WHY SO SERIOUS? (about ONE NIGHT ONLY & THE END OF OAK STREET)

You have probably heard or made a joke about One Night Only, the recent high concept romcom about premarital sex being made illegal. But you probably haven’t actually seen the movie, which bombed spectacularly because it isn’t Spider-Man.

Until it started playing in front of my eyes, I hadn’t considered One Night Only much at all. The trailers theatrically pummeled me for months beforehand, and they always made me smile softly: Oscar-nominated Monica Barbaro says “I’m hungry! So hungry!” and Nic Braun and Molly Ringwald and Maya Hawke and Ziwe and a Haim are all there; it’s still 2018 for many. I was hopeful that this clown show would make me laugh either on purpose or accidentally. But the problem with Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner is that, if you show me either one of their faces, the image acts as a magic spell which makes me forget what I just saw. Who was that? Where am I?

It never even occurred to me that any human being with a brain and soul would take any sort of ideological or formal umbrage with the film because of its “plot” or “editing.” Our world is and has always been a world of crap. Think of our romcoms and of our teen fodder—You’ve Got Mail is slow cinema about swindling a woman with a head cold. The director of One Night Only, Hollywood’s own Will Gluck, is known mostly for Easy A, a movie about a child who garners social cache from pretending to be a sex worker. The movie where premarital sex is illegal can only be so bad. You must meet crap where it is.

Clare Frances@famousbelovednl

YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT’S AROUND THE CORNER IN CRAP WORLD ❤️❤️

DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm

The next ‘PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN’ movie will reportedly focus on a main character, played by Margot Robbie. Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow would be a side character in the film. (Source: Deadline)

9:10 PM · Aug 17, 2026 · 960 Views

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One Night Only met my expectations: it is not good or bad. Anyone who invokes words like “fascism” whilst discussing it needs to have their phone confiscated from their hand, and I’ll be happy to do the taking. The only thing anyone should say about this movie is that Monica Barbaro has short brown hair. Or maybe, Callum Turner seems to struggle with cognition and speech. Yes, both those things are true!

FAQ, answered:

• Why is sex illegal in the world of the film?: Doesn’t matter. If the characters were politicians or mermaids you wouldn’t ask what the ideological implications are, so don’t do it now. Humans sometimes run out of ideas to ask the question, “Will they or won’t they?” so they have to invent magic. It is not carefully considered.

• Why don’t they have sex?: Do you want to watch Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro contact one another in any way? I didn’t think so. Fifteen year olds need to watch movies. They don’t have sex in Easy A or The Hannah Montana Movie.

• Why is the film boring and ugly?: Because most movies throughout 20th and 21st century history are bad, and this one is no different. This isn’t Marvel, which invents harm through imagery in new and exciting ways. There are a few funny lines and interesting situations. Never mind that Monica Barbaro’s dress looks like a diaper and most of the movie is about different ways to travel from upper to lower Manhattan: you can take a bicycle or a train. What do you want, the moon?

• Could it have been better?: Could I get Austin Butler to propose marriage to me? We’ll never really know because the reality we all occupy is not the one where that unfolds. If we switch dimensions, maybe you will get a studio romcom about the inherent queerness of sex, and I will be happy too.

I wasn’t going to write about One Night Only, because—as stated—there isn’t much to say. But the day after seeing it, I saw a different movie called The End of Oak Street. This is a movie about a neighborhood being transported to the past, prompting a 1982 family to survive being attacked by dinosaurs. Unlike One Night Only, I had given Oak Street lots of thought before purchasing a ticket. There is a big billboard for it on my way to work, and the tagline reads, “WHERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD”—no punctuation. Why not just simply, “there goes the neighborhood?” Without the trailer, why would your first guess be that the film is about an entire neighborhood being transported through history? Is “where” legible in the context of time?

2026 has been the endless barrage of torture, as far as movies go. The greatest things I’ve seen (The Bone Temple, The Bride, The Drama) are not that great: they’re good. Then there was Wuthering Heights and Project Hail Mary and Supergirl—I’m growing depressed. Lethargic. Stop torturing me!!!! I’m free and autonomous.

I took a train to the AMC at Lincoln Square which crawled at a glacial pace. “There is no way this is worth it,” is what I thought. There is always human feces all over the women’s restrooms at the AMC at Lincoln Square. The entire building is an outhouse. I embark on odysseys to be tortured at an outhouse.1 Determined to make it worth it—no matter the film itself—I tried a new Freestyle drink: Vanilla Cherry Mr. Pibb Zero. It was delicious, like heaven. I ate my boyfriend’s popcorn. I got ready to take a nap, as I did during Spider-Man, when I wasn’t navigating around excrement.

The End of Oak Street was wonderful. It was scary and ridiculous—purposefully and not—and there is a dog character who survives despite the dangers he is faced with. On the way home from the movie, my boyfriend tried to pull something: “I think it’s an interesting allegory about the American economy at the turn of the 80s.” I made a “wrong” buzzer noise and replied, “I think it’s interesting that a magic bubble swallowed up a family and took them to dinosaurs that chomped their bodies like food.” WHY SO SERIOUS?

In Oak Street, there aren’t just dinosaurs. There is a snake. It really looks more like a worm, but it is the size of a house and opens its jaw like a cobra. Before it opens its mouth to eat you, it has a kind of pleasant stillness. It just kind of moves aimlessly. I don’t think it intends to harm so much as it thinks human beings are food. It’s sad. The family at the center of this film fights back, in spectacular violence stabbing it about a million times with a butcher knife while the worm rams its skull into a door until it’s bloody. This made me laugh. It made me laugh so hard a tear fell from my eye. Anne Hathaway showed so much effort, so much desperation, stabbing this worm. She dirties herself from the affair. In the end, the worm simply leaves.

There are other, similar events in Oak Street which charmed or scared me. In a tonally different moment, Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway stumble upon fornicating dinosaurs. As she might in real life, Anne Hathaway thinks this is hilarious, and calls it a “stupid” situation, laughing in the most Buzzfeed way a person can laugh. McGregor seems normal in real life; he did allegedly leave his wife for a new, young one, after all. You can tell Buzzfeed affectation presents difficulty for him, even in this scene. In press for this film, it is palpable—unbearable. Anne Hathaway loudly shares with him what she sees on her phone. He is Ewan McGregor.

This anthropological splendor delights me. Why did Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor act in the film about the neighborhood in the magic dinosaur bubble? Why does the worm terrorize? If this happened to me, would I shoot the prehistoric crocodiles?

Imagine my dismay upon learning that people do not like this film. They say it is stupid, which they say is bad. They give it a star or two on Letterboxd. What are they comparing it to? They are comparing The End of Oak Street to Mad Men. They are comparing One Night Only to The Apartment. And I’m expected to watch them do it, to pretend it’s normal. I won’t.

Here’s what I think: we should take away Anne Hathaway’s iPhone and give it to Callum Turner. Reels have plausibly made their way into Anne Hathaway’s mind. They might be eating at her Fantinian drive for critical acclaim, and putting her at D23 to announce another Princess Diaries movie. Callum Turner, on the other hand, might not know what planet he lives on. He might not know about food or gay people. He is swept up in a marriage to an international pop star—he hasn’t been looking at his phone. Reels would give him drive, give him purpose.

By giving Anne Hathaway’s phone to Callum Turner, we could fix everything. We could move neighborhoods, or make premarital sex illegal. Watching Reels might retroactively make Callum Turner a Beatle.

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