Well, yours portly is back at it today after a glorious Spring Break. It was busy, but the kind of busy I like—getting stuff done around the house and knocking out various errands without the drain of doing them after working all day. There’s still an immense amount of unpacking to do, but I can at least maneuver around my home office without sucking in my gut and performing pudgy pirouettes around boxes.
Writing, however, took a bit of a backseat to errands—and to Old World, the 4X strategy game that absorbed much of my waking hours in the waning days of break. I stayed up until nearly 2:30 AM Friday night/Saturday morning playing the game, and was reminded why I don’t do that anymore, as I was dragging the rest of the weekend. That said, I did finish my first campaign (still a tutorial, technically, but it was a complete playthrough without any gimmicks and with only minimal handholding from tutorial pop-ups), winning an “Ambition Victory” as Babylon. Granted, the difficulty was a couple of notches below the standard settings, which probably explains why I was able to focus on churning out generation after generation of philosopher-kings in a mostly peaceful playthrough. Still, I feel much more confident to tackle higher difficulties as I continue to learn the game.
Those self-indulgent updates out of the way, let’s get to the movie review! At the beginning of break, Dr. Wife and I saw the new A24 flick The Drama (2026), starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. I’d always thought that Zendaya was kind of a one-note actress, as her entire schtick was to gaze moodily into the camera with the same expression. The Drama disabused me of that notion (to be fair, though, that is how she played every other character I’ve seen her portray).
The film is billed as a romantic comedy, which is a bit misleading. The flick is comedic, but it’s black comedy. Dr. Wife and I found ourselves failing to suppress guffaws at some of the truly deadpan, downbeat, dark humor of the flick, which always makes for a good time.
Indeed, there’s apparently some Internet outrage (the worst kind of outrage) over this perceived bait-and-switch, as people go in expecting a film about a cute couple getting married and instead get a movie about a dark revelation threatening that marriage. Yes, that’s technically the plot of every romantic comedy—something unflattering comes out in the second act that precipitates in the male lead running to the airport before his girl flies off to The Big City—but it’s much darker and more psychological here—and realistic. The film asks, “what would you do if you found out something about your fiancée that is (potentially) deeply troubling just five days before your wedding?” It also asks us to consider which is worse: doing something that is mildly or moderately bad, or thinking about doing something truly despicable but not carrying it only due to external factors.
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