were just there as pleasant filler between the funny dialogue. 

Another musical comedy with an appearance from Megan Thee Stallion, and one where the music felt a bit more successful -- "Lonely" in particular is a genuinely beautiful song. I enjoyed the sheer outrageousness of it, the first scene with the "sewer boys" is one of the most deranged things I've seen in a long time. And it felt like instead of simply making a very gay movie that might make some straight people uncomfortable, they made a hilariously gross movie that would make just about anyone uncomfortable by the time they get to the graphic slapstick incest sex scenes towards the end. 

Since Timothee Chalamet finally won my genuine respect for his performance in Dune: Part Two, I thought I'd check out what seems like the worst idea of his career so far. I have a tendency to put on movies when I have writing to do, and treating it like background noise while I work, which I regret with some movies, but with this one I think it's fine that I didn't give it my full attention, it was visually just hideous and didn't seem to have much of a reason to exist as a prequel. Like even the cursed Burton/Depp one probably has more going for it. 

The debut feature by Chloe Domont, who worked as a writer and director on shows about competitive male-dominated businesses like "Billions," "Suits" and "Ballers," uses the familiar tropes of the erotic thriller but feels a little more thoughtful about what it's saying about gender and power dynamics. I was a little surprised to see just how acclaimed this movie was after watching it, though, Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich do their best but it felt like Fair Play rested on their shoulders and neither of them quite had the chops to carry it. 

Apparently Ricky Stanicky kicked around as an admired unproduced screenplay on the Black List and over the past 15 years James Franco, Joaquin Phoenix and Jim Carrey were attached to play the title role, before Peter Farrelly inherited it and cast John Cena. Maybe this had the potential to be something more at some point, but here it just feels like a formulaic Farrelly Brother(s) comedy with some fairly stupid physical comedy bits surrounding a really funny John Cena performance. But wow, Lex Scott Davis is so incredibly beautiful in this movie. 

As Taylor Swift reaches greater and greater heights of historic success, the dichotomy between her stardom and the 'relatable' appeal of her very earthbound songs and image gets stranger and more distorted. She spends half of this movie dressed like a superhero, and the sheer scale of the production is overwhelming, but she never presents as an otherworldly talent like Michael Jackson or something, she's just a woman singing emotive and thoughtful songs about her life, so into her songwriter lore that she geekily announces  "the first bridge of the evening." The complexity of the stage show actively works against her emphasizing her talent, because instead of giving her best as a vocalist, she's constantly in motion, hitting her marks while the real dancers do elaborate choreography around her, posing and power walking from one end of the stage to the other. It looks pretty cool, and sounds just okay. Some of my favorite songs in her catalog, including "The 1," "Style," and "I Knew You Were Trouble" are pulled off really beautifully, and I get a kick out a song in 5/4 like "Tolerate It" being performed to a packed stadium. But the Disney+ version is 3 and a half hours, and there are a whole lot of Taylor Swift songs I don't care a bit about, so it dragged a bit. 

Listening to southern rap over the years, Freaknik has taken on a mythic quality as the ultimate party, the epitome of unruly '90s Atlanta. So it was interesting to hear people who were there explained Freaknik's rise and fall in this doc. It was really funny when somebody said "Freaknik became more about the freak than the nik," that should have been in the trailer. 

The recent 20th anniversary of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Ariana Grande naming her latest album after it, reminded me that it's kind of silly that I'd never actually seen this movie and should give it a belated spin, given how much I like some of Charlie Kaufman's early movies. Parts of it have aged poorly as a certain kind of dated sadsack romance (it was the same year as Garden State, after all), which was the thing that probably kept me from watching it at the time, but mostly it's a pretty wonderful, original film with some great scenes, and Kate Winslet in this movie is, for me, about as beautiful as anyone has ever looked. I think it could've been a better movie with someone besides Jim Carrey, though, at 42 he was just way too old for the role and the exaggerated physicality he brought to some of the scenes was not really needed. 

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