hello, apologies to whoever reads this, because I have been moving and re-adjusting to post-daylight savings seasonal depression.
it’s the most wonderful time of the year. I say that as a pretty active member of the Holiday Hater House, though the holidays themselves are usually fine. It’s the marketing the rest of the time that gets me. Movies! They’re good again! But they don’t always make it to Seattle, at least within a reasonable timeline. dear A24: please date The Zone of Interest and Janet Planet in my city, ASAP. please and thank you.
perhaps in the future I’ll stick to the weekly wrap ups, but I worry I have more to say about stuff on a month-to-month basis. hopefully this will allow me to write more…other stuff. and I haven’t done much of that lately, despite my belief that moving is one of life’s great palate cleansers. and lord knows I’ve been reading slow.
movies:
MAY DECEMBER: Unbelievable that I watched something maybe better than Oppenheimer this year, but here we are. Todd Haynes is a treasure, as is his work, and he’s got truly one of the most eclectic filmographies around that nonetheless grows deeper within itself the more movies he directs. I like Safe but have only seen it once, and I love Carol and Dark Waters and Far From Heaven. I can’t quite put my finger on why May December felt beforehand as though it would be a minor work from Haynes, save for the Netflix of it all. Within ten minutes, I knew that was not the case. It’s a deliriously overdramatic cringe comedy with an all-timer from Natalie Portman. I was smiling ear to ear from the jump because I knew right away that people will see the subject matter on Netflix and not merely scroll away, but that plenty will probably comment to themselves about the audacity of all involved to make a movie about a teacher who slept with her student and had children with him. Their loss: heterosexuality is insanity, and no one is better than Haynes at showing us that.
SNEAKERS: What a surprising picture. Never before have I been so eager to see where Ben Kingsley is going to show up 45 minutes into a movie! One of the great early techno-thrillers, in league with stuff like Strange Days, although Sneakers has a much more optimistic view of what technology can be used for than its counterpart. Even Kingsley -- the villain, a lost friend and former hacking buddy of (the foxy af) Robert Redford’s character -- wants to basically rebuild the world order with the McGuffin device everyone is trying to get their hands on. The internet was still a broad and pretty untread territory in 1992, which in turn makes the cantankerous blend of characters -- young and old, tech-savvy and street-savvy -- a fun mix to spend two hours with I highly recommend the Unclear and Present Danger episode on Sneakers. It was the first episode I listened to and I was surprised by the depth of analysis into post-Cold War media. Really enjoyed the movie and the podcast.
THE HOLDOVERS: This is the first Oscar season in which Alexander Payne is involved that I’ve paid serious attention to while also being old enough to see and actually evaluate all the contenders. So it’s been a thrill to see The Holdovers holding strong throughout an extended platform release in theaters, as well as to see positive word-of-mouth from audiences of all ages. It’s one of my favorites of the year, and is somewhat of a counterpart to May December in that The Holdovers is very sincerely funny as well as devastating, whereas May December is the tongue-in-cheek version of both of those things. Giamatti amazing, Dominic Sessa amazing. The Christmas party is my favorite scene of this year.
LOST IN TRANSLATION: Rewatched to prep for Priscilla, which I thought was perfectly fine. This, however, kind of defies words. ScarJo is never once scared or put off by the anti-magnetic fame of Bill Murray’s character. Nor does she prod, which tends to be the first thing people do around famous people in their efforts to relate. Then these two characters settle into a sort of shared tender understanding: it’s not romance, it might be love, but regardless, it’s a sensation few other movies have matched.
SALTBURN: I’m a Saltburn defender, but I’m not sure why. It’s much more peculiar than Promising Young Woman, which I remember looking forward to and finding weirdly bland before loathing the (apparently meddled-with) ending. So I had low expectations for Emerald Fennell’s sophomore feature, but around the hour mark I found myself enjoying it, nearly without reservation. I think the screenplay is sincerely honed in on all the wrong things -- it renders Barry Keoghan’s sexual-but-not-romantic obsession with the truly radiant Jacob Elordi the centerpiece, instead of with the lifestyle Elordi’s character Felix and his family lead. And that misguidedness renders somewhat mute whatever thematics Fennell is going for, but if you enter into Saltburn with the understanding that it can be a mindless and kind of pulpy story about One Crazy Summer, there is fun to be had. The photography by the great Linus Sandgren is a bonus.
YELLA: “Earlier” (pre-Phoenix) Christian Petzold movies are popping up on MUBI and I’m very excited to continue watching. Yella is one of Petzold’s collaborations with the great Nina Hoss (whom I discovered watching TÁR), as are Jerichow, Phoenix, Barbara, and more. I really love Barbara, in which Hoss plays a downright ornery doctor sent to a Stasi hospital. (There’s a reason she’s so ornery.) In Yella, Hoss is more vulnerable. She is running away from her abusive ex-husband and taking work as an accountant in a different part of Germany. I can’t really say much more than that without kind of giving the whole thing away, which I feel comfortable doing but don’t want to dedicate an inordinate amount of text to what would probably just be a bad Wikipedia summary, because Petzold’s movies work on me on a sensual, emotional level but I rarely remember the plot beat-to beat. Suffice to say this reminded me of Vanilla Sky.
AFIRE: Petzold’s clapback to the liberal, intellectual American idea that northern Europe should be the first place we’re all going to flee the effects of climate change. Here is a bona fide class comedy that knows your upbringing, your job, your novels, are irrelevant to whether or not you die in a fire. My favorite Letterboxd review of the year is a review of this movie.
It’s Prestige Movie Season, so I’ll surely have a lot to say in a month’s time when I’ve seen THE IRON CLAW, FERRARI, POOR THINGS, AMERICAN FICTION, MONSTER, and more.
reading
my progress with SAY NOTHING continues. It’s a great but slow read; I’ve got about fifty pages to go.
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM: I’m considering reading every Didion book I own in a row (it’s at least eight). STB says that was a good idea. Didion floated through time and space to pass judgment on nearly any topic -- her essay in Where I Was From, “Trouble in Lakewood,” is a touchstone. But she was equally capable of expressing the internal and the external with equal force. Favorites in this collection include “On Keeping a Notebook,” “On Self-Respect,” “I Can’t Get That Monster out of My Mind,” “Where The Kissing Never Stops,” and the self-titled essay, which is one of the saddest things I have ever read.
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND: the perfect reading slumpbuster! I thought the movie was hitting Netflix like two weeks before it actually does, so I unnecessarily devoured this novel that I would imagine is going to be much vaster and broader than a book that rarely leaves a single Long Island AirBnb. Not to mention, the book doesn’t have much of an ending whatsoever! Excited to see how it translates to film.
The Nation’s obituary of Henry Kissinger, almost certainly the best piece of writing I’ll see online this year.
food, music, etc.
My Spotify Wrapped top 5:
Can’t Hardly Wait, The Replacements
Can You Hear The Music, Ludvig Göransson
Welcome to the DCC, Nothing But Thieves
Overcome, Nothing But Thieves
iT, Christine and the Queens
I made two Half-Baked Harvest recipes this week: Red Curry Garlic Noodles (with chicken instead of beef) and Hot Honey Garlic Chicken with zucchini and avocado and rice. I also used a can of tomatoes I’ve had since the move to make a scratch vodka cream sauce that yielded like three dinners and just kept getting tastier.
Halfbaked Harvest stan here - my favorite evergreen recipes from her are:
The easiest ramen soup concoction you'll ever make: https://www.halfbakedharvest.com/20-minute-thai-peanut-chicken-ramen/
This egg breakfast thing that really really punches above its weight: https://www.halfbakedharvest.com/crispy-parmesan-and-pesto-egg-in-a-bagel/
These weird little frozen banana bites that are not a good winter snack but really hit in August: https://www.halfbakedharvest.com/frozen-chocolate-covered-banana-bites/
apology accepted