I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season with your family and friends. I love the time off. I love being with my family. I love when my kids are not in school, and I can have so much time with them. But by the second week of break, I was going a little stir crazy. I’m not going to lie, I miss being with you all. I miss doing the show.
I was weirdly idle. You think you are going to do all these things on your to do list, but that never happens. We did ski some, though the snow wasn’t great in Montana. We also watched a couple of things as a family, which I wanted to give you my take on.
Nuremberg (2025)
First, we watched Nuremberg starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malik. Jake Tapper is out there highly recommending it. He loved it. Well, I hated it. I thought it was terrible. It was so poorly done. I thought the acting was bad. I thought the screenwriting was bad. I thought the directing was bad. Usually, you are not noticing the acting or the directing. If you are noticing it, something has gone wrong.
My husband made this point, and he was right: While Rami Malik was great as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), it felt like taking an actor from the theater and putting him onto a movie screen where all the gestures are too big and the emotions are too big. It just doesn’t work. He was calling too much attention to himself in every scene. And even Russell Crowe, you couldn’t forget that he was Russell Crowe. He did not sell me on Hermann Göring. Other than getting enormously fat, it didn’t work.
I don’t think this is a spoiler alert because it is history and everybody knows what happened at the Nuremberg trials. The cross examination of Göring was done by then-Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, and they have him completely fall on his face and do very poorly. Then, they have the British prosecutor stand up and save the day. I did a quick Google search to see whether that happened because it wouldn’t surprise me if Hollywood chose to just shit on the U.S. Supreme Court justice. It does sound like Jackson didn’t do the greatest cross examination and that the British prosecutor was the one who brought it home at the end. Okay, fine, I’ll give you that point.
But I will not give you this. Ramy Malik plays a psychiatrist who was sent in to examine Göring and the other Nazis who were about to be put on trial for crimes against humanity, a crime we had just invented. They asked him to violate his ethical oath by telling the U.S. brass what he had learned in those examinations.
Well, duh. Obviously he was going to have to do that. They weren’t trying to get Göring the help he so desperately needed by sending in a psychiatrist. It was an American psychiatrist designed to get information that would help us in the trial. Hello, everybody knew that. But they really play up his ethical conflict.
And then the movie ends with Malik’s character going on a radio tour back in the U.S. and being asked about the unique evil of these Nazis. It ends with him making the strong case that this could easily happen in the United States of America; that this is what evil is and that men in power can be turned to this.
We have gone 250 years without that happening, but, sure, the message these filmmakers wanted to leave us with is that it could happen just as easily in the United States as it did in Nazi Germany. It was ridiculous.
I was excited to watch it, too. The trailer was excellent. I couldn’t wait for it. And what a disappointment it was.
The Housemaid (2025)
On the bright side, however, the whole family physically went to the movie theater to see The Housemaid with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried. It is based on the book by Freida McFadden, who is a very fun author. If you just want to put an audio book on your phone and get some stuff done around the house, I love her books. They require just enough attention to keep you interested and not thinking about your problems, but not so much that you have to stop what you are doing.
The movie stars Sydney Sweeney and some very hot guy who plays the male lead. I had never heard of him before, but he was excellent. I loved it, and my whole family did too. My daughter had listened to the book as well, but Doug and the boys had not.
It was a very good thriller with twists and turns, and it wasn’t exactly like the book. I won’t give anything away, but I approved of the changes they made and really thoroughly enjoyed the two hours and 11 minutes. And I loved my movie popcorn on top of it.
I just wanted to give you my armchair analysis of the latest offerings in case you are considering either one.