Dry January, logged

you heard me

hello! today is the warmest day of the year so far, and it is the only good thing that has happened to the world in 2024 so far. The Super Bowl matchup is flat-out disgusting. America lost, yes, but America also deserves it. I wonder if we are looking down the barrel of a year of bills coming due. But for now, we press on towards a post-Super Bowl reality in which the days are longer, warmer, more social. I’m in the process of choosing a European football club, but I’m still getting the hang of keeping track of the different tournaments, which is more fun than watching one team.

I have been reading, but not as much as I would like. I have been watching a surprising amount of films but not much TV. and I’m weirdly unimpressed with myself, which I wonder if I should interrogate at all. Probably not here, but I’ll mix things up for now.

I finished Birnam Wood and it’s not leaving my brain anytime soon. I’m such a sucker for a narrative that builds and builds and builds and then comes crashing down and the story ends and you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. This is the thing that makes Whiplash great that no one really talks about, and there’s a movie later on down the list that uhhhh might have found a similar rule useful. But there’s so much more than just its ending to love about Birnam Wood! It really does read like a first draft, as though the words just came pouring from Eleanor Catton’s fingers and she started and never stopped. Catton is on the record that the book’s big argument scene (not going to spoil -- it is worth experiencing on one’s own merits) that ends the first half (ish) of the book was by far the hardest part to write, which makes sense: very rarely has a writer in any genre captured what growing up with the internet is doing to the behavior of well-meaning young radicals, and why the left is struggling to fight a more easily homogenized conservative movement across much of the world. The book has been marketed as a psychological thriller. It sort of is that, but is much more a story of how we market ourselves to each person we meet, how we consequently come across differently to every person in the world, and the dissonance caused when those brands start to run into each other. A masterpiece. Would love to see this adapted with Jeremy Strong playing the villain in sort of a mild pivot from 

Kendall Roy -- far more self-assured, but dressed the exact same way.

• highly recommend the reviews in the New Yorker (a sorta profile-lite of Catton) and the New York Times as well as this piece that Catton wrote for The Guardian, about her youth experiences in the New Zealand wilderness, which she referenced in this talk regarding her previous, Booker-winning novel, The Luminaries. I have yet to take that 900-page book on but I instead opted to start Catton’s debut, The Rehearsal. Weird book so far! But weird in a fun way; it’s a bit like a puzzle.

Let’s see…I mentioned The Rehearsal, I’ve checked my Favorites folder… Patrick Radden Keefe’s profile of Scott Frank in the New Yorker is awesome but I’m spending far too much time recommending only one magazine so I need to get my shit together on that front. (My tabs are never a giant issue but you would not believe what my bookmarks bar looks like.) I’ve started a lot of things -- a Shirley Hazzard short story collection; the Sam Wasson book about Francis Ford Coppola -- but I don’t yet know how those are turning out.

speaking of Scott Frank, I watched the first two episodes of Monsieur Spade. hard to find, and I don’t really have any strong feelings yet about it. But it’s Clive Owen investigating a murder in the south of France, so it has to be good. right?

finished 100 Foot Wave and The Curse. I love 100 Foot Wave and will watch all of it but it mostly just makes me want to go surfing or meditate -- it feels like it’s repeating itself a bit much by the end of the second season. The Curse, on the other hand, clarified itself in ways I was completely unprepared for. “Is this the week I don’t watch The Curse?” I wondered for four or five straight weeks. But I never quit, I persevered, and was rewarded with legitimately the most bugnuts finale I can remember seeing. I’m not smart enough to make Lynch comparisons or invoke the films directed by Albert Brooks, but The Curse was always original and never scared. I don’t even know where to look to find good pieces of writing about it.

AMERICAN FICTION: A very broad and very funny studio comedy is still one of the Oscar frontrunners but y’all were too mad about Barbie to even bother looking up. 

ALL OF US STRANGERS: I’m not sure whether it’s good or not but Andrew Haigh deserves the Best Director Oscar just for writing this screenplay and then even trying to direct it himself. I suppose I should have known how distressing this would secretly be after watching 45 Years to prepare but I was nevertheless caught very off-guard. As such, the criticism (which I was surprised to see is far more numerous than I would have thought) has stuck in my craw a little more than I’d perhaps like. Movie wouldn’t work at all without Andrew Scott, but Paul Mescal and Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are all very affecting. Mescal’s drunk acting is so top-tier generally but especially in his first scene in this. shoutout Pet Shop Boys.

MONA LISA SMILE/NOTTING HILL: Julia Roberts. (also John Slattery in MLS!!!!!!!)

FREMONT: really effective sort of deadpan tragicomedy about an Afghan woman who immigrated to the US thanks in large part to her work as a translator with the Army. Fremont depicts her misadventures around the titular California city, which is exactly the kind of place Joan Didion was talking about when she wrote that people drive certain highways only for business, because otherwise it’s the kind of California that no one wants to acknowledge exists. There’s a delightful surprise near the end of this film that isn’t a well-kept secret but I think is nonetheless fun.

LANDSCAPE WITH INVISIBLE HAND: Sci-fi metaphor is a real take it or leave it thing for me. I love THEY LIVE, for instance, but that doesn’t necessarily belabor its point in the way that this did. I didn’t hate it, as it was somewhat effective as far as the “feeling bad about capitalism” goes, but I don’t really think alien overlords is a topic screaming out for an analogous take set in a crumbling high school.

THE CRYING GAME: something about these Brits in the 80s and 90s is so serenely satisfying to me. The topic of the film doesn't necessarily matter -- I just find the time and place immensely satisfying, although it is a plus whenever you can get Jim Broadbent to play a guy named Col who sees all. I knew The Crying Game has a famous twist involving a trans character but I did not know anything beyond that; I was inspired to watch it after finishing Say Nothing because Stephen Rea was married for a time to Dolours Price, one of the book’s main characters. Was not prepared for the Forest Whitaker stuff to be as heartbreaking as it is. The “twist” that involve Whitaker’s death (not the other twist) is far more moving to me, even if it is a bit convenient screenwriting. Surprised more people don’t talk about this as a ghost story; 1992 one of the great years for ghost stories! (whenever I can bring up The Secret History, I will.)

THE ZONE OF INTEREST: tricky one. it is, in fact, what the logline says, but the most compelling piece of Jonathan Glazer’s new picture is how much it’s about a guy working the corporate ladder, and how that fact has stolen all his humanity before the movie even begins. reminded me of Revolutionary Road (book not movie) wherein the characters are not merely in denial about the evil havoc they are wreaking on an entire continent, but also about the fact that they are so clearly unhappy that they don’t know what the hell else to do. Do not ever listen to anyone but yourself when deciding what your life should be. I suppose you could be worse things than unhappy, but the odds of unhappiness are quite…