I finally wore myself out on Oasis and Lord Huron for a minute or two, so here are some things I've been listening to instead.

In the Earth Again by Chat Pile (noise rock/sludge metal) and Hayden Pedigo (acoustic guitarist). A bluesky friend turned me onto this, which is a really pleasing mix between menacing electric guitar and beautiful, contemplative acoustic, among other sounds. The concentration of each varies a lot depending on the track. I still don't love metal singing, and honestly there's only maybe two tracks here that I would choose to listen to on their on, but the interplay of all the elements never gets boring.

Lux by Rosalia. I don't feel musically educated enough to really appreciate this, lol, but it's gorgeous! I do lose steam towards the end once things get slow, but I really enjoy the first half or maybe 3/4.

"House" and "Chains of Love" by Charli XCX. My most recent obsession. Apparently she's making an entire concept album to accompany the new Wuthering Heights adaptation directed by Emerald Fennell? Okay!! I'm only mad I have to wait until February for the album, because I love these. "House" is pretty far outside my usual listening, and she's barely even on it, but that big moment the tuba comes in and then she follows? Incredible. And "Chains of Love" is more conventional and might not have grabbed me on its own, but paired with "House," idk, it really works for me.

Is this what finally gets me to click with Charli XCX? Signs point to yes.

A lot of meh here.

Crash (1996). A man and his wife get involved in the car crash fetish scene. I really don't think "erotic thriller" is adequate preparation for this movie, but then again I'm not sure what is. I recently saw this described as "a series of sex scenes separated by car crashes," and that's about right.

I liked:
- The completely normalized polyamory. This married couple get off on fucking other people and telling each other about it, good for them.
- That it was a lot gayer than I expected, especially for 1996. Both m/m and f/f scenes (even if the latter felt a bit out of nowhere).

I was disappointed by:
- James Spader. THIS is James Spader? This is the guy everyone is low-key obssessed with? This gormless Zach Gilford lookalike?
- How we open with the wife, but the husband gets all the development, and she just gets pulled along in his wake. She seems to enjoy it, but I wanted to see her take some initiative, too.
- Somehow I'd osmosed that there was like car-related body mod stuff, like Cronenberg's version of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The one gal with the leg brace was not really sufficient for my tastes.

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Predator: Badlands (2025). A Yautja runt goes on a quest to kill an unkillable monster to avenge(?) his brother's death at his father's hands, and ends up teaming up with a Weyland-Yutani synth (Elle Fanning) with no legs.

This is by the same guy who directed Prey, Dan Trachtenberg. The writing felt more obvious and more cobbled-together than that movie, probably because it was trying to do more. I got tired of people stating the same obvious story beat multiple times.

I think this is the first time the Yautja have been humanized to nearly this degree, right? I've only seen Prey and the AvP movies, so I may be missing some lore. I'm not sure what I needed from a race of big game hunters was daddy issues, but otoh murderous patriarchy does go hand in hand with the big game hunting, I guess. IDK, I wanted the Yautja in general and our specimen in particular to be weirder.

However, I eventually enjoyed Thia the synth, who has a kind of anti-Gamora/Nebula relationship with a fellow synth. It passed the Bechdel test, good job! And the movie had some fantastic deadly alien fauna. Just completely bonkers creatures that want to kill you in the most unlikely ways. A+.

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Die My Love (2025). A woman (Jennifer Lawrence) moves with her husband (Robert Pattinson) to his rural family home, has a baby, and has a mental breakdown.

My impression of this movie from the trailer was that this was maybe about a couple's relationship slowly escalating to bonkers attempted murder. (Pattinson's presence definitely contributed to my impression of it being bonkers.) There was no baby in the trailer I saw, and if there had been I wouldn't have gone to see it. That said, I don't know that it was ABOUT motherhood or post-partum depression or about the marital relationship. Frankly, I cannot confidently say what it was about. The choice of first and last shots suggest it's about the house?

I can't say it's not bonkers, but more in terms of its storytelling choices than its content as such. The timeline is weird and confused, but not in an interesting way. We learn literally nothing about the main character's background until about the 80% mark. (She was orphaned at age 10? Might be good to mention that earlier??)

Some of what we see on screen probably isn't happening. The ending, where she walks naked into a forest fire, I feel almost certainly didn't happen. There's a recurring theme where she prowls around on the ground but also might be pretending to be a horse? Also there's a horse that just wanders around and which they hit with their car at one point? (To be fair, it's not the first movie this year where a thematically significant horse just wanders through now and then. Looking at you, On Swift Horses.)

To be honest, JLaw was the biggest draw of this movie for me, and I did get plenty of her. It's a JLaw showcase, and I also enjoyed Sissy Spacek in a supporting role. But overall, man. I ventured outside my usual genre, and I had regrets!