making a day of it
male friendship is alive and well in st. paul, minnesota // THE BRIDE!, HOPPERS, the grandview, the highland
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got a travelogue of a journey to all two of the theaters in St. Paul plus reviews of The Bride! and Hoppers. This newsletter comes out every Friday, which this week means Sunday.
I simply could not drag myself to Sirāt last weekend. My friend Sophie had an art opening that you should go see (!) and I couldn’t be bothered to watch Euro-snark atrocities on a beautiful Proto-Spring day. I was ready to give up on a post this weekend when another friend, a well-known St. Paul educator, called me up midweek and proposed we make a day of it on Saturday with a double feature of The Bride! and Hoppers, both of which were playing the main floors of the two Mann theaters in St. Paul. I almost ignored him, but I’ve been missing St. Paul lately and I need content and I value friendship, so I said yes. By the time we had a plan in place Proto-Spring was over and we were on the brink of what might be the biggest snow storm of the year. A trip into St. Paul in a blizzard offers a lot of opportunities for review, so here we go.
THE 63 BUS
I took the 67 into St. Paul. My plan was to transfer to the 63, a line that has been rerouted countless times over the course of my life. I was excited to review the latest route, but the 67 was two minutes late and I missed the transfer, which meant I had to walk from Raymond and University to Fairview and Grand. It’s a pretty dull stretch, and March is a terrible time for walking. I made it in 35 minutes - pretty decent time, but the combination of the cold air and my incredible speed triggered exercise-induced eustachian tube dysfunction, a real medical malady I suffer from according to a self-diagnosis I did when I was nineteen. In short the new 63 route made my ears hurt and I do not like it.
THE GRANDVIEW
I cannot undersell my love for this theater. Nearly all of my formative cinematic memories happened here. So when I write this it’s not out of malice and it’s not because I want to discourage anyone from seeing a movie there - but the Grandview is a disaster. If you want to convince people that seeing a movie in theaters is better than watching it at home, you have to make the cinematic experience objectively better than what’s available on a 4K TV. The Grandview main room is so big, and the screen is so small, and the projection is so dim, and the lights are so not turned off, that it’s basically like watching movies on a tube TV in someone’s early 2000s basement.
It’s hard for me to believe that this is what I thought seeing a movie was for most of my life. Has it gotten worse, or did we just have no idea how bad we had it? I’m really not trying to be mean. I want the Grandview to stay open forever as a cornerstone of the Mac-Groveland community. This is a loved one reminding you that you are worth it, and that you can do better.
THE BRIDE!
The teen working the Grandview box office had moved on to the vaping/making-out-in-the-backroom phase of their shift by the time I got there, so there was nothing I could do but saunter into The Bride! without paying. I was fifteen minutes later when I got to my seat, which was easy to find, because no one else was there, and the lights were still on.
The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second feature, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of 2025 Best Picture nominees: Jessie Buckley, twisted speakeasies, revolutionary violence, killing a guy on a train track, freaky theater-kid bullshit, literal Frankentstein. There’s really no point describing what this movie is about because it doesn’t make any sense. If it had been written by a high school student I might have been proud of them for trying out some big ideas. Knowing that it comes from an adult brings on secondhand embarassment. Arthur summarized the first fifteen minutes for me and they were so discordant with everything that I’d seen that I didn’t process a word he said. I guess Jessie Buckley is possessed by Mary Shelley, but she’s also an undercover police informant, and also of course an undead corpse revived to satiate Frankenstein’s monster’s sexual longing, and also the result of a relatively experiment by Annett Benning, who is a time traveller maybe? I don’t know, I really lost track. At one point Peter Sarsgaard says, “The public can handle a lady monster, but why not a lady astronaut?” which is when I gave up bothering to think.
You would hope The Bride! was a fascinatingly bad artifact, and it’s such a loaded text that you’d think it would be able to produce pages of antagonistic discourse. Instead it’s only been six hours and I’ve already forgotten 90% of what happened. A movie featuring Christian Bale stomping in someone’s head, Jessie Buckley biting off someone’s tongue, and Fever Ray performing as a goblin in a jazz club shouldn’t make me fall asleep. I’m grateful I didn’t pay for it and I wish I’d been later. Arthur gave it one dead banana that shouldn’t have been revived.
MARIO’S
Our usual spot was closed so we went over to Merriam Park for a late lunch at Mario’s, which was celebrating Pi Day with $3.14 12” thin crust pizzas. What a deal! Merriam Park has been mourning the loss of the Blue Door since 2020, but Mario’s has done a fine job filling the void. Straightforward beer selection, excellent Detroit-ish-style pizza, perfect sandwiches, hockey on the TV. I liked my marinated artichoke hoagie and Arthur ate his entire pepperoni pizza. Unfortunately he was upset to discover that his pink lemonade seltzer had hibiscus in it, which he says has been creeping into more and more drinks lately and making a detrimental impact on his life. For my part, I had an EPA and it tasted like an EPA. Thank you to Mario’s for keeping normal neighborhood dining establishments alive into quarter two of the 21st century.
THE HIGHLAND
My loyalty has always been to the Grandview over the Highland, more as a matter of turf than of anything to do with cinematic experience. In the 2000s they were interchangable, but at least since COVID The Highland has taken on family-friendly programming while the Grandview swings more rated-R. It’s obvious who brings in the money - compared to the Grandview, the Highland looks like Film Forum. Vaccuumed carpets, two! employees working the counter, bathrooms that appear to have been cleaned at least once this month - but the real difference is the theater itself. It suffers from the same vastness problem, but the screen is appropriately big, the sound works, and, get this, they turn the lights off. My only note is the massive brown splotch that becomes obvious any time the screen goes monochromatic.
I hate to cede anything to Highland Park, but side by side there’s really no argument. I don’t need the Grandview to scrub out its Dragon Inn charm, and I want it to continue as a place where Central students can get paid minimum wage to smoke weed and give out free popcorn to their friends. But if they want to keep courting Letterboxd audiences then they’re going to have to get their projection quality at least as high as the Highland. It would be a real shame if all this means that the Manns are planning to reduce down to one theater. The correct number of movies available to watch in St. Paul is four. Some things must never change.
HOPPERS
Arthur and I were joined for Hoppers by another friend and his two- and four-year-old sons, which was great because prior to their arrival we were the only unaccompanied adults in the theater. A mid-30s man going to a Saturday afternoon children’s movie alone feels at least like I can convincingly present myself as a film critic. Two mid-30s childless men going together should probably be illegal.
I don’t care for Pixar movies and find that they trigger my brain in fairly psychotic ways. I was really activated by the Screen Slaver in The Incredibles Two, and I found some of his currents present in the fascist caterpillar in Hoppers, by far the most disturbing cinematic character of 2026 so far. This is the only children’s film that dares to suggest that butterflies, given access to advanced technology, would use sonic weapons to coordinate a mass death event at a political rally. I like bugs but I think Pixar is right that they are probably genocidal and best kept quite small.
Hoppers is a movie about a college student who stumbles into a technology that allows her to upload her mind into a hyper-realistic beaver robot, which she uses to communicate with a group of wild animals to inspire them to move back to a pond she really likes which is going to be drained to make way for a highway. Like a lot of Pixar movies, it builds itself around adult anxieties swathed in cheap sentimentalism and dumb jokes for children. It’s not very funny, it’s ocassionally exciting, and it’s often quite scary. Its most interesting component, other than the blackpilled butterfly, is the interplay between animal-animal communication and animal-human communication. The animals become cartoon-eyed whenever they interact with one another but are rendered with vacant, Balthazar-esque stares whenever they interact with humans. I like this acknowledgement of the cartoon genre’s anthropomorphism, and I agree with Hoppers’s repeated suggestion that humans and animals probably shouldn’t talk to each other. We’d be quite disturbed to find out what they’d like to do to us if they had the technological capacity. And honestly we might be even more disturbed by what they’d like to do with each other.
I’m curious how many of the children at my screening were caught up in this disturbed headspace. Actually I’m not curious at all, children are pretty vocal at movies and at least one of them was shrieking with terror by the end. There’s quite a bit of death in Hoppers and the suggestion of a whole lot more. At one point an astonishing regicide takes place, which led to one teen-adjacent child shouting out, “Why are you laughing?” In our corner of the theater, the response was closer to ambivalence. The child to my right mostly demanded candy, asked “Is it over?” every thirty minutes, and shouted out “Suck!” after a character says “This sucks.” After it was over he reported that he didn’t like it, but then two minutes later he said it was so funny.1 The adult child to my left, who was on his cellphone like a boomer for half the movie and had by this point decided that two mediocre movies in one day was too many, gave it half a child-sized banana. The rest of the children in the audience applauded and ran out of theater cheering, probably because it had started snowing and it sort of felt like Christmas.
SNOWMAGEDDON 2026
Accumulation had begun by the time we left the theater. I got a ride home and am now safely inside. It’s coming down for sure but not at all that furious a clip. So far, not impressed. I hope it goes easy enough that I can get to my Oscars party tonight but that it picks up late so we get a snow day on Monday. Our American Dreams are small in the Twin Cities, but we still hold them.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. We’ll be back next week with Oscars thoughts and an exciting announcement.
His brother said he liked it and at one point dumped all his popcorn on the floor for no reason.
I'd like to say, first of all, that I appreciate that you are giving the people what they want. Namely, banana ratings. Second, Highland deserves a demerit to bring it down closer to Grandview levels because when I went out to buy popcorn they said, "we don't have any, come back later". For an industry that makes all its margins on concessions, with popcorn being probably the cheapest, most desired, and easiest to make item behind the counter, not having any for a movie filled with adults just trying to find some way to distract their children with sugar and snacks seems like a disaster. I'm sure the vaping Grandview employee at least thought to pop some corn before they went to make out.