2025-12-24 (last edited 2026-01-04)
Doing my best to give first impressions for media I engage with. These are fairly unrefined. There will be no unwarned major spoilers here, but there might be minor ones that I judge won’t change the experience of the media.
A book about trans lives. The main characters are a pair of t4t painters and their son, who is writing about their lives. One of the painters was a revolutionary, but this book isn’t about revolution, or the titular regicide, or politics, really. It’s about these three people. The book is ostensibly set in the far future, but this is set dressing; it’s really literary fiction about today. There’s something in the timefulness of it that reminds me of Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb; interestingly, they have the same editor.
Notes from a Regicide feels like a story trans people tell each other. I don’t know how a cis person would understand the book. I can’t point to what it is, but there’s something to Etoine and Zaffre (the painters) that feels inescapably real, their story resonating off the queers in my life even as the conditions of their lives are so different. I’m not sure if anything else I’ve read has had this effect.
I’m not sure what to make of the book. I should read more trans fiction.
Recommended for: the queers.
A critique of representation and a satire of literary culture and publishing in the United States. What I most appreciated about it is that every time I started developing a political critique of something in the movie, it later turned out that this was intentional, and someone would make a similar critique of the main character. He’s an interesting fellow. I similarly appreciate the ambiguity of the ending. The film doesn’t present solutions.
The movie is bitterly self aware and it presents this awareness to its watchers. It mocks Black fiction pandering to suburban white people. There’s something darkly, perversely amusing about being white and watching this movie in the suburbs, on recommendation from my mother, who herself was recommended it by her (white) friends.
Recommended for: fans of satire.
It’s really good, as expected. Very funny and well put-together. The “main character” boxer-turned-priest Jud Duplenticy is a goldmine in the setting of a conservative church. The Knives Out movies do a great job of adapting the detective story to the modern day, and Benoit Blanc is as wonderful to watch as always. I appreciate the theme of showing grace to people even when they don’t deserve it.
Still, I think this movie might actually be my least favorite of the three Knives Out movies. I would have to rewatch Glass Onion to be sure (the first movie is definitely my favorite). The whodunnit in Wake Up Dead Man fell flat for me and lacked depth, and unlike Glass Onion, this wasn’t the point. There are also cinematographic choices that took me out of the film, mostly in the first act: the internet video type stills of Lee’s books and Cy’s YouTube, the church destruction montage, and parts of Wicks’s sermons. Also Chimney Rock is not a believable New York town.
Recommended for: fans of detective fiction.