“No Other Choice”: There’s Been a Murder at Dunder Mifflin Korea

January 18, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A sweaty Lee Byung-hun in business suit being asked by his wife, "Did the interview go well?"

To any head-of-household having a hard time out there: keep in mind your spouse will not consider your flop-sweat a turn-on.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: It’s Lee Byung-hun’s time to shine! Zillions of Netflix subscribers tuned in for the South Korean actor’s machinations as Squid Game‘s nefarious Front Man, but that wasn’t his first villainous turn for American moviegoers. He was a T-1000 in the wisely forgotten Terminator Genisys, the worst in the series. As the murkily motivated ninja Storm Shadow, he was among the few highlights of the two G.I. Joe movies. And discerning youngsters out there caught him voicing the demon king in last year’s animated sensation KPop Demon Hunters. (I’ve yet to convince myself to check him out in the most recent Magnificent Seven alongside Denzel Washington. Maybe someday, but it wouldn’t fit this paragraph anyway, unless there’s a shocking twist in which he betrays them and shoots Chris Pratt in the face.)

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“The Secret Agent”: The Past Is a Shark’s Maw, Swallowing Our Histories Whole

January 17, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Closeup of Wagner Moura's face as he decides whether or not react to a specific customer among a crowd in an office.

Flashback to the ’70s when DMVs and recordkeeping offices were miserable places of endless waiting.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: The latest chapter in the South American Totalitarian History Cinematic Universe is here! In recent times native filmmakers beyond the Panama Canal have been yearning to tell stories of their homelands’ darker times now that decades have passed and some of the worst regimes have since been deposed or overruled. We’ve had Prime Video’s docudrama Argentina 1984, the 2020 Netflix documentary The Edge of Democracy about Brazil in the 2000s, and last year’s I’m Still Here, which traveled thirty years back in the same country under its perpetuated terrible circumstances. And those are just three recent Academy Award nominees I’ve seen (and a win, in the latter’s case), to say nothing of how many others have flown under my radar or haven’t reached North American audiences.

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Our 2023 Road Trip #16: Farewell Beach Romp

January 13, 2026 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
me on a white beach by the ocean, wearing off-white shorts and an Atomic Robo T-shirt.

If I wrote books, this would be a contender for my author photo.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any nearby places that also had comics and toy shops, we overcame some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for annual chances to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

For 2023 it was time at last to venture to the Carolinas, the only southern states we hadn’t yet visited, with a focus on the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Considering how many battlefields we’d toured over the preceding years, the home of Fort Sumter was an inevitable addition to our experiential collection…

Whenever other people travel to South Carolina — especially the hotspots of, say, Hilton Head or Myrtle Beach — they enjoy lounging in the chairs they brought along, chugging all the alcohol in sight, flirting with anyone and everyone in sight who’s doing the same, and/or frolicking willy-nilly while shouting, “BEACH! BEACH! BEACH! BEACH! BEACH!” The two of us figured out years ago we aren’t beach people.

Sure, we’ve walked around a few, just so we could say we’d tried them. In 2007, my very first time ever laying eyes upon a real live ocean, a severe thunderstorm chased us off Cocoa Beach. The following year, we approached Virginia Beach on a perfect summer day. We came, we saw, we wandered, we made feeble sculptures, and we wondered, “Is that it?” In 2015 we learned at Mississippi’s Harrison County Sand Beach that it’s pretty fun to have a beach all to yourself for goofing around at 8 in the morning, but it still wasn’t somewhere we wanted to linger, burn, and watch skin cancers manifest in real time.

By our final South Carolina morning we’d hit all the primary objectives on our vacation to-do list and figured, hey, the Atlantic Ocean was still right there. It’s famous and massive and it’s not like we’ve seen all of it yet, so maybe one walk on a beach couldn’t hurt and might not even bore us. Our tour of Fort Sumter had thrown in a few sandbars for free, but that wasn’t a certified beach-beach, with umbrellas and volleyball and concession stands and lifeguards and one-percenter hotels obscuring half the horizons around us. For our last hurrah in the Charleston vicinity, Anne picked us a beach from among the numerous options that we could check out before we had to leave town and begin the long trip back northwest toward duller, smoggier climes.

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My 2025 at the Movies, Worst to Best

January 11, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A surprised Galinda standing in a pink bubble for the first time while Michelle Yeoh judges her.

So what movies did you love or hate inside your magic hermetic bubble?

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 34 films in theaters in 2025 that were actually released in 2025, a 14.7% increase over 2024’s list, still climbing post-COVID. That number doesn’t include ten Academy Award nominees I caught in theaters in 2025 that were officially 2024 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest.

Of those 34 releases, 12 were sequels, prequels, or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. 6 were reboots, remakes or do-overs. Only 4 were superhero films. 3 were Stephen King adaptations. 6 had scenes or noteworthy extras during or after the end credits. 7 were screenings at the 34th annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. 3 were primarily in languages other than English.

One shocking discovery when I tallied everything up: I saw zero animated feature films in a theater, which hasn’t happened since 1995. Even in 2020 when I only saw four total films on big screens, one of them was Pixar’s Onward. So that’s pretty disappointing. And I refuse to count the new Avatar just to make myself feel better.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2025, for better or worse, starting as always at the bottom. This doesn’t include the 2025 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle (and will include three animated films!). Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference. As a fun challenge, this year I tried something new: given how much I already overwrote about each of them throughout the year, this time I allowed myself just one sentence each. No parentheses, no em-dashes, no semicolons whatsoever, though obviously many are the same old run-on stream-of-consciousness so y’all know it’s still me typing and I’m not shelling out bottom-dollar for crappy AI to do my own amateur hobby-work for me.

On with the countdown!

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“Marty Supreme”: The King Kong of Ping-Pong Is a Ding-Dong

January 4, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Timothee Chalamet in period-piece mustache holding ping-pong paddle with American flag design, standing amid other players with paddles bearing their own homeland's flags.

Preening Putz Proud of Patriotic Paddle.

Everybody loves narcissists! They’re everywhere today! They’re an evergreen industry and a dominant species and we can’t stop throwing money and attention at them! They rule our reality shows, win our sports, determine our politics, influence our social media, hoard our headlines and flood our feeds! We’re posting about them nonstop and letting them live rent-free in our heads, comping them on head-utilities and buying them head-groceries! We just can’t stop talking, thinking, mocking, or mentioning and mentioning and mentioning and mentioning one of the most self-aggrandized narcissists of them all! We never seem to shut up about him in particular! And by “we” and “our”, I mean you ‘n’ yours — constantly feeding the troll, day-in day-out, exactly what Usenet newsgroups taught us never to do way back in the 20th century. I sure can’t wait for this century’s students to catch up.

Now’s the perfect era for a story like Marty Supreme — a slick all-American anti-fairy tale about an entitled motormouth who almost always gets his way thanks to his unspoken magical self-help affirmation, “Because I said so!” and tries to steamroll over every “NO” like the nice-guy twin to Ben Kingsley’s Sexy Beast human monster. It doesn’t hurt that he’s played by Academy Award Nominee Timothee Chalamet, that beloved Manic Pixie Dream Boy idol of millions who just turned 30 last month. Who wants to be mad at that face, as long as we viewers aren’t the ones suffering in his character’s self-absorbed path of destruction?

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2025 in Review According to Our Bot Overlords

January 2, 2026 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
My wife Anne and I doing jazz hands next to a statue of the Buc-ee's gas station chain's titular mascot. Statue is labeled Smiths Grove, Kentucky.

Jazz hands at the Buc-ee’s in Smiths Grove, KY, on our way to Dragon Con 2025.

Hey, there! Welcome, gracious readers and bots, to the fourteenth annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review! Once again we self-analyze the site’s pinnacles and nadirs among readers, skimmers, search engine gadabouts, and any other casual internet users who come within fifty light-years of this li’l boutique site. Over a twelve-month period those fleeting glances add up to concrete stats that may or may not be reliable indicators of trends, fads, and wins ‘n’ sins on my part. (Well, they used to add up usefully, anyway. More on that in a sec.)

This virtual hermit cabin opened its creaky wooden door on April 28, 2012, as a place where I could entertain myself by making essay-shaped things out of whatever words and pictures I had at hand, and placing them somewhere I personally owned rather than someplace a capricious third-party moderator or owner could delete on a whim, such as Amazon, Goodreads, or Star Wars message boards. Often it’s been a satisfying platform to share galleries, memories, hugs, screeds, and pop-culture opinions that might otherwise have dissolved unwritten in my head or collected rejection emails from every professional website ever. Sometimes it’s disappointing, maybe even depressing, but whenever the encouragement comes or an impetus spurs me, I’ll make an effort for my most labor-intensive hobby anyway. When my head is in the right space, I can enjoy the process and the results, with or without feedback.

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“Avatar: Fire and Ash”: Spider! He Is Our Hero!

December 28, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Avatar 3 IMAX poster with Oona Chaplin's evil fire-motif warrior astride her pet alien dragon.

Beware the Dragonriders of BURN!

Previously on Avatar: three years ago James Cameron did his part to help save beleaguered theaters worldwide after the pandemic with the billion-dollar spectacle Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to the 2009 blockbuster. At the time I boiled down my impressions:

The predictably huge box-office smash is the visually stunning James Cameron comeback we expected, an underwater world of wonder that left our IMAX 3-D audience stunned all throughout its three-hour runtime. The beautifully panoramic Pandora ocean-tribe expansion pack and the extended no-holds-barred final-battle extravaganza exceed the baselines even by Cameron standards in all their gloriously maximized CGI razzle-dazzle nonpareil…[but] after exiting the theater and regaining your senses it’s much easier to think again, and disappointing to realize you’ve just watched the most expensive witness-protection story in world history, one in which Our Hero sought to stop endangering his community by moving his family to a strange new neighborhood and endangering them instead. And much of the family’s stresses feel like Cameron reusing salvaged parts from his previous films and from any number of fish-out-of-water family dramas. The technological bells-‘n’-whistles have been upgraded in accelerated leaps and bounds, but the chassis could use some new solder and an oil can.

But oil and water don’t mix, and some guys love laying amazing paint jobs over refurbished parts, so here we go again. Cameron and the same four co-writers continue the saga with Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is here to re-rescue the box office through the healing power of space magic and environmentally friendly EXPLOSIONS!

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Our 2023 Road Trip #15: Parks and Pastries

December 27, 2025 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
statue of a beaver standing on a tree stump and holding a stick, in the middle of a park sidewalk

Nice beaver!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any nearby places that also had comics and toy shops, we overcame some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for annual chances to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

For 2023 it was time at last to venture to the Carolinas, the only southern states we hadn’t yet visited, with a focus on the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Considering how many battlefields we’d toured over the preceding years, the home of Fort Sumter was an inevitable addition to our experiential collection…

We’re walking, we’re walking, we’re walking. Eventually our day in downtown Charleston came to a close. Just a few more sights to go before we’d have to move on.

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“Hamnet”: Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

December 25, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jessie Buckley in the front row of a standing Shakespearean audience, reaching out to the actor on stage.

The Globe Theatre used to be pretty cool about letting audiences interact with actors on stage, long before trying to tear famous people’s clothes off became a thing.

Oscars season is coming! On January 22nd the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce the next round of Academy Awards nominations. Fans have a month to go before we learn which multi-million-dollar blockbusters will be validated in the secondary categories and which Best Picture nominees were only released in a single Times Square theater that would’ve made more money if they’d just shown porn instead. The more potential Oscar winners we watch now, the less we’ll have to cram into our annual Oscar Quest before the March 15th ceremony. Or, y’know, I could just take the old-fashioned approach: go see films I want to see for my own reasons and hope they get recognized later.

The latter applied for me in regard to Hamnet, the latest from Academy Award Winner Chloe Zhao. Her contemplative road-trip drama Nomadland took Best Picture during the pandemic, and I was among the six viewers who enjoyed Marvel’s disavowed Eternals, in which super-team punch-’em-up veneer cloaked a thoughtful exploration of religious disillusionment, immoral sacrifice in the name of The Greater Good, the soul’s search for purpose and sometimes repurpose, and what the treasured canard of With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility means on a cosmic scale. With Hamnet four years later, she’s retracted her reach from planetary destruction to merely the foundation of classic Western Literature, with a story set in the sixteenth century rather than traveling all the way back to the Dawn of Time. Yet another survivor of the Marvel Machine finds deeper artistic fulfillment on a smaller stage.

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Merry Christmas from MCC!

December 23, 2025 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Table covered in white blanket and topped with figures from "A Christmas Story", "The Nightmare Before Christmas", "Rudolph", and Star Wars.

Once again with feeling, the Golden Family Christmas diorama!

Hey, kids! It’s that beloved holiday tradition where we just post a few recent Christmas-themed photos with some short yet sincere seasons’ greetings, and we give readers a break from my usual self-indulgent verbosity. It’s the most wonderful time of the MCC year! Click, scroll, ooh, ahh, and keep on frolicking down the internet superhighway!

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