An ongoing series on books, movies, and music I’ve encountered recently.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Fire!

Watchmen (TV show). This whole limited series is something special, but the three-episode stretch of “This Extraordinary Being”, “An Almost Religious Awe”, and “A God Walks Into Abar” is spectacular. I went into this basically as a Watchmen neophyte and came out a believer.

My Octopus Teacher and The Social Dilemma. An accidentally insightful Netflix documentary double feature.

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs. “If it is foolish to think that we can carry with us all the good things from the past—from our personal past or that of our culture—while leaving behind all the unwanted baggage, it is a counsel of despair and, I think, another kind of foolishness to think that if we leave behind the errors and miseries of the past, we must also leave behind everything that gave the world its savor.”

The Vast of Night. A fairly astounding debut feature. The Twilight Zone meets Pleasantville meets Super 8. Available on Amazon Prime, and I’d recommend learning as little as possible about it before watching.

The Last Dance. Can be summed up in one Larry Bird GIF.

Downhill. As a remake of the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure (big fan), I was very curious how this version would adapt itself to American sensibilities. Pretty well, it turns out.

Hamilton: An American Musical. Duh.

1917. Still glad Parasite won Best Picture, but this deserved all the awards it got.