Hollywood's Obsession With the Perception of Youth Is Ruining Movies
🖐 The Friday High Five #127
Welcome to another Mullet edition of the Friday High 5.
Business in the front: The 5 things I enjoyed this week, free for all to enjoy.
Party in the back: A deeper exploration of something on my mind, for supporters.
Business in the front
F1
Vibe: Brad Pitt is so handsome, of course he can competitively race at 60
Depending on where you live, it may be too late for this PSA, but just in case: if F1 is playing near you, go see it. This is the kind of movie that theaters were made for.
I went into this hoping for Moneyball: Cars edition. F1 is not that. Moneyball is a brilliantly written film about a man desperate enough to try changing baseball. F1 is about guys addicted to driving really fast cars. It’s not the same thing.
A better comp is Top Gun: Maverick—which Joseph Kosinski also directed—in that the story is a bit undercooked and the script a little limp, but you don’t care because you’ve never seen planes cars like this on the big screen. Popcorn was invented for movies like this. Of the two big screen experiences I’ve seen this year—as in, films that exist largely to get you to a theater—F1 was better than Mission Impossible.
It’s hard to overlook the ridiculousness of Brad Pitt at the center of it all, which we’ll tackle in the afterparty below.
South Park satirizes Trump
Vibe: Very NSFW and possibly NSFL, but also hilarious
On the heels of Trump getting Colbert canceled, and his ongoing threats against basically anyone else who disagrees with him, South Park released a very special Trump-specific episode.
I haven’t watched an entire episode of the show in probably 15 years, but after the above clip exploded on Reddit yesterday, I sat down to watch the entire thing. In dark times such as these, this is the kind of TV we need. Something that points out just how wrong this all is, and is funny too. Epstein, Colbert, CBS, 60 Minutes—it’s all in this episode. The show even dunks on Paramount, the network South Park airs on, the very one that continues to kowtow to Trump in order to get its merger approved.
In a very meta, 4th-wall-breaking kinda of way, this leads to the characters settling with Trump by paying him money and creating an endorsement, as only South Park can. The result is amazing and gross. (Mom, you probably shouldn’t click that link.)
This was the season premiere. Looking forward to the entire season.
Zero Dark Thirty
Vibe: Jessica Chastain is riveting as a bin Laden obsessed CIA agent
For one reason or another, I never got around to watching this movie until last weekend. The genre is very much in my wheelhouse—I like movies like Black Hawk Dawn, or basically anytime stuff is blowing up—so I can’t really explain my reluctance.
Maybe I just knew this would be a hard watch. It’s bleak.
That it opens with recordings from people trapped in the towers on 9/11 certainly didn’t help. Heartbreaking. I had to fast forward. Couldn’t listened to the voices from the grave. I’ve done it before. Can’t do it again.
It was nice to see the bad guys get their comeuppance, I guess, but it all felt anticlimactic. And the road involved some questionable ethics. Even if we’re on the right side, it’s hard to stomach torture. Not to get all Star Wars about it, but at what point do you become the thing you swore to destroy?
Great film, made me think and feel a lot. Won’t be revisiting it soon.
The One Ring RPG
Vibe: minimal shenanigans, maximal heroism
As most of you know, I am a huge nerd for games like Dungeons & Dragons. It’s my favorite thing to do. 2-3 hours sitting around, laughing with friends while telling a collaborative story. Most All of those games invariably skew toward zaniness. Maybe that’s an inherent flaw of the tabletop RPG genre—you can’t help feeling a little self-conscious about pretending to be an elf or a wizard, so you crack jokes. Although to be fair, I feel zero embarrassment.
The One Ring game is designed to evoke the spirit of Tolkien’s books, of which the battle between good and evil is paramount. In bog standard D&D, there’s plenty of room for gray heroes. The One Ring begins with the premise that you are legitimate heroes—or good people on that path—and there’s something immeasurably charming about that. (Especially in 2025!) The first time we played, I thought we would end up falling back on D&D tropes. But it didn’t happen.
The characters—dwarf, elf, hobbit, ranger; we have all the bases covered—have gone from strangers to an actual fellowship, under the watchful eye of Gandalf himself. We ended on a cliffhanger, as the characters arrived on an island haunted by evil spirits. It was a long journey—the game shines in simulating the rigors of travel—so the party is weary from the road and have yet to face their true challenge. Can’t wait.
The Bear S4, Episodes 3-5
Vibe: The episode you didn’t realize you needed
After the claustrophobic chaos of Season 3, Season 4 has been a breath of fresh air. The Bear is fun, again, and not an exercise in self-harm.
We’re slowly working our way through the season. Episode 4 is my favorite to this point. It’s a standalone Sydney episode that goes wonderfully off-script. We meet her cousin, and her cousin’s daughter—both of whom are a delight—and Sydney and the daughter have a little girl time. The characters spend so much time at the restaurant, it’s always strangely refreshing when we see them doing normal life stuff. It’s sorta like when you were a kid, and you encountered your teacher out in the wild, at a store or the movies. That shock of, oh yeah—I guess you have a life outside of work. You don’t just sleep under your desk, and eagerly await the moment we return to class. You don’t live to teach me stuff I don’t really care about.
Working at The Bear has been very all-encompassing, to the point that the characters really do seem to live for the restaurant. (A point that comes to a head with Sydney in episode 5.) But I really enjoyed this carefree day-off, where Sydney bonded with her cousin’s kid, and gave her advice, and also tried to work through her own problems.
Party in the back
As I was watching F1, the same three thoughts continually circled around in my head, like cars jockeying for position:
Holy shit, these races are incredible.
I know Brad Pitt is 60 but wow, he’s actually pulling this off.
Wait—is this guy actually a loser?
The third point tended to come last, thanks to the twin powers of cinematic races and Pitt charisma. It was a niggling thought, easily overlooked but not completely shaken.
Pitt plays an older driver named Sonny Hayes who flamed out of F1 after an accident early in his career, and since has paid for his beach bum lifestyle by winning any race that will have him. Hayes is old. The film knows it, the other drivers know it, and we, the audience know it. Pitt may look ridiculously good for his age, but there’s no hiding the fact that he is aged. There’s a scene where archival footage of Sonny’s F1 accident is shown. That footage looks ancient. Sonny’s vintage is clear, but somehow—thanks largely to Pitt—we buy that this dude can keep up with drivers half his age. Even though their cars are faster!
It shouldn’t work, but it does. Pitt’s charisma is a force of nature. I don’t know how else to explain it. He makes you believe counter to what logic and your own eyes tell you.
That’s all well and fine. What I really want to talk about is that last point, the one about Sonny Hayes being a loser. I think it’s part of a larger, ongoing narrative Hollywood keeps telling, without directly addressing, which is a byproduct of casting old men in roles they have no business playing. Arrested development as a character archetype, but without the inherent humor.
Hollywood's obsession with youth—or the perception of it—made F1 less than it could’ve been.