Everyone in power, or aspiring to power, in this country seems to be studying Politics and War, though they will sometimes cover that study with a flimsy disguise.
On the so-called Left we see surveillance moralism (and often enough the sexualization of children and early teens) masquerading as science.
On the so-called Right? It’s wrathful trolling masquerading as political philosophy.
None of these folks, God bless their earnest if shriveled hearts, have any room inside for the arts. Everything has to serve their political purposes, and works of art are rarely sufficiently blunt instruments.
Live Text, available in iOS 15 and beyond, feels not far off from magical. The ability to copy text from photos or through the camera app has completely transformed my book notetaking process as a print-book partisan but digital notetaker. I can just point the camera at a desired passage, hit the Live Text button, copy the text, and plop it in Workflowy (where I keep my book notes). And to think I used to have to take pictures of quotes to later type out manually like an idiot…
2. Reader View
Using the Reader view in Safari on iPhones makes reading things on the internet insanely more pleasant. If you come upon an article clogged with ads, unnecessary photos, and/or unreadable text, Reader strips it down to a clean, simplified, text-only version. You can find this feature elsewhere too; I use it often in Firefox on desktop.
3. No-Signup Tools
So that this isn’t an exclusively Apple affair, I wanted to shoutout nosignup.tools because at this point in my life I appreciate any digital tool that doesn’t require an account or credit card to use. Just free tools that work quickly and easily.
The above is a screenshot from a video on my phone that’s come to be known in my family as “Ball Under Table.”
Recorded shortly before the first COVID lockdown, the video documents a little game our (at the time) freshly minted one-year-old created. He would roll the little squishy soccer ball under our table, wait for me to get down and reach to get it, then waddle off into another room.
It was his way of trying to sneak off, which, having just learned to walk at that point, he was doing a lot. The video ends with me having “caught” him in the living room and asked, “Are you sneaky?” After a pause, he smiles mischievously and sets off again.
Run it back
Now three years old, he loves to watch this video over and over again, along with the many other videos of him from birth to present. It has become so indelible that he’ll recreate it in the exact same spot. (Though his wobbly toddling has turned into straight-up sprinting.) And if his mother or I dare to veer from an exact reenactment of the video, he’s none too happy about it.
It’s interesting how this moment has morphed over time. When it happened, he was too young for it to make a long-term impression. But once he was old enough to watch and rewatch the recording, that’s what became his default understanding and memory of that moment.
Which is a phenomenon I understand well, having watched and rewatched a lot of my own home videos from when I was a kid. How many of those moments would I actually remember if they’d never been recorded? Not a lot, given my woefully weak capacity for long-term memories that aren’t useless bits of trivia.
He’ll have just as much (if not more) footage of his childhood as I did, thanks to our smartphones and camcorder. And he’ll have to deal with far more screens and reality-distorting technology in general. How will that affect his mind and those of his generation?
Barbarian. Despite being a big baby about horror films, I went to see this opening weekend when I came into some unexpected free time. To say it’s surprising in many ways is a gross understatement.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Thus far it’s managing to strike the right balance of serving a global audience, LOTR trilogy fans, and Tolkien nerds. I quit on House of the Dragon after one episode because I’ve had my fill of Game of Thrones content, but I’m all in on this one.
Bluey season 3. Every season of this show (the best on TV) has a handful of episodes that are stone-cold masterpieces, and thus far “Rain” is holding the championship belt.
Nope.With this and Barbarian, it’s been a delightfully horrific summer at the movies.
Experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni wrote an interesting (if long) consideration of why we forget most of what we learn, and how “vibes” are more important than knowledge in that learning process.
That sounds a lot more woo-woo than it really is. An example he gives:
Here are things I don’t remember from high school:
– The phone number of my best friend, despite dialing it hundreds of times.
– How to play a high D on the trumpet, despite playing it for years.
– Almost everything I memorized for quizbowl competitions, despite carrying around freezer bags full of flash cards and testing myself on them over and over for months at a time.
Here are things I do remember from high school:
– How fun it was to call my best friend and talk for hours.
– How exciting it was to march onto the football field, trumpet in hand, and play a halftime show.
– How much I despised my school’s rival quizbowl team, how infuriating it was when their coach called us “reasonably intelligent,” and how I was so nervous before our championship match against them that I nearly threw up.
On vibes:
Knowledge is cheap and easily acquired. What you really need is curiosity, self-efficacy, perseverance, perspective, and hope. And those are vibes.
On what it takes to learn (and teach) through good vibes:
The students who ultimately succeed in learning R [the programming language] are not the ones who force themselves to memorize functions or do a bunch of coding drills. They’re the ones who accept they will feel stupid and that most of the rules will at first seem totally arbitrary, and who understand that they will gain great power if they just keep going. … I’ve found that the best way to transmit this vibe is to show them just how dumb I am.
On vibes as dark energy:
It is possible for teachers to send a vibe of “success in school depends on satisfying my whims.” Peers can give you the vibe of “this is all just a game before we go do whatever will pay us the most.” Buildings can say “it’s cool to cause the opioid crisis as long as you donate some money afterward.” Nobody ever has to state any of this explicitly, and usually nobody does. Vibes are like dark energy: invisible, but evident everywhere.
If you found high school to be a dark, inscrutable enigma with a rigidly enforced social-class structure and impenetrable lingo, you’ll deeply appreciate Rian Johnson’s lean and masterful debut feature that renders adolescence as gritty film noir. A young, sphinx-like Joseph Gordon-Levitt investigates his ex-girlfriend’s mysterious disappearance like a teen Dashiell Hammett detective, navigating double-crosses and life-or-death stakes that feel right at home in the high drama of high school.
2. October Sky
Chris Cooper and Laura Dern would be enough for a solid cast, but even at 17 years old Gyllenhaal brings the charisma and authenticity emblematic of his now long and impressive career. (Still, the secret star: composer Mark Isham’s devastating heart-punch of a theme.) The movie is about family and friendship and science and America, but ultimately it’s about a teenager with a dream. “This one’s gonna go for miles…”
3. 10 Things I Hate About You
Heath Ledger beaming with rascally charm (and pulling off an epic lip-dub years before they were cool). Julia Styles taking no prisoners. Joseph Gordon-Levitt aw-shucks-ing his way into our hearts. Sorry Clueless: this is the best ’90s Shakespeare film adaptation and it’s not close.
4. Dazed and Confused
Tag your high-school self: were you kinda skeevy like Wooderson, mama-bear protective like Jodi, effortlessly cool like Pink, pseudo-intellectual like Tony, a live-wire bully like Darla or O’Bannion, victimized like Mitch? Dazed lives on because it’s all of us, and that’s alright, alright, alright.
5. Booksmart
This directorial debut from Olivia Wilde was charming as hell. In conjunction with the natural chemistry between Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as straight-laced overachievers out for one crazy night before high school ends, Wilde’s script brings the film to depths of character, understanding, and humor that are rare in debut features and especially in movies about teens.
Too many unsupervised teenagers at a fancy house. Red Solo cups strewn about. A couple making out. A skater kid sliding down the stairs into a tower of beer cans. Someone throwing up at just the wrong moment.
Welcome to a high-school movie house party.
Despite seeing this kind of party depicted on screen over and over again, I never actually went to one in real life. I was an introverted and mostly well-behaved Christian lad who considered sex, drugs, and drinking taboo. Which is how I usually found myself on Friday nights hanging out with my church youth group friends.
It was a lot more fun than it sounds! We goofed off, played games, pranked each other, watched movies, and shared an occasional deep discussion.
I’m grateful for those times because they kept me out of serious trouble and proved you don’t need mind-altering substances to have a good time.
But they weren’t very cinematic.
A Better Story
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to adopt a deeper appreciation for the high school movie party. The best ones aspire to more than just adolescent revelry; they act as a catalyst for chaotic, dramatic, comedic, or romantic things to happen to the main characters in order to further the story.
Sometimes those things happen away from the ruckus, in a quiet or intimate moment. Think Kat and Patrick bonding on the swings in 10 Things I Hate About You or Josie crushing on Guy while trying to conceal her ruse in Never Been Kissed.
And sometimes the heightened environment of a party can bring simmering conflicts to a boil, as with Seth and Evan’s street showdown in Superbad or Amy and Molly’s bracing blow-up in Booksmart.
Those crucial moments didn’t happen while the characters sat at home dutifully studying for a test or even watching things happen to fictional characters on a screen.
They had to go get into a little trouble. They had to take chances and for once risk not making the safest choices.
If I could share a bit of wisdom with my 15-year-old self—and any other high schooler who’s a little too comfortable with the safe and responsible path—it’s this: Lighten up just a little bit. You can stay true to your convictions (which, by the way, are going to change) while still living your young adult years to their fullest.
So go ahead: join that party. Cheer on Schmidt pulling the knife from his back in 21 Jump Street. Jump into the “Paradise City” mosh pit in Can’t Hardly Wait. Cruise through a moon tower kegger like in Dazed and Confused.
Find ways to make a better story. Because that’s L-I-V-I-N.
I’m very excited to share a new thing I’m part of that’s now live on the internet: Cinema Sugar, a website/newsletter/social media destination for people who love to see, think about, and talk about movies.
Our mission statement:
We are not interested in celebrity culture. We are not interested in hate-watching, takedowns, or tasteless criticism. We believe movies make life sweeter.
It started as an idea from my pal and Chicagoland singer-songwriter Kevin Prchal, with whom I love to nerd out about movies and movie culture. We’ve been building out the brand and website for the last month and a half or so, and are thrilled it’s finally out in the world.
Each month will be dedicated to a different theme or genre, featuring top fives, interviews, curated playlists, movie night guides, personal essays, and so much more.
We’ve got a lot more cool stuff coming, so please check out the website, sign up for the newsletter, and join us on social media to talk movies with your fellow movie lovers.
When we make our art, we are also making our lives. And I’m sure that the reverse is equally true.
That line is from Look & See, the beautiful documentary about the life and work of Wendell Berry.
I think about it often, and I thought about it again recently as I feasted on two pieces of art simultaneously: the limited documentary series The Last Movie Stars on HBO Max and Alissa Wilkinson’s new book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women.
In sync
Whenever I notice disparate works of art speaking to each other, I call it synchronicity. It’s one of my favorite things to write about because discovering new connections feels both satisfying and alluring.
The Last Movie Stars, which chronicles the lives, careers, and decades-long romance of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, offered a way into this synchronicity not through the series’ content but through its form. As director Ethan Hawke tells the stories of the two subjects, through clever editing he intercuts scenes from Newman’s or Woodward’s movies that speak directly or obliquely to whatever they were going through at the time in their lives.
Examples include contrasting Woodward’s real-life misgivings about being a mother with her performance in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds as an abusive, resentful mother (acting with her real-life daughter!). Or reckoning with Newman’s own struggle with alcoholism using boozy scenes from The Verdict—a performance inspired by director Sidney Lumet imploring Newman to reveal more of himself in it.
Newman touches on this paradigm explicitly during one archival interview used in the series:
Our characters rub off onto the actor. Probably one of the areas of great discontent is that they probably feel, as human beings, they are merely a series of, a collection of old characters that they played. I sometimes get that feeling about myself, that I have become a series of connectives between the parts of the characters that I really like. And I’ve strung them together into kind of a human being.
A salty symbiosis
That idea of one’s work and life feeding each other while building a kind of accretive self echoed in my mind as I read Salty, Wilkinson’s collection of biographical essays spotlighting nine notable 20th century women who comprise her ideal (if hypothetical) dinner party.
Whether they were writers (Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou), artists (Agnes Varda), activists (Ella Baker), or cooks (Enda Lewis, Elizabeth David, Laurie Colwin), all of them used what they learned in their work and lives to inform—and, ideally, improve—the other:
Chef Edna Lewis bringing black Southern cooking to 1960s New York and then beyond with The Taste of Country Cooking
Filmmaker Agnes Varda translating her fascination with the ordinary into cinematic curiosities
Civil-rights activist Ella Baker practicing communal hospitality as a catalyst for social change and empowerment
These women weren’t movie stars like Newman and Woodward, but their lives were still reflected in their work. They too—to toss a metaphorical salad—were pulling from the strung-together assemblage of old characters they played throughout their lives, making meals with the ingredients available to them.
And that’s all we can do, really. Per Wendell Berry, we make our lives and art concurrently, whether we know it or not.
My compliments to Alissa Wilkinson and Ethan Hawke for the meals they’ve created in these works of art, which are infused with moments and lessons from their own lives that made them all the richer.
“The Actor’s Vow” by Elia Kazan (via The Last Movie Stars on HBO Max):
I will take my rightful place on stage and I will be myself. I am not a cosmic orphan. I have no reason to be timid. I will respond as I feel; awkwardly, vulgarly, but respond.
I will have my throat open, I will have my heart open, I will be vulnerable. I may have anything or everything the world has to offer, but the thing I need most and want most, is to be myself.
I will admit rejection, admit pain, admit frustration, admit even pettiness, admit shame, admit outrage, admit anything and everything that happens to me.
The best and most human parts of me are those I have inhabited and hidden from the world. I will work on it. I will raise my voice. I will be heard.
I’m creating my movie best-of lists retroactively. See all of them.
As usual with this silly but enjoyable series, I started by consulting my logbook for all the movies from 2000 I’ve seen. That initial list of 36 films had some pretty easy cuts (Men of Honor, My Dog Skip) and plenty of titles I liked but knew were bound to be honorable mentions.
Deciding on my final 10 was probably the easiest time I’ve had doing so in a while. Then again, it required me to cheat for the first time.
A personal and family favorite that’s not only underrated as a romantic comedy but also as a Chicago movie.
3. Almost Famous
Kinda surprised this didn’t hit the #2 spot, but that doesn’t negate my love for it as a musician and former journalism student.
4. High Fidelity
Another great Chicago movie, and one that hit me hard when I saw it in college. So much so that I incorporated it into an essay I wrote for a writing class about my (at the time) brief and unsuccessful dating history. To quote Cusack’s Rob Gordon: “I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and… I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that’s suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.”
5. Cast Away
Hard to argue with Russell Crowe winning Best Actor for Gladiator, but Tom Hanks winning his third Oscar for this role as a cap on his decade-long hot streak would have been just as good. (See also: my list of top movie music moments.)
6.Gladiator / The Patriot / Remember the Titans
An unprecedented three-way tie! It had to be done. All are historical epics (that are just barely historical), led by A-list movie stars at their peak, and became the Holy Trinity of time-wasters for lazy social studies teachers during units on Ancient Rome, the Revolutionary War, and Civil Rights respectively. (See also: Fatherhood in The Patriot and Interstellar and Remember the Titans in my top movie music moments.)
7. In the Mood for Love
A gorgeous, transfixing meditation on love, modernity, and the things we don’t say.
8. Best in Show
Of all the indelible moments from this absurdly hilarious mockumentary, “busy bee” sticks out the most.
9. Frequency
Throughout middle school I used my Juno email account to send occasional dispatches blurbing the movies and TV I was enjoying at the time to friends, family, my soccer coaches, church family friends—basically whoever I knew who had an email address. (In retrospect they were pretty similar to my Media of the moment series.) All that to say, I remember raving about Frequency in one of those emails. Rewatched it last year and it holds up.
10. The Emperor’s New Groove
If I’m being honest, this spot is mostly for the supporting character Kronk, who elevates the movie from fairly rote Disney animation fare to sublime quotable comedy.
About once a week something makes me think of a line from one of the (NSFW) Auto-Tune the News videos that had a viral moment way back in social media’s halcyon days of 2009.
Any mention of Iowa or climate change reminds me of #2, the T-Pain-esque bop:
And any mention of the phrase “God bless America” reminds me of #5, which includes an absolute banger of a chorus featuring a future president:
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan. An excellent oral history of one of the greatest films ever made. One of the many tidbits: George Miller’s first choice to play Max was Heath Ledger, which I now can’t stop thinking about.
The Northman. A brutal, heavy-metal fever dream from Robert Eggers.
A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester. Published thirty years ago, its scholarship is out of date and perspective rather flippant, but the writing remains spicy and illuminating.
We Own This City. A sequel of sorts to The Wire that was just as compelling with a much shorter runtime. Gotta hand it to HBO Max, which has accounted for pretty much all of my TV viewing over the last year or so between this, Winning Time, Minx, and Station Eleven.
Top Gun: Maverick. The first Top Gun is kinda bad. This one is not.
The Office BFFs: Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There by Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey. I’ve listened to the Office Ladies podcast since the beginning—where much of the book’s content has been covered previously—but still found this enjoyable and informative.
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. This fits into a nonfiction genre I really enjoy, where the author visits various places/people that connect to the book’s central theme and explores their histories. Smith covers some stuff I was already familiar with but much I wasn’t—including that the Statue of Liberty has shackled feet.
On a beach waiting to witness works of fire thundering forth for the Fourth of July, sparklers burst against a cloudy sunset— the flames of liberty burning out fast.
Darkness descends and the main event announces itself with flash-bangs against the firmament: Declarations of incandescence, self-evident in their light, loudness, and pursuit of happy viewers.
United they fall, a coterie of combusted paper— explosive evidence of cheap dreams.
Yet after the rockets’ rainbow glare burst in the air, what was still there?
Recently I thought I should make a list of my top 10 films of all time. Making best-of lists is a hallowed tradition on this blog after all, so why not go for the big kahuna?
Because it’s insane, that’s why. As Roger Ebert wrote: “Let us agree that all lists of movies are nonsense.”
And yet.
As with other forms of nonsense, making lists of movies retains its allure in spite of the absurdity. It’s fun, frustrating, and futile all at once.
Let’s dive in.
It takes two
Once I started putting together my initial longlist to consider, I quickly realized narrowing it down to one Top 10 wouldn’t do. Choosing 10 films from a century’s worth of options would mean leaving out too many iconic (to me) films and rendering this exercise pure masochistic nihilism.
So I gave myself an out. Two, actually.
First, hearkening back to my Favorite Films of the 2010s, I decided to build the list based on genres. This helped provide structure and ensure a wider representation for my picks. Second, I allowed for two films per genre, representing a Legacy pick (before 1980) and a Modern one (after 1980). With two important exceptions, this held true.
Those criteria established, the selections fell into line fairly easily. It felt good to have similar films from different eras paired up rather than pitted against each other. (It did not feel good to leave off so many contenders I love, but such pain is the cost of this endeavor.)
Notes/caveats:
The list is ordered alphabetically by genre, with the legacy selection listed first in each.
I didn’t rank or annotate the films because they speak for themselves.
The selections represent my taste at this very moment. Maybe I’ll revisit this every decade like the Sight & Sound poll to keep myself honest.
Disagree with a film’s genre placement? Leave a comment or let me know and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.
Enough throat-clearing. I give you:
The Greatest Films of All Time
Action/Adventure: Die Hard and Mad Max: Fury Road
Comedy: Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Anchorman
Drama: It’s A Wonderful Life and Unbreakable
International: Ikiru and The Lives of Others
Musical: Singin’ in the Rain and Once
Noir: Double Indemnity and Brick
Romance: Casablanca and Brokeback Mountain
Sci-Fi/Fantasy: Back to the Future and Lord of the Rings
Thriller: Rear Window and Memento
Western: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Hell or High Water
That was a question from my 3 year old during a recent walk as he was looking at the sky. We’d recently introduced him to the concept of seeing recognizable shapes in clouds, so I’m guessing that’s what he was getting at. But this phrasing was so much more deep, man.