Athena. Come for the gangbusters opening 10 minutes—stay for the tense, heart-pounding drama of Children of Men-meets-The Battle of Algiers in a French apartment complex. (Streaming on Netflix.)
The End of Education by Neil Postman. My third Postman book after Amusing Ourselves to Deathand Technopoly. Would probably rank it below those two but still a barnburner.
The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. The story of discovering the Rosetta Stone (thanks Napoleon!) and the decades it took to decipher it, thus unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt to modernity.
The Hunt for Red October. Finally got around to see this. Enjoyed it but still have to give the ’90s submarine action thriller edge to Crimson Tide.
Kiki’s Delivery Service. Been going through the Miyazaki oeuvre with the 3 year old and some, like this one, are first watches for both of us. Love being able to show him animated movies with a completely different pace and style than what he’s used to with Bluey/Curious George/Disney, etc.
The World’s Worst Assistant by Sona Movsessian. Sona is a key part of the success of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast so I’m glad she’s able to cash in on it.
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Story of Life by Lulu Miller. A remarkable memoir/biography hybrid that reminded me of The Feather Thief with its nature/animals obsessives at the center and the ethical dilemmas they encounter (and create).
I just finished a rewatch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended editions, something I was saving for after I finished season one of The Rings of Power. And I’m glad I did because I was able to appreciate the trilogy that much more, with the events of Middle-earth’s earlier age as captured in the series adding an extra weight and significance to what happens in the movies.
Some stray thoughts on each movie as I went through them…
Fellowship of the Ring
This film is so indelibly etched into my being, not to mention my favorite films of 2001 and of all time. There’s so much I could say about it—so many memories it created for me—but just one is that one of my first dates with the woman who’d become my wife was an all-day marathon of all three Extended Editions during a blizzard worthy of the Caradhras Pass.
Ok, one more: our wedding processional was a combination of “Concerning Hobbits” and “The Breaking of the Fellowship” from Howard Shore’s magisterial score.
I’ve bounced back and forth about whether this one or Return of the King is my favorite of the trilogy, but I’ve landed back on this one.
The Two Towers:
While some of the extended footage that didn’t make the theatrical version made sense as cuts, dropping Faramir’s flashback absolutely didn’t. It provided useful context for both his relationship with Boromir and his father, added color to Boromir’s character, illustrated Faramir’s motivations, and helped set the stage for the Denethor drama to come. I get that it was a long-ish scene, but they could have easily trimmed several minutes from the battle of Helm’s Deep if we’re being honest.
This remains my third-favorite of the trilogy despite having some great moments.
The Return of the King
Listening to Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” as the credits rolled provoked a deep sense memory of sitting in the theater seeing this for the first time. In a stunned stillness I attempted to absorb the enormity of the epic journey that had just concluded.
This time around I was able to better appreciate:
just how long and exhausting the journey was for Frodo and Sam
the ring as a metaphor for addiction (Gollum as a troubled addict, Frodo slowly getting hooked, Sam as conflicted loved one)
the full evolution of Aragorn’s arc from reluctant ranger to confident king (also as a model “warrior poet” a la William Wallace in Braveheart, though for some reason much more appealing???)
the courage of Merry and Pippin as they faced constant peril and/or underestimation
Gandalf’s struggle with leading and inspiring others while harboring his own doubts and guilt about sending Frodo to his likely demise
This isn’t the first major noir (fedora-tip to The Maltese Falcon) but damned if it isn’t the genre’s absolute peak: femme fatale, no-nonsense narration, crime gone wrong, investigator on the case. It’s hard to pick Billy Wilder’s best movie but this has to be near the top.
2. Memento
Seeing this in early high school was my first encounter with Christopher Nolan, Guy Pearce, and the unique thrill of getting my mind blown by a film. It’s also the rare twist-ending movie that offers more to see and untangle with every rewatch.
3. The Third Man
Most noirs of the classic era were pretty clearly filmed on backlot sets. Not The Third Man—you feel every inch of postwar Vienna’s rundown streets and cavernous sewers. Though it starts a little ho-hum, once Orson Welles shows up you’d better buckle up.
4. Notorious
Had to represent Hitchcock on this list. The triptych of Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains—legends of ’40s Hollywood—turn this into a crackling espionage thriller with an all-time ending.
5. Fargo
God bless the Coen Brothers for injecting their unique brand of weird into what can often being a deadly serious genre. Add to that its emphatically rural and Midwestern flavors and you’ve got a neo-noir more vibrant and vital than an early-morning egg breakfast.
If you’re an artist of some kind, you’ve probably experienced this before.
You encounter a piece of art and the first feeling it provokes is Awe (“This is amazing”), followed by Envy (“I wish I’d made that”), and then Inspiration (“I want to make something like that”).
Ideally this becomes a virtuous cycle, a continuous process of input and output that leads to artistic fulfillment. But I often find myself somewhere between Awe and Envy: impressed by the work and regretful it’s not mine, but not in a bitter way.
That’s what I often feel while listening to my favorite band, The Okee Dokee Brothers. I heard them described somewhere as the Pixar of kids music, which is apt: they pack an amazing amount of artistry, wisdom, life-giving stories into seemingly simple folk tunes that appeal to all ages.
Here are a few I wish I’d written myself.
“Seasons in a Day” from Songs for Singin’. Using the phases of a day as a synecdoche for the four seasons is a stroke of genius.
When you drill down deeply into a single subject, you nearly always realize: Holy crap, this is more complex than I’d have thought. This is true of just about any subject, right? And it’s exactly the opposite feeling you get from a “big” book, which strives to make you feel like you understand how Everything Is Explained By This One Specific Idea. When you gloss over a subject from 50,000 feet in the air, as those big books often do, you can feel a sense of dangerous knowingness. You’ve been insulated from the gnarly details; you think you know what’s going on, but you really don’t.
In contrast, when you dive obsessively into a single, narrow subject, it humbles you about about the state of your overall knowledge. If there’s this much to know about cod — or pencils, or champagne and salt and ice and gramophones? Then you become usefully aware not of your knowledge but of your overall ignorance. You’re reminded that, as ever, that the devil’s in the details.
To paraphrase Rick from Casablanca, when it comes to history books I’m a true (small-d) democrat. I’ll take ‘em long or short, expansive or narrow. But I totally share Thompson’s love of microhistories. I just finished one recently for a book club (American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella) and have enjoyed many more, including:
Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair by Witold Rybczynski
A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers by Tom Standage
Seeing this Gore Verbinski joint in early high school did three important things: it initiated my undying love of Naomi Watts, it showed me how artful scary movies can be, and it scarred me so deeply that I subsequently swore off horror for a long time. So congrats to The Ring for killing both the VHS tape and my desire for cinematic scares.
2. Shaun of the Dead
As far as I’m concerned, this remains Edgar Wright’s best film. It establishes the tropes we’ve come to expect from the British writer-director’s oeuvre—snappy editing, ingenious use of music, an alchemical mix of humor and heart—while also injecting some scathing, 21st-century social satire into the zombie horror canon.
3. Alien
In space, no one can hear you scream “oh hell no” when an alien bursts through an astronaut’s chest and then torments the other poor souls trapped inside a spaceship with it. This was only Ridley Scott’s second film and you could argue that, in his now decades-long career, he never topped it.
4. Get Out
Though more psychological thriller than straight-up horror, Jordan Peele’s debut feature holds up beyond its hype and heralded twist simply because of how well it’s made. The cast, the script, and Peele’s attentive directorial eye all come together to create a story and setting that even a horror-averse scaredy cat like me couldn’t resist.
5. The Witches (1990)
Had to give some love to the film I watched at a sleepover as a kid and haunted me long after. Despite having read the Roald Dahl book it’s based on, I just wasn’t ready to see those evil child-hating witches come to life—though now, in retrospect, I’m absolutely here for Anjelica Huston really going for it.
I think there is one very good reason to cap our political hatred: it makes us miserable. Not because we’re always coming to blows with our political enemies—the data suggests that doesn’t happen very often—but because we’re always thinking about them. I’ve seen perfectly nice evenings turned dismal by the discussion of the latest political outrage. I’ve heard goodhearted people pine for the painful deaths of certain Supreme Court justices. I’ve watched friends pickle their brains in the poisonous brine of political Twitter. The true cost of partisan antipathy is not the war waged between us and our enemies, but the war we fight in our own heads.
I just think this a bad way to live. Indulge your contempt long enough and it’ll turn you stupid and mean. You’ll start thinking that pointless things are actually important, liking writing angry emails to your cousin or publishing the ten millionth scientific article on political polarization. You’ll live in the perpetual hell of a world that is always ending but never ends. I dunno man, maybe join a book club instead.
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.
