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Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

New monthly supporters get an (optional) one-time single sentence feature in a TNMN edition. Say anything, and Blake must include it in a future edition. Here’s an example:

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A mushroom trip brings a teenager face-to-face with her 39-year-old self.

→ Outspoken teenagers doing drugs and learning stuff about themselves. This is your typical coming-of-age fare with a drug-induced, supernatural twist.

→ Maria Dizzia. You’ll recognize her. She’s a standout performer in most everything she does, usually in a supporting role.

→ Waiting for the other shoe to drop. The film seeds you early with the notion that there is a shoe, and it will drop.

Megan Park’s My Old Ass plays with coming-of-age tropes inventively enough to stand out in a relatively crowded category. Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella both turn in witty performances as the same person, nearly twenty years apart. This clever device provides a distinct lens through which we can see how the events of the story affect the lead character in both the near and far term.

Most worthy of admiration, though, is director Megan Park’s script. In your author’s opinion, one certain thing separates good ideas from powerful stories. Modern storytellers so often mistake grand stakes or eccentric characters for compelling narrative. But it isn’t about any one of these things alone. Eccentric characters are far more worth the investment when we see how stakes force them to change, grow, or regress. Grand stakes are made infinitely more gripping when you zoom in on the blast radius. I don’t want to watch the movie about a monster attacking a major metropolitan area. I want to watch the movie about a regretful woman, forced to race across town in the midst of such an attack, only to make amends with her dying mother, who’s stranded in a hospital on the other side of town.

My Old Ass is funny and endearing, and as is true of any good coming-of-age flick, at the film’s core is a rhythmic, existential wrestling match between growth and regression of a character worth caring about.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

BIG FAT BABY.

ARCHIVAL RECORD ID: 68223423
ABSTRACT: Contained herein is the last known journal entry belonging to the world’s most intelligent man, just before he vanished. It was found blowing in the wind, approximately 147 yards from his last sighting. It is estimated to have been written moments before he succumbed to a rather severe case of Idiopathic Mandibular Ptosis, a disorder most commonly referred to as the Open Mouth Syndrome.

— START OF RECORD —

It’s been eighteen months since it showed up, and scientists have struggled to explain it for reasons that will become obvious momentarily. Allow me to warn you: you can’t make this shit up.

On January 1st, 2043, a big fat baby, the size of a budget cruise liner, fell from the sky and landed right smack dab in the center of my hometown. Directly on top of the town square. People often wonder aloud about The Baby, asking questions that will never be answered.

The first question: Why did The Baby turn up in our cute little dockside town, which was home to more or less forty-thousand people, and not New York City or Washington D.C.? If this was some sort of hostile invasion, it would make a whole lot more sense if The Baby had been dropped in a more consequential area. The public, therefore, surmised that The Baby was a relatively harmless nuisance rather than anything more malevolent. The second question: Who dropped The Baby from the sky, and what did they want? It’s no doubt the sign of extraterrestrial life, but was The Baby lovingly discarded by parents who weren’t fit to care for it? Had they evaluated humankind and decided that they could trust our species to care for it? Or was The Baby some kind of demented experiment-gone-wrong, and Earth was a convenient place to dispose of the waste, a toilet that didn’t even need flushing? The third question: Is The Baby really a baby? It might look like a baby, but everyone and their mother had seen enough science fiction films to know that intelligent lifeforms can look like just about anything, and the people of my small town were no fools.

These questions were, of course, directed at the scientific community, but it was only after The Baby showed up that we learned scientists were far from capable of fielding any inquiries at all, let alone those of the complex or existential variety. The obvious question to ask is, why wouldn’t the scientific community be the most perfect group of people to assign such an extraordinary problem? To be fair, this was the original plan. In fact, in the beginning, the only people allowed near The Baby at all were the scientists and researchers and government officials and really any slice of the population with real power.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. After only a few months of observation, those who spent time near The Baby showed signs of impaired intelligence, lesser reasoning skills, substantial cognitive decline. It happened slowly enough to escape notice, but effectively anyone who spent meaningful time near The Baby seemed to become heartbreakingly stupid. And because only the highest profile government agencies and scientists and academics were permitted to see The Baby, vast swaths of humanity’s intelligentsia were rendered glorified potatoes, cognitively nullified in a matter of months. Most became so dumb they could barely close their mouths, let alone conduct important research and figure out what the hell to do with The Baby or who to return it to. Worse yet, as this impairment became more well-known, society’s brightest and most powerful became more obsessed with solving the problem. And so nearly all of the brightest thinkers in society seemed to flock to The Baby like insects to a neon blue bug zapper, returning as complete and total imbeciles after conducting their study.

Family members of those researching The Baby filed complaints and reports of their loved one’s mental deterioration but, over time, anyone who could possibly do anything about it was bumbling around like a toddler in a grocery store, and grievances were better shouted into a pillow than towards a person with any meaningful power to effect change.

There’s no real name for the illness, but most of us just call it open mouth syndrome, because the most severely infected seem to be entirely unable to close their mouths, so much so that trails of drool follow them just about anywhere they go. Some of their mouths have become so dry and hospitable that bees build nests in them, until, of course, their airways become blocked and they choke to death.

One of our remaining intelligent scientists, Dr. Angela McCandless, documented this and more in her final research paper, which was sadly not peer reviewed because at the time of publishing, her stupefied peers were more enamored with how ‘they’ make Gatorade so blue, and for the most part couldn’t be bothered with such dense and useless research about The Baby. The thesis of the paper was simple enough for the general public, unaffected by The Baby, to understand, and so a few days before she passed away from nothing extraordinary (old age and an infection), she published the paper as her final act to protect the world’s intelligence.

The paper stated it in clear terms: ‘The arrival of the entity [The Baby] triggered a localized cognitive collapse’, a profound stupidity the likes of which were likely irreversible. In the paper, she compared her most affected peers to “drooling three-year-olds whose only real skill is incessantly asking the question ‘why?’ over and over again until their conversation partner is so exhausted with the premise that they must give up the discussion.” And of course she warned all members of society to stay away from The Baby at all costs, noting that it seems to have a way of luring in the most intelligent among us.

Since then, most of us have learned to coexist with The Baby in town. He can be a little disruptive at night, but the truth is things like this become much easier to ignore if they’re around 24/7. And for all the disruption to traffic and the strange aesthetics of the new city skyline, The Baby was relatively quiet and almost never cried.

Almost never.

All the more unusual that tonight, just after most of the dockside shops closed up for the evening, I heard The Baby crying. Loud, constant, uncontrollable, inconsolable. I craned my neck around and looked all the way up at his soft powdery baby cheeks. He looked harmless, and before I knew it, I was standing about six feet in front of the thing, which was about five stories tall sitting up, and I was staring right into his big green eyes. I’m not sure how I got there, really, but I felt called in a way that’s hard to explain. Like I was put here to take care of The Baby, and I needed to help it.

Didn’t anyone else hear it? Maybe they knew better than I did. I obviously needed to walk the fuck away from this thing. He’s about to turn my brain into a god damned jellybean. A tragedy, given I might be the smartest person left on Earth, on account of all the other idiots this thing has created. But I can’t just walk away. He’s hurt or afraid. Maybe there’s more to The Baby than we’d realized.

Also, The Baby is so darned cute. You’d get it if you looked into his eyes and saw his thin little lips and experienced the way he smiles with his whole face and saw how his bellybutton is still deciding if it’s an innie or an outie. How could I walk away from such a thing? Besides the fact that it had become one of the world’s great mysteries, he is objectively adorable by all counts except for his colossal size. The last time I had this feeling, I stood on the edge of a valley in Yosemite and I’m not sure what I saw there was half as awe-inspiring as this supersized infant. And so I stared and stared until I finally decided to talk to it that way I’d talk to any baby.

“Peek-a-boo!” I popped out from behind my hands and The Baby giggled quietly. I laughed and continued until we both got bored and the sun fell out of sight. I looked around the town square and didn’t see a soul. Sigh. Time to go home.

“Do you think I’m cute?” The Baby’s voice was formal, stiff as a board. It was deep and throaty and better suited to call a football game than communicate the thoughts of a giant baby.

“Sorry?” I whipped around like a reality television star.

“Do you,” he paused. “think I’m a cute baby?”

“Do you want me to?” I scratched the back of my head, fearing any wrong move could be the end of me.

“I do.” The Baby replied.

“Sure,” I said. “I guess I think you’re a cute baby.”

“You can ask me a question,” he smiled down at me. “Anything at all.” 

“What?” I asked. “Why?”

“I’m a giant baby and I’m talking.” The Baby chuckled and I kicked some dirt around, trying to look unfazed. “Don’t you have any questions for me? I know everything.”

Call me a fool, but The Baby had a point. Look yourself in the mirror and ask when was the last time you had the chance to ask a giant baby any questions you had. So, I asked him a few questions. And The Baby provided brilliant, detailed, thorough answers. Eventually, he answered everything I wanted to know, no matter how trivial.

Each time The Baby answered a question, I felt a weight lifted, like Earth’s gravitational pull decided to give me just a little more slack. The feeling was compelling, and so I didn’t care to stop. I asked The Baby everything I’ve ever had on my mind. What should I do with my career? Where should I go to dinner tomorrow night? How many days after a first date should I wait to call? What’s the capital of Minnesota? What’s the point of watermelons with both white and black seeds?

By my count, I asked about 246 questions before I noticed a puddle of a viscous, clear liquid — like something you might wipe off of the skin of a reptile — beginning to pool below my sneakers. The liquid made its way up both my legs, beneath my clothing, until I was laminated and sticky. I tried to ask The Baby what was happening to me but, once the liquid had reached my mouth, I couldn’t gather enough oxygen to say a single word. Moments passed and the liquid slid off me, leaving behind a thin film and not much else.

The Baby let out an adorable giggle as I turned and walked away slowly and a small strand of drool hung from my wide-open mouth like the rope of a climber rappelling down the face of a big, dumb cliff.

I fear this journal entry will be my last, as the distance between my upper and lower lip now exceeds 5 centimeters by my estimation.

I wonder how they make Gatorade so blue…

— END OF RECORD —

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