u/romanzolanzki

Rant incoming writing this in my car after just seeing Maddie's Secret. Long-time Alamo Drafthouse patron here — monthly pass holder, once a week, love the seats, love the tables at every row, love the quiet no-phones policy, love the whole experience. It's genuinely my favourite cinema chain. Which is why I need to complain about the terrifying evolution of where the food is headed.

Was at Alamo Drafthouse in Texas tonight (DFW location). Ran late, didn't get to sneak in some snacks beforehand (sorry!!!!), so I faced the full wrath of the menu which I haven't ordered off in a month or two. Ordered an adult double cheeseburger AND a kids' double cheeseburger because the portion size on the adult one didn't look worth the price tag and I wanted to double up cheaper-- I was hungry!!!

GUYS, they were IDENTICAL. Same size. Same bun. Same everything. The only difference I could ascertain in the darkness was maybe some missing lettuce on the kids' one? Ten-ish dollar price difference. Ten dollars. Am I being pranked?

Beyond the portion scam — the ketchup tastes like off-brand diet ketchup. The condiments across the board taste like the most basic possible sourcing. A couple weeks ago I got a pizza and it was burnt AND tiny. For premium cinema pricing they are serving gas station quality food. I REPEAT. GAS STATION QUALITY! And this ain't my darling QuikTrip either.

Don't even get me started on how they don't post prices online anymore. You have to see the menu in-person once you're already seated and it's too late to bail. That's not a coincidence. That's a swindling decision my loves!! The variety has died too. Remember when the menu had actual range? Nachos, actual entrees, seasonal stuff? Now it's a shrinking list of overpriced basics. In the apps you can't even get chicken tenders without having to get the full entree with fries. The only ones in the apps here in DFW are "cauliflower buffalo tenders" or whatever the hell. 10 dollars for a cruciferous vegetable???? JAIL!

Here's the thing — I would happily pay premium prices if the quality matched. That's the whole Alamo brand promise: better cinema, better food, better experience. The cinema part is still holding up. The food part has fallen off a cliff. You want to scam the people, the people are going to scam you back. Without divulging too much about my personal life, I stick to Alamo because it was there for me during a really dark period of my life and was the only choice of movie theatre at the time. Please don't make me switch! I do not want to, but my patience has started to really wear thin. I think they know they can't tell you off for sneaking in food because even at this point the employees know it's a joke.

Anyone else noticing this? Is it just my location or is this chain-wide? Because I'm about to start meal-prepping for my Sunday screenings and that feels insane to say about a place that markets itself on the dine-in experience....!

First of all let me say this is NOT AI and I am writing this in my car after literally just seeing it (!!!) After my Toy Story 5 review got accused of AI since I use em dashes... anyway guys... I really wanted this to land harder. Went in as a sympathetic viewer — indie, queer, John Early doing something ambitious with tough subject matter — and I left conflicted.

What IS working for me: The bulimia thread genuinely lands well in places. There's a scene between Maddie and her mother in the doctor's office that's in my opinion, one of the best moments in the film — the mother uses comedy to armor herself until she can't anymore, and then she just quietly steps out of the joke and says "this is all I can do today." That's real writing since the whole thing tries to balance humor with dark subject matter, culminating in this scene. The culinary through-line is also VERY strong — the idea that people who become EXCELLENT at something.... often carry their deepest wound inside that thing?? We all are grappling with what we're inherently good at because we want to be the best at it.

Maddie cooking for the other patients in inpatient with basic ingredients from a flavourless kitchen is one of the more moving choices-- it reminded me of a moment in your life when everything just completely collapses. You tend to reach for the thing that you are naturally good at and build with the basics from scratch. Cooking is one of these things for Maddie and doing it with basic ingredients vs. the sophisticated chilli crisp from her old kitchen at the height of her bullimia is a crafty metaphor.

The birthday cupcake scene (for Amanda, another patient) — where something as joyous as a birthday collapses into the nightmare of being made to eat food — is conceptually one of the best moments in the film for me. Seriously! It's a good mascot for what the film is reaching for: the jubilation of celebration and food, colliding with the absolute DREAD of... actually having to eat it?This is absolutely something that most adults watching their weight have to deal with at an office party, kids birthday, or any "free food" event. This set up is exactly that but on steroids considering the context of bulimia -- But the execution just… happens. No visual weight, no camera language matching the emotional stakes. If the cinematography and dp direction was more sophisticated, this could have been even more moving than it was. It felt rough around the edges.

High school play: This is what I keep coming back to. The wigs are a bit crunchy. The lighting feels almost pantomime-y at times the way spotlights drill in for drama. The gossipy patient characters read the same as the gossipy characters at the food content studio, they all lacked depth. The mean girls are mean, the good ones are good, the transformation moment is a spotlight. Scenes felt like I say my line, you say your line. When the lights go down on the cupcake scene and everyone just watches Amanda crumble, it's less film-and-TV and more community theatre. That premium finish a film hitting the big screen needs — it just wasn't there for me sadly.

What isn't working for me: The film is doing too many things at once — ED, gender, sexuality, voyeurism/public image, identity, friendship, betrayal — and can't give any of them their full weight. (This review would be twice as long if I tried to address every theme this film tries to tackle.) If it had committed solely to the ED and image thread, this could have been a small masterpiece. Instead it's spread thin. It REALLY reminded me of Jennette McCurdy's book I'm Glad My Mom Died thematically, but doesn't earn its ground the way that book does. Ironically the book is also imbued with comedic charm surrounding a topic as important as EDs.

Parenthetically, the "Deena" character is a real casting problem for me — the performance reads as uncertain and it distracts every scene she's in. Sorry!!! She's not scary-unsettling, she's the-actor-isn't-sure unsettling, which is a different problem. Especially the intro which is the MOST important part of getting buy in from an audience! Her acting performance was really distracting and did not land well for me.

On the gender/ambiguity: I'm a gay man rooting for trans representation, but the film uses ambiguity as a substitute for clarity rather than as a technique. We never quite know whether Maddie is a trans woman, a drag persona, or something else, and that ambiguity isn't productive — it's just unresolved. A trans actor in the role would have brought embodied truth the ambiguity is denying us. As it stands, the film touches queer and trans themes without committing to what it's actually saying about them. Which I think might be the point? But it is hard to do well when it's not the focus. For a run time of 98 minutes, it's a tall order to tackle with ED.

The ending: Unfortunately, it's a symptom of the film itself — The open ending felt like it can't make up its mind HOW to end because it's trying to hold too many threads at once. There needed to be more editorial discipline and more concrete decisions about where we're going.

Overall: 6.1/10. Real writing talent, real ideas, real moments. But the film needed more than an edit — casting, cinematography, and structural discipline all needed sharpening. It bit off more than it could chew, and the execution couldn't carry the load the script was reaching for.

Anyone else see this? Did the balance between dark humour and the real weight of the themes work for you, or did it feel off?

Seen A LOT of films this year and I'm still obviously recovering from the disaster that was Disclosure Day, so my expectations going into Toy Story 5 were honestly low. But honestly, if you really take it apart? Wow.

Five films deep into a 31 YEAR franchise and Pixar is still doing it. The whole film is secretly about tablets vs imagination, screens vs play, passive consumption vs creating worlds together. The animation shifts into a different visual register every time the toys enter a "play state" and it absolutely wrecked me because it so vividly allows us to connect with imagination in such a positive way — it's the film's thesis made visual.

I was so surprised that I was crying. Play is so important in relationships, work, health, innovation, wellbeing, problem solving you name it, that something so simple really seemed so profound. Why don't we play anymore like that? Those toys that say 3+ from Fisher Price really meant the plus and we didn't listen!!!! It makes me wonder if people that denigrate this film see it as being too childish or not important.

Even more so, surprisingly bold for Disney/Pixar to make a film essentially arguing that the parents in the audience need to put their phones down and let their kids actually play properly — which adults can relate to also. Without giving any spoilers, healthy imagination ends up illustrating when things are truly in balance and even connects new characters in the film. When the themes started to emerge very early on, I was completely drawn in that these were the questions they wanted to tackle with 5.

It was a 9.5/10 for me! And I am a hard ass when it comes to films. The fact that a fifth entry in a franchise can still be saying something new and true is honestly remarkable. I know people want to hate this film because going into it, it already is a franchise blockbuster money-making cash grab — but go into it with an open mind.

I will also add I watched all the Toy Story films from 1 in 1995 (31 years ago!!!!!) all the way through 4 in the last 3 days. Did anyone else feel the play/imagination thing land as hard as I did?

Graduated about five years ago. I work in institutional investments now (came up through tech), and one thing nobody warned me about: the further you climb in a prestige-driven field (especially like nyc finance), the denser the room gets with the top-1-whatever %. Every step up, I noticed the mental bar quietly resets and the scrutiny ratchets higher. I really wanted to make this post to get some thoughts about it because one thing that's helped me is realizing everyone actually struggles with this in some way.

I saw a post in here a while back — "how are people at Harvard so perfect?" — and it genuinely stuck with me, because here's the strange part: I didn't really struggle with imposter syndrome that much at Harvard for some reason. It came and went, sure. But coming in first-gen, from a crappy high school, minority, LGBTQ+ — you name it — I was mostly just inspired to be in a room with people that incredible. I remember I met this seriously gifted kid in one of my CS classes (who was 16) and I literally had to call my mom after and tell her how much of a genius he was. He solved something I struggled with for about 3 hours in 12 minutes. But I've found more into alum life the imposter feeling has gotten louder for me, the further I've gotten from graduation, not quieter.

TMI, but it's Reddit, so: I've been doing some work with my therapist using IFS (Richard Schwartz's "parts" framework — his book No Bad Parts is worth it if any of this resonates). What clicked for me is that there's a part of me that's a genuine double-edged sword, and I think a lot of people here will recognize it. It holds me to an impossible standard, and I've realized it's the actual engine behind how hard I work — I've (through a lot of work) come to be grateful for it. But it's also the thing that tortures me, replaying old grades and old roles that by any objective measure went fine, or stacking me up against someone who's seemed effortlessly perfect since birth. I gave that part a name and started treating it as a voice I can thank without obeying. That alone helped more than I expected — because there was a stretch recently where it genuinely crippled me. I'd never experienced anything like it. It was wrecking my performance, and not in the way pressure sometimes sharpens you. Going to Harvard in my field can feel like a dime a dozen — so the bar just moves to the next thing, and the next.

Two things I keep coming back to. First: the people with the no-cracks resume, the perfect roles, the perfect life — I've learned getting to know some of these folks a lot of them are carrying something you can't see. Everyone is struggling with something, and if you actually reach that "perfect" spot, the pressure there is heavier, not lighter. I put myself in the shoes of being completely perfect and I realized it would never be enough for me. Second: nobody gets through a life without failing at something. It isn't possible. Some seasons it's just harder to remember. I got rejected from a scholarship program over a decade ago that still haunts me, which tells you how much the brain holds onto.

I know how this reads to anyone who didn't go here — "you went to Harvard, what could you possibly have to complain about." Fair. But comparison doesn't care where you started; it just finds the next person ahead of you.

So I'm asking the people who actually get this: how do you deal with never feeling good enough? What's genuinely worked for you — not the platitudes, the real stuff? Please drop it below. I'd rather this turn into a thread people can come back to for help than just me talking.

A month ago we said goodbye to our beautiful boy. I co-parented him with my ex for 6 years — he'd had him for 13ish in total. He was kind of a soul dog for both of us, but especially for him. We flew out together to be with him at the end. It was the first time I'd seen my ex properly sob, and I was bawling like a child too. I don't think I ever want to have a day like that again in my life.

In the lead-up we'd been in close contact — warm messages, voice calls, checking in on each other. After we said goodbye, things slowed. About a week after flying back, my ex went almost completely silent. He went to stay with family for a bit, then after that he kind of disappeared. He's always been an internal processor, so I'm not totally surprised, but the silence has stretched longer than anything we've had before.

I sent one practical message about something we needed to sort out in the coming weeks and didn't hear anything back-- i think it has been about three weeks now. I sent another more recently — light, gave him space, made it easy to respond or not. Still nothing.

I'm not panicking. I know this hit him deeper than it hit me and we are processing it differently— our boy was the constant through his entire adult life, and he's still living in the house surrounded by all his things. I had the relief of a flight home and a different physical space to grieve in. He didn't get that.

But I'm grieving too, and the silence from the one other person who shared this dog with me is its own loss on top of the loss. I still can't walk down the dog supply aisle in the grocery store. I keep getting flashbacks to the last days. I miss our boy, and in a different way I for sure miss being able to talk to the only other person who knew him the way I did. I feel like no one else gets it. A few questions for anyone who's been on either side of this:

1. If you've been the silent one after losing a soul pet — how long did it take before you could actually talk to people again, and did messages from others during that time help or feel like pressure?
2. For those who've reached out to someone in deep grief — what kind of message landed best, or is silence from the outside actually the kinder thing?

Thank you so much for any insight. Sending love to everyone in this community — I know the only people who really understand this kind of loss are the ones who've lived it 🩵