just do karaoke
Song Sung Blue, Marty Supreme, and hoodwinking dreamers
When I first saw the trailer for Song Sung Blue, I knew it would be a detestable movie. Diamond edition nepo baby Kate Hudson and rampant Australian Hugh Jackman star as two humble Americans who just want to SING! I'll throw my shoe through the projector screen.
I soon learned that Song Sung Blue was not about any old Neil Diamond tribute band, but a Neil Diamond tribute band from Milwaukee. A second cheese has hit the curd, a second cow has hit the farm, a second beer has hit the can!
I gleaned this information from local Milwaukee news outlet TMJ4, which reported extensively on Hugh Jackman’s press tour of the greater Milwaukee area. Hugh Jackman wears a cheesehead! Charlie Berens interviews Hugh Jackman! Hugh Jackman sings “Sweet Caroline” at Landmark Lanes! Mr. Jackman… get off my lawn!
And the real rotisserie chicken on top of the Bloody Mary:1 Hugh Jackman hands out scoops of frozen custard at Kopps. The video evidence of this stunt is disturbing. He dons an apron, offers an anemic scoop of custard on a cone, and leans in for a picture. He does not stop smiling. His smile is so empty. Hugh Jackman is so well-trained, like all those Rachel Berry knock-offs I knew in high school, the ones with dead eyes and sustained screlts. Pretenders good at pretending to be people that only exist in play-pretend.
The line of earnest Wisconsinites eager to gush over Hugh wrapped well around the block. They waited for him for hours in the unrepentant cold. Mr. Jackman, or the machine that made him, handed out ice cream and smiles to icicles. Wisconsin was happy to have the opportunity to freeze.
Of course, I had to see the damn film. After all the hullabaloo.
Me and Gwyn and Gwyn’s friend, Jack, hunkered down at the Marcus Majestic Cinema on the evening of December 28, 2025. There were only two other people at the screening who were not of our party. I hope you’ll forgive us when I tell you that our theatre etiquette slipped. We whispered to each other throughout the whole thing. We laughed at things that were not meant to be funny. We turned to each other, agog and slack-jawed. You’re seeing this too, right? It was the most fun I had at the movies in 2025.
Here’s a little taste of what happens in Song Sung Blue:
Hugh Jackman is missing exactly one tooth in the first few scenes. His dentist, who is also his manager, promptly installs a new tooth that has a little lightning bolt in it, because Hugh Jackman’s stage name is “Lightning.” We’re all supposed to get on board with this being a good stage name, even when he makes Kate Hudson go by “Thunder.”
It goes without saying, but Hugh Jackman’s trademarked vibrato abounds.
Alcoholics Anonymous jumpscare in the very first scene (Hugh is an alcoholic).
They open for Pearl Jam? The guy they cast to play Eddie Vedder looks too much like Billie Eilish for me.
Kate Hudson gets hit by a car while standing on her lawn. Absolutely smushed. She loses half her leg. When Kate’s daughter arrives at the hospital, shouting and crying for her mother, Hugh Jackman pulls his step-daughter into a different room to inform her that he’s actually having a heart attack right now, and she needs to defibrillate him back to life. Huh? She watches him collapse onto the floor, screams, and gives him a shock. He lives.
Hugh Jackman’s step-daughter (the same one) approaches him one day in the middle of her mother’s post-amputation depression to inform him that she is four months pregnant. His response to this is that he thought she had just put on a few pounds. He asks her what she’s going to do about it. She says she’ll give it up for adoption. She’s already looking into eligible couples. He shrugs. A few scenes later, this teenager is working through prenatal yoga with a massive belly in the company of her mother, Kate Hudson, who is now out of her post-amputation slump. The girl gives birth in a full face of makeup and smiles as she passes off the baby to a faceless couple. Nobody seems to have any sort of opinion about this at all, and it is never mentioned again.
King Princess stars as Hugh Jackman’s daughter?
When Kate Hudson is on the mend after losing half her leg, she goes to stand in the same spot she was when she got hit by the car. It seems to be part of the healing process. She takes a deep breath, then heads back inside. TWO SECONDS after she steps away, ANOTHER car crashes into their house in the EXACT same spot where she was just standing. It was already a little hard to believe the first time around. Kate issues a burst of very canned laughter (this is what they’re calling the best performance of her career??) and makes a quip about lighting striking twice, then they all move right along. There’s more Neil Diamond back catalog to cover.
The duo reach their zenith when they sell out a show the same night that Neil Diamond is playing in town, because their core audience is the Neil Diamond fanbase that couldn’t get tickets to the real thing. The day of the concert, they learn that Neil knows who they are and wants to meet them. Hugh Jackman gets a little too excited about this in the bathroom and banana-peel slips while getting ready, utterly whacking his head and cracking it open. At this point, the movie decides it’s Black Swan. Hugh seals his head back together with nail glue and doesn’t say a word to anyone about his little accident. He carries on with the performance, offering thinly veiled, misunderstood last words to his family (“Help… me…”). After the show, they’re in the car to meet Neil Diamond at the lakefront custard stand (oh, please). Instead of “I was perfect,” Hugh Jackman says, “Baby, I’m huge.” Kate Hudson gets out of the car, and when she turns back to Hugh, he’s dead. Yes, dead. As a doornail.
As you may surmise, Song Sung Blue suffers from being based on a true story. The emotional whiplash makes for bad storytelling. I mean, take the Kate Hudson car crash: that’s the sort of story you tell at a party to gag people about the tough stuff you’ve survived. It’s unbelievable, and that’s what people will say when you tell them the story at a party: “Unbelievable.” And they’ll shake their heads. It does not make for good cinema.
But I will say something nice about the movie now — it has one good scene. This scene occurs post-amputation and post-recuperation. Hugh Jackman has been gigging in a Thai restaurant owned by a guy who loves Neil Diamond. Hugh basically just runs karaoke, but the owner likes him enough to agree to a Kate Hudson relaunch concert after her recovery. Kate and Hugh are singing “Holly Holy” with the restaurant owner’s daughters as backup singers and the karaoke machine running alongside them. Kate is trying to feel like her old self, and it’s tough at first, but golly, does the power of music prevail.
“Holly Holy” is triumphant for the duo. Maybe not a technically staggering feat, but something honest that is felt and valued by the people that really know them — the other sideshow attractions that make up the friends and business partners of “Thunder” and “Lightning.” Watching this scene, I wondered if I was being too harsh on the silly movie; I was moved, goddamnit. Then the song ended, and I didn’t care anymore.
That’s the beauty of the moment. Any good moment. It’s immortal, and it never happened.
One week after Song Sung Blue, I saw Marty Supreme. I was back in L.A., wondering if maybe this is the year it all gets good for me. This movie was not one to bolster that state of mind.
Maybe naively, I thought Marty Supreme was going to be a success story. Like Song Sung Blue, its marketing encouraged theatergoers to DREAM BIG. Gwyneth Paltrow asks Timothée Chalamet what he’ll do if ping pong doesn’t work out, and he says, “That doesn’t even enter my consciousness.” Timmy runs out on Odessa A’zion, telling her that he has a purpose she could never comprehend, “an obligation to see a very specific thing through.” He has fake acne scars and dogged ambition — how could it not work out?
But it doesn’t. He wins the ping pong game, sure, but nothing else. He has no money, no respectability, no prospects. He wins the sham game because he lost the real one, and he needed to win something. Then, he goes back home, looks his newborn baby in the face, and weeps. Tears for Fears taunts him, singing, “Welcome to your life…” as he’s crying, and it’s all so on-the-nose. Grow up, big dreamer. It was never gonna work.
I find all of this crushing and cruel and shallow. In both films. These are Hollywood movies, big budget pictures made by names, starring names. They are engineered to make money based on popularity. I refer to these characters by their actors’ names because that’s who you can picture, therefore that’s who really matters. Even if their characters lost, these guys won the fame game.
The best essay I wrote in undergrad was about intertextuality in casting. By this, I mean that, whenever a certain actor shows up in your movie, you immediately broadcast everything you know about that actor onto the character. Maybe Matt Damon creeped you out in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and you can’t ever see him in a positive light again. Maybe you grew up with Zendaya on Disney Channel, and try as you might, you can’t buy her as a drug addict on Euphoria. Maybe you loved Timothée Chalamet when he had floppy curls and an earnest guffaw, but you’ve cooled on him in latter years, due to his buzzcut and Kar-Jenner arm candy. None of this exists in a vacuum.
For me, Hollywood is a brittle white sign. I drive past it every day, and it isn’t exciting anymore. Last year, I called my mom upset before and after I saw Anora. She tentatively asked how the movie was on my second call. “The movie was great, Mom,” I said, choking on my bitterness. “The movies are always great. It’s real life that sucks.”
I came out here to be an actor. I once believed so strongly that there was no way I wouldn’t be an actor. I’m finally on the verge of giving up on acting. L.A. drove me to it.
When I see these movies, I see a flim-flam imitation of the disappointment I experience on a daily basis, performed by the only class of people that don’t get it. It’s make-believe, and it always has been, but it feels corrupt in this light. I still love movies. I love stories, I love play-pretend; I don’t find it easy to love a false underdog vying for little gold statues. Your moment is here, your moment is gone. It’s so impressive that you were able to cry in that scene. How did you do it?
I am frustrated that dreaming costs so much money. I am envious of the very few that got lucky enough to not need to worry about it. I feel foolish, because I used to consider myself in a kind of kinship with them. Those illusions are over now.
As for my dreams? I still have them. I’m not sure what shape they take right now, but I know that they are there whenever I need them.
I wish it could all be pure, though. Real. That a good karaoke moment could actually rival an Oscar. Because it should. I have been moved to tears by unpolished strivers in middles of nowheres. I have turned dry eyes to big budgets that put a ransom on my tears. Maybe emotions ought not to be an economy. But I doubt they’d stop now.
This is something you can order in Milwaukee!
got this notification minutes after leaving karaoke night at the bar where I did not, in fact, do karaoke. next time!