Episodes Monday Rundown: Jan. 1 - 5 2025

The Monday Rundown is a weekly post talking about some of what Libby and I have been watching, reading, listening to, and playing in brief. It's for paid subscribers only and is a shameless ripoff of Fran Magazine's Sunday Dispatch. As a special bonus, this first edition is available to all subscribers. If you'd like to become a paid subscriber, click the button below.

Watching

Speed Racer (dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 2008): Watching the Wachowskis' Speed Racer from the front row of a packed movie theater is an absolutely overwhelming experience, to the degree that I (Emily) spent something like the first dozen hours after leaving the screening in a mild but pleasant dissociative state. The film was roundly pilloried at the time, but it feels like people have caught up to what the movie was up to over time. It's now so frequently heralded as a misunderstood masterpiece that we might just be ready to move it a few rungs up the ladder to something like "they didn't understand it at the time, but...," a status also afforded to a similarly visually dense film that that received a cool reception at the time of release: Blade Runner.

I jokingly said on both Letterboxd and Bluesky that Iron Man (a movie I like) demolishing this movie at the box office was a "two roads diverged in a wood" point for human civilization. This is, I should note, hyperbole, a literary device I'm quite fond of. If Speed Racer had been a box office behemoth, I don't think we'd be living in the workers' paradise right now. Yet watching the film in 2025, it's easy to wonder just what the pop culture world would have looked like had it been as big as The Matrix. Again, I like Iron Man, but I'm also tired of the self-aware posturing that it kicked off among hundreds of lesser copycats. If Iron Man had failed and Speed Racer had succeeded, would I wish there were more snarky superhero movies and fewer hyper-earnest anime adaptations? Maybe. I'd definitely wish there were more Robert Downey Jr. star vehicles. It's also interesting that the hero of Iron Man is a literal billionaire (whose similarities to Elon Musk are made explicit in the sequel), while Speed Racer's core ethos suggests anybody who has that much money has become detached from what makes them human and should not be trusted.

It's also easier to appreciate Speed Racer in 2025 because while its design elements didn't really lead to much, its editing style is all over modern blockbusters. Indeed, the movie that took this editing baton and ran with it is Mad Max: Fury Road, which married everything this movie did in terms of kinetic storytelling to a grimier aesthetic that was easier for our modern sensibilities to glom onto. Still, when Speed roars from the back of the pack to win the final race over a montage of everybody who's supported him thus far? That's the good shit. (ESJ)

Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross, 2024): Much has been made of whether this film's choice to present its entire story via first-person perspective works. Everybody can agree it's bold and audacious; some people seem to eventually tire of it. To me (Emily), every time the perspective stuff started to tire me, the movie would switch things up in a way that rejuvenated my interest. I'd also say it's integral to getting the audience to empathize with the characters to the degree that certain storytelling moments land with the force they do (without spoiling).

The choice also works because the camera is not precisely capturing what is being seen but, rather, how things are remembered. The screen blacks out sometimes when particularly horrible things are happening, or the camera will go in for an extreme close-up that the character could not realistically be seeing with their own eyeball. The film lulls you into this gently, with a number of early shots from a child's point-of-view that capture, say, what it is to lay on the floor and look up through the branches of a Christmas tree. Later, we see a scene from one character's perspective, then from another's, and the eyelines of the performers don't quite match what we remember the camera doing. This is not present tense; this is past.

This is a towering film, and I expect to write more about it. (ESJ)

Reading

Orbital (Samantha Harvey, published 2023): Lately, I (Emily) have been incorrectly learning the premises of books. I am not entirely sure how this is happening or how to get it to stop, but when I first heard about the Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, I believed it to be about the crew of the space station watching in vain as the world ends below them. That is not the case. This is a book about a day in the life of the crew of the space station that zooms in and out from closeups on their interior lives to vast descriptions of the planet rotating beneath them. There's not really a plot, per se. The closest thing to one is that a typhoon slowly forms and makes landfall below them. They can only watch as it does so.

Orbital is a climate-change book, but mostly obliquely. It nods to the effects of climate change more than it says that's what's happening. I appreciated that about it. Mostly, though, I appreciated how incredibly beautiful the prose is. I often read books like this when I'm working on a novel that is diametrically opposed to their aims. Since I was working on something small-scale and very character-focused, I thought the slightly broader sweep of Orbital might prove a good companion. I was right, to the degree that I could feel some of what I wrote in the new book being affected by paragraphs like this (from the book's very first chapter):

Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt. Now there's Santiago on South America's approaching coast in a cloud-hazed burn of gold. Unseen through the closed shutters the trade winds blowing across the warm waters of the Western Pacific have worked up a storm, an engine of heat. The winds take the warmth out of the ocean where it gathers as clouds which thicken and curdle and begin to spin in vertical stacks that have formed a typhoon. As the typhoon moves west towards southern Asia, their craft tracks east, eastward and down towards Patagonia where the lurch of a far-off aurora domes the horizon in neon. The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.

If you read that and were, like, "Nice enough, but no thanks," don't pick up this book. If you found it at all moving, Orbital has my highest recommendation. (ESJ)

The Wedding People (Allison Espach, published 2024): The Wedding People is one of those books that I (Libby) loved while I was reading and liked a little less the more that I sat with it.

The Wedding People follows Phoebe Stone, an adjunct English professor and professional depressive, at the lowest point of her life. Recently divorced from her presumed soul mate (who left her for their colleague), haunted by her infertility, fully blocked by her thesis, Phoebe finds herself pushed too far by one final, heartrending loss. She decides to take matters into her own hands – by which I mean, she decides to fuck off to the East Coast to the fanciest hotel she can imagine.

(Mild spoilers for The Wedding People follow. Sorry.)

To kill herself.

For anyone who's read a book before, it should come as no surprise that things don't work out the way Phoebe plans. For anyone who has read the title of the book, it should come as no surprise that a large part of Phoebe's narrative journey involves her inexplicably finding herself embroiled in the drama of the aforementioned wedding people.

Because of my own history with both depression and infertility, the early parts of the novel were like catnip for me. Allison Espach's depiction of suicidal ideation and the hopelessness that accompanies it is raw and resonant. Phoebe yearns to rest and to wrest some small sense of control back in a life that has burdened her with so many crushed dreams. To kill herself would be the period at the end of her sentence but one that, at the very least, she would get to write herself.

(It's probably fine to jump back in here.)

As the plot moves on, Phoebe finds herself rejuvenated, in part by the petty problems that unfold at the extravagant wedding festivities being held throughout the week at the hotel. Here, the book changes. It trades in its stark, but true, brooding and instead starts veering into something of a traditional romance novel which, I admit, I really didn't see coming when I started reading. That's not to say there's anything wrong with Espach's choices or with the book itself. It's remains involving and charming til the end, to the extent that I found myself really rooting for the couple who is clearly OTP, but the experience still sits a little funny in my brain.

In discussing it with Emily, who read it immediately before I did, she pointed out that in her experience reading romance novels, it can be nearly impossible to mash up the genre with anything else. Romance subsumes everything, partly because it presents such an idealized view of love and the world at large. You can't be sad in a romance novel! What a silly thought. And if you are, trust that your perfect someone is lurking right around the corner, waiting to fall into your life at the exact right moment.

It's jarring to see a character go from the brink of marrow-deep despair and slowly get swallowed up by a Julia Roberts film. And on some level I think what I'm bumping on is the sort of misbegotten idea that there is some sort of quick fix for depression. Something that can give you a renewed sense of vigor and purpose and hope and fireworks and flowers, all in a week's time. That, ultimately, is the failure (minor though it may be) of The Wedding People. It is the mere suggestion that a life's worth of disappointments can somehow be rectified in seven days, when reality is so much harder than that. And with the realism that Espach brought to the early chapters of the book, it seemed a shame to see them crowded out by the business of, well, the wedding people. (LH)

Playing

Thank Goodness You're Here! (2024): There's few things I (Libby) love more than an absurdist video game. I could not tell you how many tears of sheer joy Untitled Goose Game and Trombone Champ have given me, so Thank Goodness You're Here! is right up my alley. In it you play a tiny man on a series of stupid missions around a ridiculous town in Northern England. To try to explain much more than that would sort of give away the whole gag. Still, to give you a sense of what you're getting into, in addition to walking around, your other two action options are Jump and Slap. If that wasn't enough, one of the primary voice actors is Jackie Daytona himself, Matt Berry.

Available on PC, Mac, Switch, and Playstations 4 AND 5, this is a fun little distraction which I was able to finish in around two hours. If you need a break from the insane inanity of reality, definitely check out the same in Thank Goodness You're Here! (LH)

A Good Song

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. Paid subscribers also have access to the weekly Monday Rundown. This newsletter is written by Emily St. James and Libby Hill. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).