Five Cool Things and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Hello and welcome to another Five Cool Things, the bi-weekly article where I talk about all the fun, interesting, and, yes, cool things I’ve come across since the last time.

I don’t go to the movies much anymore. It’s just too darn expensive, and it is so much more convenient to watch things at home. I don’t watch that many modern movies, if I’m being honest. I’m much more of a classic-movie fan. Whenever the Oscars roll around, I’ve usually only seen a couple of the nominated films.

I’ve decided I want to do better at that, and so I’m dedicating December to watching as many films from 2025 as I can. This week’s post is dedicated to new movies (and one impossibly charming David Byrne performance).

Let’s get to it.

Train Dreams

I had never heard of this Netflix movie until a few folks in my social media feeds started talking about it. But since I’m trying to watch as many films from 2025 this month, I queued it up and pressed play. I’m so glad I did. What an astonishingly beautiful film.

Buy Train Dreams paperback

Joel Edgerton stars as Robert Granier, a logger who works in the Pacific Northwest during the early part of the 20th century. He meets a collection of odd people, falls in love, is beset by tragedy, and is plagued by memories of a Chinese man being murdered and how he did nothing to help him.

The plot is a simple thing. There isn’t a whole lot that happens. There are memorable incidents, but mostly it is just Robert living a life as the whole world changes around him. The way director Clint Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso shoot the nature scenes is reminiscent of something by Terrence Malick, which is to say it is utterly gorgeous. Edgerton gives a wonderful performance. Granier is a man of few words but we feel a world of emotion through his eyes, facial expressions, and gestures. It is a beautiful film, aching and warm at the same time.

A House of Dynamite

Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film is 2/3rds a great movie whose disappointing ending has angered a lot of people. It tells the story of a ballistic missile fired from an unknown location, by unknown assailants and how the United States government deals with its possible detonation over Chicago.

Buy Zero Dark Thirty

The first act is one of the more thrilling and intense films I’ve seen in a long while. It details how our early detection system failed to notice the initial launch of the missile. Once detected, everyone at first believes it is just a test or a training exercise. Then they realize it is real and it is headed towards the Midwest part of the country. They launch defensive missiles and try to prepare for what happens next. Should they counterattack? Or wait and try and figure out who is responsible, etc. This section ends just abruptly before anything absolutely terrible happens.

The second act begins the day again, and we see all of those events from different perspectives. It ends, and a third act resets yet again. The credits roll, and we are never given resolution to the story. That’s a very intentional act by the filmmakers, but a frustrating one. We are programmed to want movies to have certain endings. Not giving us any kind of resolution made a lot of folks angry.

Personally, while I was frustrated by that ending (or lack of one), I felt that what went on before was interesting enough to make me recommend the film. I think the first act is an incredible piece of filmmaking. I found the second act’s reset interesting and seeing things from a different perspective to be fascinating. By the third act, things got a little tedious. But I did appreciate that is where we see things from the President’s perspective. He is the one who ultimately has to make the hard decisions, and he is also the least prepared to do that. Most of the other characters are career military personnel. They have trained for such a scenario hundreds of times. The film does a great job of showing that even though they have trained for this moment, they never truly believed it would actually happen, and the realities of what is happening are still difficult to comprehend. But the President hasn’t trained for this moment. He is utterly ill prepared and that’s a terrifying thought.

She Rides Shotgun

Taron Egerton stars in this thriller as Nate McClusky an ex-con who made some deals with some nasty white supremacists while he was in prison and then turned against them. Now they are after him and his young daughter Polly (a terrific Ana Sophia Heger). At first the film keeps it close to the chest as to whether or not Nate’s a good guy. He shows up at Polly’s school and picks her up in a clearly stolen car. He’s cagey about where her mom is, and it is clear they have an estranged relationship. Then he takes her to a motel and cuts and dyes her hair.

Buy She Rides Shotgun

Slowly we realize what exactly has happened and how his love for her grows. It is ultimately the story of a father and daughter getting to know each other after he’s been incarcerated for many months or years. Also, skinheads want to kill them.

It isn’t a perfect thriller by any means. It falls into cliché more than once, but the two lead performances are great (as is a wonderfully playing-against-type John Carroll Lynch as the big bad guy). I’m a sucker for this type of film that pretends to be one thing while at its heart it is a completely different thing.

The Man in My Basement

Charles Blakely (Corey Hawkins) is a man who needs some help and can’t find any. He is unemployed and broke. The bank is about to foreclose on his ancestral home. His family and friends refuse to help. They’ve been down that road before. He’s burned those bridges. All seems hopeless, and then a man shows up on his doorstep.

Buy The Man in My Basement: A Novel paperback

The man calls himself Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) and he says he wants to rent out Charles’s basement for a few weeks. He offers an impossibly large sum of money. At first, Charles declines. The man seems weird, and why would he pay that kind of cash? Besides, there is a bunch of junk in his basement, and as it turns out, that junk is old, maybe antiques, and he can sell that for a lot of money. But then the bank calls. Someone has made them an offer on the house, and if Charles doesn’t pay his back mortgage, they will be forced to sell. The antiques lady says she can’t get him any money for at least a few weeks. That will be too late.

He takes Anniston’s deal, and he moves in. Then he builds a metal cell and gives Charles the key. Things get weird from there. The Man in My Basement is partially an atmospheric horror film and partially an intellectual treatise on race, guilt, and history in America. It works better as the first.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but obviously Anniston isn’t who he at first seems to be. The reasons he’s locked himself into this man’s basement are slowly revealed. How Charles deals with these facts is both fascinating and kind of dumb. It is a film that all too often lets its ambitions get in the way of its thrills. Still, when it does thrill, it’s pretty great, and the two lead performances are wonderful.

David Byrne: Tiny Desk Concert

I’ve never been a huge Talking Heads fan. Growing up I liked their hit songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” “Psycho Killer,” etc., but I never bought their albums or dug past the hits. I pretty much completely ignored David Byrne’s output as a solo artist.

Buy David Byrne’s American Utopia (Criterion Collection)

But then a few years ago I got on a Jonathan Demme kick and watched Stop Making Sense, the director’s seminal concert movie featuring the Talking Heads. That film is as good as they say and I loved the music. Sometime later I watched American Utopia, Spike Lee’s recording of a David Byrne concert, and once again was blown away. And now I’ve watched him perform at NPR’s Tiny Desk and I think I’m a fan.

The thing I love about Byrne’s music and especially his performances is that they are so infused with joy. For all his arty intellectualism, at the heart of his music is delight. He radiates happiness. So do his performers. So do I when I’m listening. I love that everybody is dressed in matching blue suits. I love that they squeezed that many musicians into such a tiny space, and they still found a way to dance. I love this music and this performance.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Ready or Not (2019) was surprisingly great. It took a premise that could have been utterly ridiculous and turned it into gold. Samara Weaving starred as a woman whose dream wedding night turns into a nightmare when her husband’s family forces her into playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek. Weaving proved herself to be a movie star, and the film balances its thrills with genuine laughs.

Buy Ready or Not

It is a film that absolutely doesn’t need a sequel. It ended perfectly, and I’d be perfectly happy to never know what happened next. But we live in a world where everything eventually gets a sequel, and here we are. Normally, I’d just shrug and move on with my life, but then I watched the trailer, saw how utterly loaded its cast is, and I’m now on board. There’s Elijah Wood as a knowing lawyer, Sarah Michelle Gellar as one of the killers, plus Shawn Hatosy (who I loved in The Pitt), Nestor Carbonell, and even freaking David Cronenberg shows up at some point.

The plot looks like it will be more of the same. I guess that family was just one small part of something bigger, and now our hero will have to survive another night of people trying to kill her. The trailer does seem to indicate that the film knows that’s a little ridiculous, so I’m hoping it will lean into the fun of it all and be just as enjoyable as the first film.