Catching Up: January
I can't offer you a full-length new post but I can certainly compile some stuff
Hey! So obviously I haven’t been keeping up with the ol’ Substack because I’ve been prioritizing paying gigs in terms of what’s allowed to run me ragged or intrude upon my vacation upstate. But I’ve been meaning to at least use this to blast out compilations of my reviews and essays; maybe not every single damn thing, but at least the new-release reviews and the best of the other stuff. I’m not expecting that anyone is eagerly anticipating the opportunity for a bunch of Hassenger Completism. Honestly, the volume of stuff I’m writing these days doesn’t exactly demand that kind of following from publication to publication; some of what I write is unabashedly for a different audience than the film-literate nerds I like to imagine reading me, and that’s fine! Sometimes people need things Explainer’d for them. (I may not lean heavily on Endings Explained in these recaps.)
I am expecting, however, that some of you quit social media in disgust (fair) or don’t see half my posts because of various algorithms. I also just plain enjoy aggregating this stuff in a way that’s a little more organized and curated than my Authory account (which is still invaluable). Maybe I’ll add some extra commentary here and there on movies I didn’t write about, or about the pieces themselves. We’ll see! The advantage to having a backlog is that a lot of these movies are probably available to stream or rent or whatever; I’m all about telling people stuff to check out in a movie theater, but if you want that you might have to actually follow along a bit more closely week-to-week. Or just ask me. I love getting emails and stuff. OK, here we go; get ready to jump back almost eight months to August’s spiritual release-calendar twin, January. I actually love being on new-movie detail for both of those months because you can often escape the tyranny of high expectations and just enjoy some pure genre stuff. You can also, unfortunately, watch Mel Gibson’s worst movie yet! (As a director, anyway.)
January 2025 New Releases:
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
One of Them Days
Wolf Man — I really enjoyed this, and I get why it flopped at the box office, but I think if you’re into monster movies, it does a pretty interesting and often quite harrowing twist on the wolfman formula. I was really happy to make my case for it for GQ. And I had fun comparing versions of three Universal Wolf Man movies for my Decider column Version Control.
Flight Risk
Presence
Companion
Dog Man — In between this movie coming out and my daughter recently giving away some of her Dog Man-verse books to a family friend (so, seven months), this stuff went from like one of her faves in the world to something she felt like she outgrew. I don’t know that the movie had much to do with that; she seemed to enjoy it, and I had fun with it, too (though DreamWorks and Illumination cartoons often make me a little drowsy these days, even when I like them). But just as PAW Patrol jumped to the movies just in time for her to feel kinda done with, the newest pup she once obsessed over sort of fell off for her once it became a cinematic event. Sunrise, sunset, etc.
January 2025 Retrospectives
Cover-Up (1948), a Christmas noir that I wrote about pre-Christmas, but, hey, what can you do.
Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016), one of those comedies that randomly trends on streaming, but I quite like.
Happy 25th anniversary to Down to You (2000), one of the worst movies I have ever seen. This is the first in my monthly series of quarter-century retrospectives for Paste, one of my favorite projects of any given year.
January 2025: TV?!?!
Yeah, sometimes I review TV. I would say it’s because the money is good, but frankly, that depends on whether the show is something I would watch anyway and/or how many episodes are provided for review. But for the Daily Beast, I did tackle Shifting Gears, a terrible new Tim Allen show that a bunch of people emailed me to complain about my not finding it funny (this is by far the funniest thing about it). I also got an email chastising me for making fun of Lori Loughlin’s absolutely terrible performance in the series On Call. And I dipped into the Netflix sensation The Night Agent, which is mostly pretty bad. It was more fun exploring the badness of the worst SNL Musical Moments to accompany the very cool 50th anniversary special that mostly covered the best ones. And on a positive note, my piece about how Star Wars TV actually got good and no one really noticed (this was even before Andor Season 2!) was reprinted in the New York Post, Decider’s parent company. I guess I’ll just count getting some pro-Acolyte sentiment into the Post as a win.
I think that about covers January. I’ll be back with February whenever I next feel like taking a break from whatever I’m overworking in the next few weeks!