Perry Bamonte, guitarist and keyboardist for the Cure, has died. He was 65.

The band announced on its website on Dec. 26 that Bamonte died “after a short illness at home over Christmas.”

“Quiet, intense, intuitive constant and hugely creative, ‘Teddy’ was a warm hearted and vital part of the Cure story,” the band said.

The London-born Bamonte began touring with the Cure as a guitar tech and assistant in 1984, then joined the band full-time in 1990. He performed over 400 shows with the group and recorded on the albums “Wish,” “Wild Mood Swings,” “Bloodflowers,” “Acoustic Hits” and “The Cure.”

Bamonte parted ways with the Cure after 14 years, later performing with the group Love Amongst Ruin. He returned to the Cure in 2022 for “another 90 shows, some of the best in the band’s history,” the group said, including the Nov. 1, 2024, London show documented on the concert film “The Show of a Lost World.”

As a member of the Cure, Bamonte was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. The band is still scheduled for a run of European festivals and headline shows in 2026.

“Our thoughts and condolences are with all his family,” the group said. “He will be missed.”

The Housemaid, 2025.

Directed by Paul Feig.
Starring Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Ellen Tamaki, Megan Ferguson, Brian D. Cohen, Indiana Elle, Amanda Joy Erickson, Don DiPetta, Alexandra Seal, Sophia Bunnell, Lamar Baucom-Slaughter and Arabella Olivia Clark.

SYNOPSIS:

A struggling woman is happy to start over as a housemaid for an affluent, elite couple.

Whether or not one has read the recently published book by Freida McFadden, there is no question where director Paul Feig’s The Housemaid (adapted from Rebecca Sonnenshine’s screenplay) is headed. He is, first and foremost, a feminist filmmaker (absolutely not a bad thing), and there are certain predictable but vital modern-day storytelling trends. That’s not a fault here, but it is damn near maddening how long the film wears a mask before arriving at that turning point. Even while acknowledging quite a few clever bits of foreshadowing with a dash of welcome class commentary and themes surrounding gossip and how much of it should be taken credibly, the first half of this narrative doesn’t need to go on for roughly an hour with failed attempts at misdirection.

That the second half of The Housemaid, which lays out the details behind the obvious and fully embraces its trashiness with a sprinkling of truly sinister behavior, is as intense as it is, only makes the shortcomings more frustrating. When the specific “whys” of what is happening here are given to the audience, all that’s left is white-knuckle suspense that could go in multiple directions, with either an optimistic or tragic climax. For whatever reason, the journey to that turn is sometimes a slog – generally only salvaged by its trio of outstanding performances leaning into the campiness – that seemingly assumes its audience has never read a trashy paperback airport novel or seen a thriller.

Despite the predictability of some elements, one still doesn’t want to dive too deeply into the synopsis. Nevertheless, it involves Sydney Sweeney’s Millie, a woman on parole for an undisclosed crime desperately seeking employment to stay on the outside, even if it means telling white lies to hopefully get hired as a live-in housemaid. A meeting for such a position with Amanda Seyfried’s Nina goes as well as she could hope for. Still, in the back of her mind, she believes the resume will be scanned for its dishonesty, costing her the job opportunity.

It goes without saying that Millie gets the job and begins working for Nina, given an attic for a bedroom (which suspiciously has a deadbolt on the door and a window that no longer opens), and basic housework duties such as cleaning, cooking, and looking after the rude young daughter Cecelia (Indiana Elle), who has clearly gotten a bit too comfortable with such a privileged life. Now, there have been some traumatizing hardships as more is gradually revealed about Nina’s past and some actions as a mother. Nina also shows signs of schizophrenia immediately after giving Millie the position, repeatedly and frequently scolding her for doing what was asked, while insisting that she never requested that.

Fortunately, Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, taking a page out of the Glen Powell charming playbook, but with sides to the performance the latter would struggle to pull off) witnesses much of the crashouts and mistreatment toward Millie for no justifiable reason, offering some support, peace, and stability. Unsurprisingly, Millie still wants to find another job and get the hell out of there.

As mentioned, Millie is also played by Sydney Sweeney. Hence, it makes sense that Nina, who is already spiraling and paranoid, would warn her not to make any passes or advances towards Andrew. That’s also where the film starts to fall apart in terms of logic, as no one in their right mind would hire this particular woman to be a housemaid if that insecurity or fear for potential adultery were there, especially after the background check on the resume raises several red flags. Nina’s behavior is also so erratic, temperamental, and hostile that one wonders why someone like Andrew is typically calm, still around, and always so quick to forgive her and downplay the severity of it all.

A lot is happening here regarding the character dynamics that doesn’t make any sense, which is also part of the point since we know there are ulterior motives at play. To sit with such illogical behavior for roughly an hour, while also knowing where this is ultimately going, is downright annoying. The viewer is in a constant state of knowing what’s up while ticked off, waiting for the specifics to come into play and the genre to shift for far too long. Then, The Housemaid starts doing what it should have done a while ago, becoming a genuine thrill ride in the process. It’s a film that admittedly does fire on all cylinders once the puzzle pieces fall into place.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

We might rarely get to see snowfall in Los Angeles, but logging onto social media in December means the arrival of a different kind of flurry. The one where our friends, both close and parasocial, excitedly share the year-end music-listening data dumps of their Spotify Wrapped.

Spotify Wrapped only represents the culmination of our listening habits on a single music platform, but every shared Wrapped post seems to come with some self-evident clarity about our personal identity. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and provides us the opportunity to see ourselves deconstructed via our musical inclinations. By most accounts, it’s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you’ve got us pegged.

For anyone in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a year to get the Wrapped treatment. We’re still processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires — and haunted by ICE raids and the federal administration’s ceaseless attacks on California. Not to mention Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to take that temperature check.

But listening to music can be a passive experience — one enjoyed in tandem with folding laundry, or driving a car. To really learn about ourselves and how our year has been, we might want to turn elsewhere, to a habit with more intention. I’m talking, of course, about reading.

While there’s apps for tracking our reading habits, like StoryGraph or Goodreads, I’m devoted to a wholly analogue tracking method that’s helped me churn through books faster and with more intent than ever before: the book stack.

Starting every January, whenever I finish a book, I place it sidelong atop a shelf in the corner of my living room. With each new book I conquer, the stack gets taller, eventually becoming a full tower by December. A book stack, low on analytics, can’t tell me the total number of pages I’ve read, or how many minutes I spent reading, but it’s a tangible monument to my year’s reading progress. Its mere presence prods me into reading more. It calls me a chump when the stack is low and cheers for me when it reaches toward the ceiling.

My first book stack started in 2020, a wry joke to demonstrate the extra time we could all devote to reading books during a pandemic. The joke barely worked. I ended up reading just 19 books that year, only a few more than I had the previous year (though it could’ve been more if one of those books wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”).

Still, the book stack model gamified my reading habits and now I give books time I didn’t feel I had before. I bring books to bars, movie theaters and the DMV. If ever I have to wait around somewhere, you better believe I’ll come armed with a book.

The pandemic may have waned, but my book stack count continued to climb, peaking in 2023 after reading 52 books, averaging one per week.

But, hey, it’s about quality, not quantity, right? If there’s a quality to be gleaned from my 2025 book stack, you’d see that I’ve been looking for hot tips on how to survive times of extreme authoritarian rule. Some were more insightful than others.

In the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All the President’s Men,” a landmark true story about two intrepid reporters who brought down the president of the United States by repeatedly bothering people at their homes for information. Fascinating as it is, it also feels like a relic from a time when doing something like that could still work. Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” tells the story of a Jewish New Jersey family in an alternate timeline where an “America First” Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, ignoring the threat of Hitler in Europe and giving way to a rise in antisemitism at home. Roth paints a dreary portrait of how that scenario could have played out, but the horrors are resolved by something of a deus ex machina rather than by any one character’s bold, heroic actions. Then there’s Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” about the converging stories of a German boy enlisted in Hitler’s army and a blind French girl during World War II. Sadly, this novel reads less like a book about living under fascist rule than a thirsty solicitation to become source material for Steven Spielberg’s next movie.

Each of these titles have merit, but this year’s book stack had two gems for anyone who wants to know how best to resist tyranny. Pointedly, there was Timothy Snyder’s tidy pocket-sized handbook “On Tyranny” filled with 20 short but fortifying chapters of practical wisdom like “Do not obey in advance,” “Defend institutions” and “Believe in truth.” Each is applicable to our current moment, informed by historical precedent set by communist and fascist regimes of the past century. This book — well over a million copies sold — came out at the start of Trump’s first term in 2017, so I came a little late to this party. The fact that Snyder himself moved to Canada this year should give us all pause.

Practical advice can also be found in great fiction, and on that front I found comfort and instruction in Hans Fallada’s “Alone in Berlin” (a.k.a. “Every Man Dies Alone”), based on the true story of a married couple living in Berlin during World War II who wrote postcards urging resistance against the Nazi regime and secretly planted them in public places for random people to discover. Under their extreme political conditions, this small act of civil disobedience means risking death. Not only is the story riveting, there’s also great pleasure in seeing the mayhem each postcard causes and how effective they are at exposing the subordinate class of fascists for what they truly are: nitwits.

Also notable in “Alone in Berlin” is the point of view of both the author and his fictional heroes. Neither a target of persecution, nor a military adversary, Fallada nevertheless endured the amplified hardships of living under Nazi rule during World War II. His trauma was still fresh while writing this book and it’s evident in his prose. He survived just long enough to write and publish “Alone in Berlin” before dying in 1947 at the age of 53.

If I’ve learned anything from these books, it’s that it’s in our best interest to not be afraid. Tyrants feed on fear and expect it. A citizenry without fear is much harder to control. That’s why we need to raise our voices against provocations of our rights, always push back, declare wrong things to be wrong, get in the way, annoy the opposition, and allow yourself to devote time to do things for your own enjoyment.

And in that spirit, my book stack also includes a fair amount of palate cleansers in the mix: Jena Friedman’s “Not Funny,” short stories by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (whose main character is named after Gogol), and a pair of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Though it’s hard to read Vonnegut without stumbling upon some apropos nuggets of wisdom, like this one from his novel “Slapstick:” “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior.”

Zachary Bernstein is a writer, editor and songwriter. He’s working on his debut novel about a poorly managed remote island society.