Boy Movies #46

The anniversary issue

You’re reading Boy Movies, a newsletter that has existed for an ENTIRE YEAR. Can you even believe it? I sure can’t.

🎉 HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOY MOVIES 🎉

Well, the elephant in the room is that Boy Movies doesn’t actually turn one year old until tomorrow, October 4th, which is the official date I launched with the Top Gun: Maverick issue and therefore the date of birth that appears on its government-issued ID. That just didn’t work with my typical posting cadence, so whatever. If you noticed before I pointed it out, you’re insane and should work for the FBI. In any case, here we are, saying happy birthday to Boy Movies.

At the risk of being all [I started this newsletter because voice], I started this newsletter because I have never been good at picking up hobbies but felt as though I was starting to lose myself a bit only doing writing for my job. I wanted something for myself, I wanted to expand the things I wrote about, I wanted to be more creative, but I absolutely did not (and still don’t) have it in me to be the type of person who sends millions of freelance pitches out into the ether. Sarah was like, “You should start a newsletter, and if you hate it, you can just stop,” and I was like, “Yeah, okay, good idea,” while privately wondering whether or not that was actually true. Spoiler: it was!

While it feels a bit like a cop-out that my “hobby” is the same thing I do for work, this newsletter has lifted me up in ways I couldn’t have imagined in October 2022. Things have changed a lot for me over the past year. The biggest constant, somehow, has been Boy Movies, which provided me with a relaxed outlet when I was in some very low places (may we never forget my iconic cyst drama). Every time I make a new friend because of this newsletter, or someone brings it up to me out in the wild, or leaves me a comment, or tells me they’re watching a movie I’ve written about here, I feel the kind of joy typically reserved for newborn babies who haven’t yet become aware of the horrors and trials. It’s insane to me that anyone reads this thing — why? What’s wrong with all of you? I don’t know, but please don’t ever get well, that would be terrible for business. Thank you for supporting Boy Movies. This past year has been a blast. Here’s to many more, and fingers crossed that we finally see some movement on my end goal of getting acquired by a huge tech company, or Dua Lipa — the huge tech company of pop music.

And now, to address your questions…

Submitted by Akosua: 

What is (if you have one) the cultural object (movie, character, celeb gossip) that was like your lightbulb moment that “pop” culture was your path?

I love this question because it reminds me of the great Las Culturistas tradition of asking guests what the culture was that made them say culture was for them. A few things stick out in my mind (Harry Potter — barf — was huge for me, while The Social Network is what made me care about “film”), but when I think of lightbulb moments it’s hard to overstate exactly what seeing the Rent movie at age twelve did to my psyche. Thinking about it is so chilling. It sends a shiver down my spine. The music, the characters, the story, the costumes… I was shattered, I was moved beyond words! Everything about it genuinely, humiliatingly shook me to my core. They didn’t want to pay their rent but still wore cool clothes, and I was like, “Totally.” Suddenly I knew who Idina Menzel was, and one never forgets their first Idina Menzel.

It is, to be clear, a pretty bad film in retrospect, but it’s not like I cared — what did I know about quality back then? I have the Rent movie to thank for my (sorry) love of musical theater (have I lost all of you yet) and for my habit of doing deep dives on actors’ careers and lives. I think being a preteen and reading Anthony Rapp’s book, in which he described having gay sex in great detail, should explain a lot about why I am the way I am today. I wish I had a more chic answer, but it’s the anniversary issue and I can do nothing but be fearlessly real. Literally how do you measure, measure a year… me writing this issue…

Submitted by Abigail:

2024 boy movie you're most excited for?

Keeping in mind that any and all of these could shift because of the actors strike: Gladiator 2 (this movie has the potential to change me, you, and everyone we know), Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two (obv), and VENOM 3 (have I talked about being a huge Venomhead on here yet)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I will be seated for Joker: Folie à Deux (girl, lol) for reasons related to Gaga, though if you ever catch me watching its predecessor it is a sign that I have been body snatched. I guess it’s also time to open up about two of my more controversial opinions, which are: I will in all likelihood enjoy Deadpool 3 just as I enjoyed Deadpool and Deadpool 2, and I am spiritually, morally, categorically against the Dune franchise. That’s all I’ll be saying about either matter. If you have any questions, take them up with the lord.

Submitted by casss:

tom hardy: boy actor or girl actor???

because ive seen that trailer for the jodie comer motorcycle movie also featuring austin butler and tom hardy and ive never seen something that screamed girl movie to me more. maybe not even barbie

Let me be clear about a few things: 1. I am ready to sit my ass in a theater to hoot and holler at The Bikeriders like I’m watching Avengers: Endgame, and 2. Tom Hardy is a woman. Those iconic old MySpace pics? His slight but sturdy stature? His silly voices and his little passions (hello, Venom)? “I’m An Actor, Of Course I’ve Had Gay Sex”? That face? He’s one of those girl actors who mostly does boy movies, but he brings a level of unpredictability to everything that keeps the viewer on their toes. You never know what you’re going to get from a Tom Hardy performance. He is gorgeously, gamely up for anything. Case in point: the way I started cackling when he opened his mouth in The Bikeriders trailer. He’s an alien superstar! UNIQUE.

A few submitted by Ariana:

How has the concept of boy movies, the genre, and Boy Movies, the newsletter evolved since you started this?

This is such a good question and one I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. I’ll break my response into parts.

As far as the newsletter is concerned, when I started doing this I had a very different idea for how I thought it would go. Just on a technical level, I remember initially instating a ranking system that I quickly abandoned (after the second issue, I believe) when I decided I didn’t want this to turn into a situation where I was “reviewing” movies, at the risk of delving into Letterboxd-y territory. Like, if you want to see how many stars I gave Titanic, you can just follow me there. (The answer is five big ones, baby.) I didn’t want to box myself in, and I wanted to leave the door open to play around with form. Letting go of that rigidity, of the gimmick, was essential to making sure I enjoyed writing the thing week after week. If something is going to be a labor of love, you might as well actually love it.

Also, for the first few months, I felt crippling embarrassment every time I sent out a new issue. I think there will always be a certain level of discomfort whenever I allow anyone to read the things I’ve written, since putting something out there always means running the risk of it being picked apart or misunderstood. It’s hard to say exactly what shifted — maybe I just got used to the feeling, or maybe I got better at ignoring it — but I’ve arrived at the point where I genuinely love sending out a new Boy Movies. When I interviewed John Wilson, he told me about how he found it easier to talk about incredibly personal things behind the barrier of his show rather than discussing them directly with the people in his life. Sometimes separation allows for honesty.

The genre question is tougher. Especially lately, I’ve been feeling kind of… maybe not guilty, but slightly chastened over the whole boy movie/girl movie dichotomy that I’ve BUILT MY LIVELIHOOD (jk) on. Look, I won’t repeat what I already said in the Barbenheimer issue and the strike issue, but resistance to intelligence is at such an all-time high that I almost don’t feel right labeling anything a “boy movie” or a “girl movie” out of the fear of my intentions being misconstrued. Like, if an unsuspecting layperson were to stumble on this newsletter and group me in with the “girl math” crowd, you would, not to be hyperbolic, have to institutionalize me. I don’t feel like further enforcing a silly binary is helping much of anything, even if I don’t mean it in the same way the faux feminism freaks on TikTok and Twitter do.

And yet, boy movies as a concept doesn’t disappear just because I feel weird about what’s happening culturally. For boy movies to disappear that would mean the disappearance of masculinity as a whole. (Perish the thought.) I mean, Oppenheimer is still raking in millions and they just released a new Expendables sequel. (Every time I pass by a poster and see the title styled as Expend4bles I scream and cheer. EXPEND4BLES!!!) There is still a lot of fun to be had dissecting the “boy” elements of movies, and if anything, my current approach to writing this newsletter goes back to what I said earlier about leaving behind rigidity. Staying loose and being willing to experiment with the ways I write about boy movies has helped keep this whole thing feeling gratifying, even as I watch people’s brains rapidly rot in real time.

If Zach Braff DMed you and said he's dying to do a Garden State issue of Boy Movies with you, how would you respond?

“All booking requests are handled by my assistant” and then patch him through to my roommate’s cat.

Straight men love to tell women that they *need* to watch [insert boy movie]. Do you think this request is ever acceptable? 

Coming from straight men, no. Leave women alone. I resent how certain types of people turn watching movies into a competition (I do blame Letterboxd for this a bit, as much as I like using Letterboxd), and I’ve found that the quickest way to ensure I’ll never watch something is when someone tells me I HAVE to watch it. Shut up! My typical response when a friend tells me they haven’t seen something I think they’d like is to make an effort to list a few reasons why they specifically would enjoy it, in effort to remove any level of superiority. Earnest alert: I genuinely love movies and I love talking about them with people! Why turn it into an exercise in gatekeeping? Boring!

That being said, I did feel very called out by the scene in Barbie where one of the Kens is explaining at length why The Godfather is good and it’s supposed to be, like, a dunk. I mean, okay, whatever, but The Godfather actually is extremely good and all the people I’ve ever discussed it with have been women. And while we’re on the subject, “Push” by Matchbox Twenty is one of my favorite songs of all time. Maybe Greta Gerwig and I would not get along.

Which girl director would you love to see a boy movie from?

My first thought was that it’s a bummer we never got to see Nora Ephron direct a Mikey & Nicky-style boy movie, which I think she would’ve been fabulous at. My second thought was that Nicole Holofcener should direct, like, a mob movie, just for fun. She works so beautifully with actors in a way I think would translate well to the internalized conflicts happening among guys who are, as they say, connected. I guess what I really want is the Holofcener take on Eastern Promises.

Submitted by Joe:

What are your favorite Sports Movies? Also, when watching/thinking about a film and its Boy/Girl designation, do different genres require different criteria to go one way or the other? (Would you look for something in a Sports Movie to tip it Girl that you wouldn't look for in a drama, due to most Sports Movies' inherent boyness?)

What this made me realize is that I don’t watch nearly enough sports movies! I literally googled “sports movies” and hadn’t seen much of anything on the lists I scrolled through. Shameful! If anyone has any recommendations for sports movies I should check out, please drop me a line. That being said, I love the first Creed, a kinetic force of a film, to the point where it became a detriment to the subsequent movies in the series. (I say this as someone who enjoyed Creed III, Jonathan Majors notwithstanding!) My mom sat me down earlier this year and made me watch the first two Rocky movies, both of which I really enjoyed, but they’re less about sports and more about Rocky being a fundamentally kind wife guy who loves that lame virgin girl so much. Also, how do we categorize Jerry Maguire? Does it count as a sports movie? I am a big fan of Jerry Maguire, which I believe to be one of the most romantic movies ever made. People don’t want you to know about Renée Zellweger standing titties out on that porch in front of Tom Cruise and her entire neighborhood and God himself. Amazing stuff.

As for the second part of the question, my short answer is yes! Different genres definitely require a different criteria, with Rocky actually being a good example. Here we have an iconic sports movie that is widely beloved by men (how many other boy movie protagonists can say they have literal statues erected of them?), and yet there’s this huge girl element in the form of Rocky’s romance with Adrian, who is so different from a typical boy movie love interest that it totally caught me off guard. In the case of a sports movie, I would maybe look for something like that: a surprising female character, or a particularly sensitive display of emotion. Since everything else is boy until proven girl, the bar is certainly higher, and I’m more discerning about labeling something “girl” than I would be with a regular drama. Most dramas, even the most boyish ones, have a built-in girl element — it can be something as small as the casting of Carey Mulligan in Drive — but with inherently boy genres like sports movies and war movies, you have to do some digging if you want to locate the girl traits that may or may not be there.

Submitted by Cassidy:

What is the most fun you’ve had writing a boy movies so far? BONUS QUESTION: What is Jon Hamm’s deal?

EASILY the Social Network issue. It’s still completely cuckoo crazy to me that I got people to go on record admitting any of those things, to bend over and show their entire assholes for my newsletter. The significance of that is not lost on me. I had more than one person tell me that it read as if all of the contributors were actually gathered together in one room rather than just submitting answers via Google form, which was very much the goal and also really speaks to the community aspect of why I wanted to write a TSN issue like this in the first place. I got to talk to people about my favorite movie ever made and create a tribute to something that genuinely changed my life. It’s pretty much everything I wanted to do with the newsletter all rolled into one big, psychotic issue and I remain thrilled by how it came out. My magnum opus, perhaps.

What IS Jon Hamm’s deal? He’s on The Morning Show this season, looking better than anyone has ever looked and playing an Elon Musk type named “Paul Marks.” Okay! That’s not really relevant, I just wanted to mention that I’m watching The Morning Show — or, rather, The Morning Show is holding me captive. Anyway, Jon Hamm is so singular because he played Don Draper, a MAN in every sense of the word, but also Mad Men is a girl show. I’m realizing in this moment that I might go so far as to call him… a girl actor? He stays out of the superhero franchises, despite the fact that I’m sure he was given his pick of them post-Mad Men, and apparently wants nothing more than to be considered a weird comedy guy (what a shame he’s so explosively hot). To be so misunderstood is to be womanlike.

Submitted by Sarah:

What are the least and most boyest Harry Potter movies?

Let it be known that Sarah brought this question up to me the other morning at the coffee shop while speaking in the hushed tones of a whistleblower about to reveal government secrets. She was like, “Can I be anon?” to which I replied, “No.” For my intrepid graphic designer, and the reason for the existence of Boy Movies, I will rank the Harry Potter movies from least to most boy. I’m making no such disclaimer; we’ve all seen them and we all know that lady is a malevolent hag and a terrorist, so let’s just keep this moving.

7. Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets — TIE!
They were just kids!!!!!! I genuinely love and am still enchanted by Sorcerer’s Stone as a film, sorry. As I’ve said before, children’s movies are in a league of their own. They are generally, mercifully genderless. Sorcerer’s Stone certainly is. Meanwhile, Chamber of Secrets is about being a young girl who gets targeted by some fucking dork because she’s a young girl. I couldn’t decide which was more or less boy than the other so I took the easy way out and lumped them, the two Chris Columbus-directed contributions to the franchise, together.

6. Prisoner of Azkaban
In many ways, Alfonso Cuarón was queering the Harry Potter movies. It’s the black sheep of the series, stylistically and tonally in a different league than all the others. This is the one where the kids inexplicably start wearing hoodies and jeans. It introduces us to werewolves, a gay allegory whether Joanne likes it or not. Hermione gets a girlboss moment. Sirius Black. If they were smart they would’ve let Cuarón direct the five films that followed, but thank god he didn’t.

5. Deathly Hallows Pt. 1
I initially had this higher and then I was like, no, it’s mostly a road movie about three besties going through the worst time in their lives together. Kind of genderless, aside from when Ron has his little straight guy meltdown.

4. Half-Blood Prince
The gay bathroom scene (iykyk) can’t make up for how much of this is focused on two nasty, nasty characters: Voldemort and Snape. God, and I just remembered the wretched Harry and Ginny relationship… don’t piss me off.

3. Order of the Phoenix
Harry was mad pussy for getting so upset over his dad bullying a loser who deserved to be bullied.

2. Goblet of Fire
Aggressively a movie about pubescent teen boys. Takes out all the gay shit from the book. The concept of prom. Ron being like, “My outfit makes me look like a woman :(” Please! Also, this is where the series takes a super grim turn as it transitions from “haha wizard school” to “k so now students are getting murdered,” which is very boy.

1. Deathly Hallows Pt. 2
Harry has special boy syndrome throughout the entire series, obviously, but DH2 turns him into such a special boy he literally has to die and come back in order to defeat the evil snake man who killed his parents. He maxes out on being a special boy. There has never been a boy so special.

• Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who humored me and submitted questions for this issue <3 Is this something I should do again? Was even one word of it interesting? Lmk!

• Geoffrey Lapid, who writes the great Movie Diary 2023, was kind enough to have me on the blog last week! I wrote about Wayne’s World! Party on!!!!!!