I recently went on a bike ride to the library with my 5 year old. It was the first time he was on his own (training-wheeled) bike instead of riding along in the trailer and it was really fun. He was so jazzed up about it, which caused him to start monologuing his thoughts throughout the entire ride.
Some of those thoughts morphed into what he considers the Rules for Biking, which are as follows:
1. “Always look forward, except when there’s wildlife or really beautiful parks, and you can just look for a second.”
2. “If you get a scrape on your leg, it looks cool. Not too much cool, just still a little bit of cool.”
3. “Everyone who loves biking should stick together.”
Bonus quote: “Ahhhh, don’t you just love having the wind in your face?”
Today our youngest turned one year old. He and I are often outside together like in this picture because it’s what makes him feel better when he’s upset. Walking around while holding him will get tougher as he grows and begins to walk, so I’m trying my best to cherish these moments before he goes off to make shadows of his own.
If someone I love wants me to go to a movie with them, I do.
I never hesitate to watch a favorite movie again when that’s where my whim takes me. In fact, I watch movies from my Blu-Ray/DVD collection more often than I stream anything.
It’s the other two that are head-scratchers for me:
I don’t watch movies produced and/or distributed by the big studios. (I had been leaning in this direction for a while, but I didn’t make it a guideline until three or four years ago.) I just don’t, for the same reason that I don’t read novels by people who live in Brooklyn: it’s not a good bet. The chance of encountering something excellent, or even interestingly flawed, is too remote. Not impossible — I really enjoyed Dune, for instance, and Oppenheimer, both of which I watched with my son — but remote.
I don’t subscribe to Netflix, or HBO, or Amazon Prime. The only service I subscribe to is the Criterion Channel, because it allows me to watch (a) classic movies, (b) independent movies, and (c) foreign movies. All of which are much better bets than anything the current big studios make.
The only streaming service we pay for is Prime since it’s bundled with our Amazon account. I’d love a Criterion Channel subscription, though between my Criterion Blu-rays, the public library, and my free Kanopy subscription through said library I already have classic, independent, and foreign films fairly at the ready.
And, having watched a goodly amount of all those, I gotta say I don’t think they are all “much better bets” than current studio fare. For every Citizen Kane or Blood Simple or Pather Panchali, there’s a dozen more titles in the back catalog that are just as mediocre as what today’s studios can put out. Just because they’re old or obscure or won’t show up in the Netflix Top 10 doesn’t make them inherently better than modern movies.
As for the big studios bit, here’s a list of titles produced and/or distributed by one of the Big Five studios since 2020 that Alan’s guidelines preclude him from seeing:
Nope
The Fabelmans
Jackass Forever
Top Gun: Maverick
Babylon
In the Heights
Encanto
The Beatles: Get Back
Barbarian
The Banshees of Inisherin
Theater Camp
Poor Things
All of Us Strangers
Not to mention titles that were streaming exclusives like:
The Wonder
The Vast of Night
Roma
The Irishman
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Palm Springs
Prey
The point is not what you think of each of these movies individually. (I happen to like, really like, or love all of them.) It’s that a formula that prevents you from seeing any of them seems to me too blunt-force and ascetic for its own good.
If it’s a matter of “too many movies, too little time” and wanting a reliable mechanism to separate the wheat from the chaff, then that’s something I can fully relate to. Life’s too short to watch bad movies, so (as with books) you should stop watching what you don’t like so you can spend your limited time on earth with what you do.
How do I decide what’s worth watching? I don’t have codified formula to fall back on, but here are several factors I might consider:
The writer/director
The cast
The premise or story
Historical or cultural significance
How well it’s regarded by people I love and/or whose taste I trust
How well it’s regarded by select critics whose taste I trust
How well it’s regarded by the cinephile community writ large
How likely it is I’ll enjoy it even if the above factors are lacking
The beauty is these apply to all kinds of movies: new and old, independent and studio-backed, English-language and international. And there’s not a certain amount of them I have to hit to say yes to a movie. It could be only one or even none and I could still decide to give it a go.
But even meeting all of them does not guarantee a hit. Every time I hit Play or enter a theater is a roll of the dice, and that’s the fun of it. What I watch could end up being gold or garbage or something in between. What keeps me coming back is the joy and anticipation of discovery, the possibility of being surprised or delighted no matter where the movie comes from.
That dedication to whim is something I gleaned from none other than Alan himself in the guidelines he set out in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Those guidelines apply just as much to movies as books or any other art form, and they’re reliable enough to lead you towards fruitful ends—with or without a big movie studio in the mix.
One of the many clichés you hear as a parent of littles from older parents is something to the effect of: “Cherish every moment—they grow up so fast.”
It’s something I’m also tempted to say to newer parents because kids do indeed grow up fast, and when you look at photos from when they were younger it’s easy to get wistful for those times.
But it’s also true that not every moment can or should be cherished, not when it’s full of screaming or sleep deprivation or pacifiers that need to be cleaned yet again. Sometimes you pine for that seemingly mythical future when the kids are older and life is easier and you can do things without a diaper bag or tantrum.
There are a few names you could call this phenomenon of living in the moment while longing for another:
Cognitive dissonance
“Two things are true” per the Good Inside philosophy of Dr. Becky Kennedy
What I’d call “improv parenting” – i.e. taking a “yes, and” approach
Whatever you want to call it, the idea of two conflicting states existing at the same time strongly resonates for me. It’s OK to acknowledge and accept whatever phase you’re currently in—newborn, toddler, teen, single or multiple kids, etc.—while also wishing you were in another. “Yes, I’m here right now. And I will be over there sooner than I realize.”
This perspective doesn’t erase or invalidate the (many) frustrations embedded in child-rearing. It merely helps you see and appreciate the good stuff in each phase, even when you’re deep in the trenches. It’s a reminder that life is fleeting, that each phase has its good and bad, fun and hard, and none of it lasts.
It started a few years ago when our firstborn got into our copy of The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs that plays a dozen different bird calls. Then one day while on a walk through our local park, I heard a call that I recognized from the book, so I knew right away: red-winged blackbird!
More recently I started using the free Merlin Bird ID app, which identifies birds based on their calls and has made me much more attuned to hearing new ones as we walk. According to that, our neighborhood is full of cardinals, robins, house sparrows, mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, white-breasted nuthatches, woodpeckers, and lots of other avian delights.
I’ve been on social media long enough to have accumulated a few pet peeves about how people interact online.
Here’s one: the phrase “do better.”
Much like its cousin “wake up”, “do better” signals a smug self-satisfaction that will justifiably be met with defensiveness by the accused and therefore a very low chance they will actually seek to “do better” (whatever that even means).
So if you actually want someone you disagree with to change their thinking or behavior, you’ll have to do better than “do better.”
Austin Kleon on a recent episode of the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast:
I truly believe that with a book, on a sentence to sentence level, I trust the turning of pages. There needs to be a momentum. If you’re turning pages, the book is good, and that includes the trash reading. I do my fair share of it. But I really trust the turning of the pages.
This is a beautiful phrase and important if counterintuitive concept. He was talking specifically about how quitting more books actually helps you read more because you’re much more likely to finish a book you actually like.
Certain kinds of reading are naturally more arduous than others, as this lover of presidential biographies can attest. But that’s the thing—I actually enjoy reading those weighty tomes, so even the arduous elements are still worth the effort and usually don’t stop me from keeping those pages turning.
So many people have this misbegotten belief that even reading for pleasure has to be hard work to be worthwhile. It’s often a vestige of schooling, where you’re assigned books and forced to read and write about them regardless of how much you like them. There’s a different kind of value in that exercise, but when we’re talking about reading for fun outside of educational or professional obligations there’s just no excuse for it.
I half-joked in my Oppenheimer blurb that I have a long list of history books that also deserve to be turned into IMAX-worthy epics.
Well, I’m happy to report my favorite author Steven Johnson is also on board with this movement—specifically for the story of penicillin and other incredible scientific achievements:
If Nolan can create an IMAX blockbuster out of quantum mechanics and Atomic Energy Commission hearings, surely someone could make a compelling film out of this material. There’s even a crazy subplot—that I also wrote about in Extra Life—where Hitler’s life is saved by American penicillin after the 1944 Wolf’s Lair assassination attempt. And yet, for some reason, those films just don’t seem to get made.
We get endless entertainment offerings about the Apollo missions, but nothing about the global triumph of eradicating smallpox. We get big-budget features following brilliant scientists as they figure out ever-more-effective means of conducting mass slaughter, and not films about brilliant scientists collaborating to keep soldiers and civilians from dying horrifying deaths from sepsis and other infections. Apparently, we like rockets and bombs more than pills and needles—or at least that’s what we’re told we like.
Johnson’s books are great examples of nonfiction page-turners that could easily be movie material, from the pirates of Enemy of All Mankind to the epidemiological murder mystery at the center of The Ghost Map. Not to mention any number of the threads within Extra Life or How We Got to Now that show the unlikely and riveting origins of miraculous innovations we now take for granted.
I brought physical media back into my life not to replace streaming, but to keep streaming in its place.
I heard an audiophile once say that he treated streaming music services (even lossless streaming) like radio. It’s great for discovering new music and artists, and to play at parties, but it’s not for serious listening. I think that’s a perfect analogy.
Movies are my physical media collecting medium of choice, but the analogy stands. Streamers are not infinite archives—they’re good for conveniently spotlighting new and selected titles for only a certain amount of time.
If you truly love a title, get a physical copy and don’t surrender to the vicissitudes of media conglomerates whose only concern is their bottom line.
Rivaling Winston Churchill’s missive on brevity, this 1944 memo by Maury Maverick is the first known use of the word gobbledygook and dishes out some hard truths about good writing:
Be short and use Plain English.
Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow. The Naval officer who wired “Sighted Sub — Sank Same” told the whole story.
Put the real subject matter — the point — and even the conclusion, in the opening paragraph and the whole story on one page. Period! If a lengthy explanation, statistical matter, or such is necessary, use attachments.
Stay off gobbledygook language. It only fouls people up. For the Lord’s sake, be short and say what you’re talking about. Let’s stop “pointing-up” programs, “finalizing” contracts that “stem from” district, regional or Washington “levels”. There are no “levels” — local government is as high as Washington Government. No more patterns, effectuating, dynamics. Anyone using the words “activation” or “implementation” will be shot.
It’s hard to even imagine now, but aimlessly browsing bookstores was something I did semi-regularly back in my single and then pre-kid days. One kind of book I’d always keep an eye out for was (for lack of a better name) word compendiums, an author’s curated collection of rare, idiosyncratic, or just plain cool words.
Here’s my own collection of these collections, which also includes a few gifted to me:
How could you not love books with ostentatious, tongue-in-cheek titles like The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate that feature antiquated or unusual words like nepheligenous and bavardage that only logophiles like myself appreciate?
I love them because they catalog the kind of two-dollar words I already collect myself. You can find most of those words in any self-respecting unabridged dictionary, but surrounded by thousands of other less-cool words. These compendiums distill the dictionary into its finest, most potent form, and for that they have my deep respect—not to mention a place on my limited bookshelves.
Something I learned a long time ago is that it is a great help to the artist to believe that there are no coincidences. One way to boost your curiosity is to just assume that everything in life is a clue left from the universe for further investigation. Follow the clues the universe drops for you, and you will almost always learn something interesting. Take everything as a sign and you’ll be less stumped about what to do next.
Dune: Part Two. I couldn’t see Dune on the big screen so I was glad to catch this one. Anytime I can see a big, weird, tactile, religion-infused spectacle like this is a good time for me.
Masters of the Air. Produced by the same people behind Band of Brothers and The Pacific, this miniseries on Apple TV+ focuses on the airmen of the 100th Bomb Group during World War II and is well worth your time.
Molli and Max in the Future. Delightful revamp of When Harry Met Sally with a sardonic, sci-fi twist.
The Cranes Are Flying. Rather astounding 1957 Soviet movie about the ramifications of war.
A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage. From the author of The Victorian Internet, this hit the spot for millennia-spanning history, trivia, and troublesome truisms about transportation.
As with last year’s list, I decided to skip the usual pressure to make a top 10 by the end of the year without having seen a bunch of the eligible movies. Instead I took my time, waiting to watch titles as they hit streaming or Blu-ray so I’d have a better shot at a list that more accurately reflected my favorites from 2023.
There are still several I haven’t gotten to yet unfortunately (RIP my moviegoing after child #2). But with the Oscars upon us, I figured now would be the best time to close out another year in movies.
On to my top 10…
10. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain
Odds are your enjoyment of this will be directly proportional to your enjoyment of the video shorts of Please Don’t Destroy, who wrote and starred in this rather ridiculous romp. I’m a huge fan, therefore I had a great time with this. Does it suffer from the SNL Movie Syndrome of feeling stretched out beyond its sketch-based form? A little bit. Is it also consistently hilarious? You bet.
9. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
If you make a documentary related to Back to the Future, I’m gonna watch it. This one also happens to be really well done, making creative use of reenactments alongside Fox’s talking heads, memoirs, and TV/movie appearances to tell his life story. And he’s still funny as hell despite the effects of Parkinson’s. (I had a blast interviewing the movie’s editor and geeking out about all things BTTF.)
8. Poor Things
There’s just nothing like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. And there’s no one acting quite like Emma Stone these days. Their creative alchemy yielded this deeply weird, dark, funny, and feminist picaresque that had me alternating between “ha” and “huh?” quite frequently.
7. Theater Camp
I never cease to marvel at the magic of musical theater, whatever the context. To go from absolutely nothing to a collection of songs, complex choreography, manufactured sets and costumes, all combined into an entertaining story? Sign me up every time. Cheers to this ensemble cast of young performers who managed to do that in this mockumentary while selling both the over-the-top satire of showbiz life and the earnest appreciation of doing what they love.
6. Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan, call your agent: I’ve got a long list of supposedly “uncinematic” history books filled with people talking in rooms that Oppenheimer proves should in fact be turned into IMAX-worthy epics.
5. The Killer
WeirdhowDavid Fincher can drop a sleek “The Bourne Identity meets Adaptation” gem like this starring A-lister Michael Fassbender and have it feel completely forgotten by year’s end. (That’s the Netflix Effect for you, I guess…) This story of an assassin cleaning up a botched job really opens up when you realize it’s actually a comedy, with said assassin the butt of the joke just as often as he is a savvy operator. More Fassbender/Fincher collabs, please.
4. Reality
Much like Oppenheimer, this is an excellent 2023 movie featuring a government contractor being interrogated for their motivations and questionable conduct related to sensitive national security intelligence. Unlike Oppenheimer, it’s only 82 minutes—yet remains a riveting, slow-burn docudrama with an impressive performance by Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner.
3. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
A great coming of age story, family dramedy, exploration of religion, female-centric story, and year-in-the-life movie all in one. Kudos to writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig for sticking the landing in adapting a legendary story while also launching a career in Abby Ryder Fortson and surrounding her with A+ supporting talent.
2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Reports about the death of multiverse storytelling have been greatly exaggerated. As a middle sequel continuing the story of its predecessor and setting up the third installment, it has structural limitations that prevent it from hitting the same level as Into the Spider-Verse. But, much like its titular hero Miles Morales, damned if it doesn’t overcome the odds to spin an extraordinary web nevertheless.
1. Four Daughters
This documentary follows a Tunisian family whose two eldest daughters succumbed to fundamentalism and joined ISIS, with the spin that the director (Kaouther Ben Hania) has hired actors to play the disappeared daughters and recreate scenes from the family’s history along with the remaining sisters and mother. This unique approach leads to some stunning emotional moments, not to mention a complicated and cathartic journey for the real family as they try to make sense of the ineffable with humanity, gravity, and even comedy. (Another riveting documentary—and favorite of 2021—I had top of mind while watching this was Netflix’s Procession, which also featured real survivors of a different sort reckoning with their trauma through artifice.)
Still haven’t seen:American Fiction, The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, The Taste of Things, Perfect Days
