For me, the title Pigen med Nålen immediately conjures the late 18th century Sturm und Drang play by Heinrich Leopold Wagner Die Kindermörderin (The Childmurderess). That brutal drama is about a woman made pregnant by a lover and then abandoned. She is, of course, treated as a whore and shunned from society. In despair, terrible poverty, and hunger, she goes mad and eventually murders her baby by shoving a hatpin into its brain. It's a wild and dynamic play (as are all of the plays from the Sturm und Drang)with an especially gruesome ending.
In other words, is there any way a movie called The Girl with the Needle is going to be about something other than murdered infants?
This movie is very good, but it is a very difficult watch, and I am not sure there is anyone I could recommend it to. Strangely, however, it has picked up rather a lot of traction for the Best International Feature Oscar. It is Denmark's pick for the big award, and it was named a finalist in mid-December. It has also earned itself a Golden Globe nomination and the National Board of Review named it one of the top six foreign films of the year.
The Girl with a Needle is a bleak social-problem film with a deeply troubling score (it's honestly brilliant). It's superbly acted (Trine Dyrholm is especially great), and it's filled with fucked up imagery and curious visual puzzles. I was into it, but this is gothic terror along the lines of last year's El Conde but without the satirical humor.
In the middle of a very busy end-of-year movie blitz I took time out to see The War of the Rohirrim because I can’t say no to Tolkien content—I'm such a Tolkien nerd that I've been making my own Middle Earth Connections puzzles—but this animated film was quite boring.
The War of the Rohirrim follows a very cool story in the history of the Kings of the Mark (in the first appendix to The Return of the King), although the film's version of this story been altered a good deal to invent a heroine who is the new central figure of the story (she doesn't even have a name in the original book). All of that is sort of fine. It's explained by the narrator that this is a version of the tale you won't find in the story books. But then the execution of this reinvention doesn't quite work. The animation is strange—two-dimensional figures running around in three-dimensional scenery—and the focus of the film seems off at all times, as if the screenwriters were trying to work more into the story than needed to be there. To my mind, the screenplay is really the problem here. For me, the emotional moments just didn’t land, and the whole thing felt stilted.
But if you want to do a Middle Earth Connections puzzle, try one of these. I think I've gotten better at it, so X is probably a lot better than I. Maybe start with X:
The End has some pretty wonderful things in it. I was especially interested in the film’s approach to the apocalypse and its real reckoning with the ethics of apocalyptic survival strategies (something akin to the work of Octavia Butler in fiction). And although I initially thought this film’s lessons were a bit smug and obvious, I was really taken by its very, very smart approach to honesty and forgiveness. If things are either only good or bad and we refuse to engage with anything we deem bad or dishonest, we will find ourselves isolated and unloved. This is a wise take.
Still, The End didn’t quite work for me. I loved all the actors, but the characters felt too strange and awkward, and I just couldn’t understand the central “Son” figure and his behavior. I had an impossible time identifying with him despite my desire to and my love for George MacKay.
Pablo Larraín is doing his usual Pablo Larraín thing here. For my money, Maria is not nearly as good as Spencer, but it's a good deal better than Jackie (not that that would be difficult).
On the one hand Maria is overwrought and melodramatic and excessive. It frequently feels theatrical and false, calling attention to itself as a performance or dramatization. But on the other hand, all of the masks in Maria feel true and deep and desperate.
In many ways, although this is a film about a diva who was never not on stage, never not faking it, Larraín gets to something honest and sensitive. Just because the tears had to be manufactured doesn’t mean they don’t come from real grief.
The art direction is gorgeous in this, and the makeup is exquisite. Jolie is luminous and every bit the movie star. I was also in love with Pierfrancesco Favino (he’s always good, but he is the real heart of Maria, and he teaches us how to love her).
I love August Wilson's play—in fact, I just re-read it last month—but this film did not work for me. I guess I feel like the direction made a hash of what the story is about. I understand that The Piano Lesson is a ghost story, one where history is literally in the room with us, but for director Malcolm Washington that meant haunted house tropes of water running along the floor, flickering light bulbs, apparitions floating down wells, and scary music. Maybe this could have been ok, but the haunted-house approach seems to have been the only part of the story that Washington brought clarity to. The rest of the movie felt very confused to me, as if even the stuff in the play that isn’t about haunting is somehow also merely second fiddle to the horror-movie techniques he’s enjoying. So Berniece's bath sequence becomes a vaguely tense and troubling scenario rather than a sexy/romantic one, and even the watermelons feel loaded with scary ghost-meanings.
For most of the movie Washington is committed to his haunted-house, horror-film angle. And yet… all of a sudden we’re out at the nightclub and the movie version of The Piano Lesson becomes something else altogether—a wild dance party. And when we’re down in Louisiana the film’s style shifts yet again—a kind of strobe-lit wash of weird colors juxtaposed with faux-haunting CGI that isn't in accord with the same haunted-house language in the Pittsburgh scenes. It's four different movies, and this makes a bit of a mess of August Wilson's play.
I liked John David Washington’s Boy Willie. He’s pretty marvelous, but then I love him in everything, honestly. And of course Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts are solid in supporting roles. But the director just couldn’t choose a tone, and I think the film really suffers for it.
1. What did you do in 2024 that you'd never done before?
I learned to shuck oysters. I edited my first journal articles—a taste of editing that will continue into 2025. Won Lord of the Rings bar trivia on a first date with a guy.
As I look back on this year, I'm feeling like I spent most of it focused on work. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean I have to answer this question by saying I didn't have a lot of experiences that were brand new to me.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My new years resolutions for 2024 were to cook more vegetarian food. I succeeded at this. I also had high hopes that I would work less (failed at this one) and that I would stay current with all seasons of Drag Race (succeeded at this one). I also had a goal of reading more books than usual (I hit my usual GoodReads goal of 125 but didn't do better than that) and reading my friends books in particular (I did do better at this in 2024, but I will do even better in 2025).
Next year, I really really want to make a deal with myself that I will do less work for my employer, that I will work out more regularly, and that I will spend more time traveling and visiting friends.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My friends Daniel and Alex had a son named Adrian.
4. Did anyone close to you die?
No one close to me died this year. My mom passed in 2023, and her absence in my life is still something I feel pretty acutely. As a matter of fact, today I went to the store to shop for groceries for Xmas dinner and this would almost always have been something mom and I did together. We did this together for years—more than a decade—and it felt very strange not to have her here with me. I think about her a lot.
5. What countries did you visit?
None.
6. What would you like to have in 2025 that you lacked in 2024?
I have so much! This is a difficult question.
Bigger muscles. 😁
7. What dates from 2024 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Manuscript deadlines: July 31 and December 15 were my most important deadlines this year. But also some really crazy shit went down on the first day of classes of Fall 2024. I won't soon forget that day (maybe I'll say more about that down below, or maybe you'll just have to get the tea from me in person).
Perhaps most importantly I was promoted to associate professor and granted tenure on August 8. They draw this out for a very long time: I heard last December that my file would be forwarded to the president of the university. Then I got notified in February or March that I would be granted tenure once my fall contract started. So people would congratulate me on tenure and I would always reply that I didn't actually have tenure yet. I became mildly obsessed with the delay related to this, worried constantly that Florida's neo-fascist politics would somehow disrupt things. In any case, August 8 came and went, and now I'm an associate professor.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? A book contract for my dissertation book, The Violate Man. It has been such a long time coming for this manuscript. I've been working on it (on and off) for maybe 15 years now, and I think the manuscript is in great shape. It has an editor who loves it. And it is filled with important and interesting case studies.
It was also an enormous achievement to publish my special section in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism on "Drag vs. the Law". This is an area of research in which I've become very invested, and it was exciting to be able to publish my colleagues' writing about drag and how it has interacted with and intersected with the law.
I was also really pleased to have an article in Shakespeare Bulletin this year: "'Against Interpretation': Actor-Driven Shakespeare and a Love for Scholarship". It's a fun piece, I think, and it allowed me to do some very interesting research on the American Shakespeare Center, a theatre company in Central Virginia of which I am very fond.
9. What was your biggest failure?
Sometimes I'm really not a very good friend. My introversion takes over and I need time to myself to reboot and recharge, and this can lead me to be antisocial, to neglect my best long-distance friendships, and to hurt other people's feelings in the process. I hate when this happens, and I'm always very sorry, but I think perhaps this trait is getting worse as I get older.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I really didn't. I seem to be doing alright!
11. What was the best thing you bought?
A new 14-cup Cuisinart food processor. It's so cool. I got it on sale on Black Friday at a reasonable price, but I think it's probably worth the full price.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My friend Michelle Carriger won the Barnard Hewitt award this year for her book Theatricality of the Closet! I was also so excited to see Andrew Rincón's play I Wanna Fuck like Romeo and Juliet nominated for a Lambda award. (Actually, shout out to the judges for the theatre portion of the Lambda Literary Awards—the plays are bad almost every year, but this year they were almost uniformly excellent!)
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Florida voters, American voters, Republicans in congress, Democrats in congress, genocide apologists. It has been an appalling, depressing year, honestly.
14. Which charitable organizations did you give to?
I also donated money to help some students in need and some former students making their first independent films.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Dune: Part Two
Vacationing on St. George Island with Meredith and Jason in May.
Visiting Caleb and Diana in North Carolina a little later in May.
The American Society for Theatre Research conference in Seattle in November.
16. What song will always remind you of 2024?
This isn't a 2024 song, but after Gavin Creel passed away this year, I listened to him sing "What Can You Lose" on a loop for days. I have always loved the way he sang that song, and I've always loved the song.
"No One Else", "Dust and Ashes", and other songs from Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, which FSU did as our Spring musical in 2024. I worked as the show's dramaturge and saw it dozens of times, and our students—really our whole School—did an amazing job with this show. (Here's the dramaturgical material I produced for the students.)
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Happier.
b) thinner or fatter? Fatter.
c) richer or poorer? Richer.
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Reading Early Modern drama with Michelle, Joe, Donovan, and Walter.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Teaching classes to graduate students who either hadn't done the reading or simply decided not to show up to class.
20. How did you spend the Winter holidays?
I am in California for a little over a week, seeing family and friends and trying to get in a little rest, as well. I've already gone on a hike in Griffith Park with my friend John, baked three different batches of cookies, eaten dumplings like five times, and taken a little pilgrimage to my childhood home (which looks completely different!). Also, I need you all to know that even the cheap Mexican food in any small suburb of Los Angeles is exponentiallybetter than the Mexican food where I live in Florida or anywhere else I've lived. I know "nobody walks in LA" but when I'm in Los Angeles I also like to walk, especially in some of these beautiful California parks.
21. Did you fall in love in 2024?
I did not.
22. How many one-night stands?
Only a few. I really need to get better at this. I wonder what is wrong with me. Maybe I secretly believe I am unattractive and unlovable. This is probably it.
23. What was your favorite TV program?
I watched way more TV than usual this year. For research purposes, I watched Baby Reindeer and I May Destroy You. For fun I watched season two of The Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, which was... not good. But I am not really sure if it's objectively not good or if I just don't like TV. I find television so annoying. It all just takes so long. Everything is so unnecessarily drawn out. I tried to watch The Decameron because I love Amar Chadha-Patel and because I thought Karan Gill was so handsome in I May Destroy You, and also because I just love the actual Decameron, but I couldn't get into it.
And then I kept my New Year's resolution to stay current with all seasons of Drag Race. This also meant catching up with earlier seasons so I would have all the background I needed and know all the returning queens on the All Stars seasons. So...
I watched Drag Race México season 1, Drag Race España season 3, Drag Race España All Stars, Drag Race France season 2, Drag Race Belgique season 2, RuPaul's Drag Race: UK vs the World season 2 (with the most absurd upset), RuPaul's Drag Race season 16 (with the best upset), Drag Race Brasil season 1, Drag Race Germany season 1, RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under season 3, Drag Race France season 3, Canada's Drag Race season 4, RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars season 9 (big no to this winner), Canada's Drag Race: Canada vs. the World season 2 (these vs. the world seasons are the fuckin' worst), Drag Race México, season 2, RuPaul's Drag Race UK season 5, Drag Race Philippines season 3, RuPaul's Drag Race Global All Stars (probably one of the worst seasons ever), RuPaul's Drag Race UK season 6, Drag Race España season 4, Drag Race Thailand season 3, and Drag Race Down Under season 4 (why does this still exist?). Overall I would say this was too much drag race, but it won't happen again. Even if I stay current again, I wont have to watch past seasons to catch up. And anyway, I really wanted to catch up on the past seasons, and now there are only three past seasons I haven't seen (and does The Switch even count?).
OK wait. One more TV thing. I also watched My Secret Agent Husband on the DramaBox app. It is an absolutely ridiculous show that was filmed to be watched in the aspect ratio of an iPhone. It was gay and very stupid, and I had a great time. I can't recommend it, of course, but... I kind of want to watch it again.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
No. I don't think so.
25. What was the best book you read?
Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. This is a classic, of course, and it's a classic for a reason. It's wonderful. I also adored Henry James's The Wings of the Dove.
For nonfiction, I really fell in love with Avgi Saketopoulou's Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, Kareem Khubchandani's Decolonize Drag, La Paperon's A Third University Is Possible,and Tina Post's Deadpan: the Aesthetics of Black Inexpression.
I also loved a whole bunch of plays that were new to me: Emma Wipperman's Joan of Arkansas, Rajiv Joseph's Describe the Night, Jaclyn Backhaus's You on the Moors Now,Sabrina Mahfouz's A History of Water in the Middle East, Harrison David Rivers' The Bandaged Place, and Nazareth Hassan's Untitled. (1-5).
I started seriously listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto in 2024—not just his film music. I love his stuff.
27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw?
I drove down to Tampa in August to see Dan Caffrey's play The Amphibians at Think Tank Theatre. I had a great time at this play. I also really loved our production of Great Comet and I'm very proud of that.
28. What did you want and get?
Tenure, a publishing agreement for The Violate Man, nudes in my DMs, and so much tinned fish (I've become completely obsessed with tinned fish and I now buy regularly from four different companies).
29. What did you want and not get?
A crop of limes from my lime trees. I really need to work on my gardening and cultivation this year. I started trying in 2024 but kind of failed. Maybe in 2025!
30. What was your favorite film of this year?
So far it's Andrea Arnold's Bird.
However, I have around sixty-five movies on my unseen-movies list for 2024. I'll probably see thirty-five of those at least, so my top ten will definitely change.
Right now, though, my favorite films of the year are:
Bird
Challengers
Close Your Eyes
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A Real Pain
Flow
20,000 Species of Bees
Dune: Part Two
The movies I'm most excited for as of this writing are Babygirl, The Brutalist, Hard Truths, How to Make Millions before Grandma Dies, I'm Still Here, A Traveler's Needs,and Vermiglio
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 43. It was the usual night for my movie club, so we watched that week's movie—a deeply fucked up Tsui Hark movie called Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind—and then the folks from the club had a cocktail with me at a local bar that's open late. It was low key and nice.
32. What new recipes did you make this year?
I've been making a lot of hummus and other bean dip situations. I have two hummus recipes I make all the time now, one of which involves infused oil with cinnamon and ginger and cilantro and chiles, and the other of which involves fried spiced lamb neck-meat. I also started posting these more frequently as reels on Instagram.
33. What were your cocktail obsessions?
I'm still drinking a lot of Old Barrels and Manhattans. But I made a lot of Puka Punches this year when my friend Chari was staying with me over the summer.
34. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Different election results. I cannot believe we have to live through another four years of this.
35. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2024?
Shorts, white socks, white sneakers.
Dress shirt, dress pants, tie, boots.
36. What kept you sane?
Working out. Happy hour at Savour, 1903, or Charlie Park. Hanging out with Meredith and Jason. Phone calls with Jason Tate.
37. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Amar Chadha-Patel
38. What political issue stirred you the most?
Ongoing genocide in Palestine. The ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The resurgence of fascism in the United States.
39. Whom did you miss?
Justin and Elizabeth and Ashley and Danny and Wahima.
Tate, Matt, Walter and Jeanne, Katie, Jude and Steph, Chris.
Catie (although we sure did FaceTime after Maggie Smith passed so we could cry together).
Yasser, Katie, Jonathan, and Viktor.
Honestly, lots of folks. I have so many people I love spread out all over.
40. Who was the best new person you met?
This is cheating because I met her in 2023, but I started hanging out with Jen Gillette this year and she's just so great. My new colleagues Jasmine and Madeleine are also amazing.
41. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2024:
I feel like the thing I'm learning the most about this year is forgiveness. You have to be able to forgive if you want to preserve relationships with people, because people do stupid, terrible, ridiculous things, but people are not perfect. People are careless and foolish and they actually need forgiveness. This is a lesson for a teacher, of course, because it's important that I try to treat students generously and forgive them for their occasional frequent foolishness. But I've been thinking about it more and more in personal relationships too. And the thing is, people don't deserve forgiveness. That's sort of the point. It's a gift: a way to move on from the past and try to put faith in a person's future behavior—and a future together.
42. Share an important quotation from 2024:
In this year's 53rd State Occasional, edited by Lucas Baisch and Emma Horwitz, they asked their contributors to talk about what they're obsessed with. Kate Kremer wrote something that I can't stop thinking about:
"A friend wants me to protect myself from my daughter's incursions. She wants to protect my daughter from my overweening (under-weaning) indulgence. She's afraid I might not give her the proper training-by-example in matters of bodily autonomy. My feelings are complex: I want my daughter to attend to my feelings, but I don't want her to stop attending to her own particular pleasures. Complicity comes from the late Latin complex, "allied", from the Latin complicare, "fold together",and I guess I am obsessed with my own complicity. I'm disturbed by the misalignment between how I feel—which is fine, durably fine—and the violence done each day in my name."
This hit me not only because of what she is thinking about—how our own day-to-day feelings are completely at odds with the ways we are complicit in genocide, torture, incarceration, and other state violence—but also because I have been working on editing something about consent and its limits for the journal, and so I've been thinking so much about autonomy, consent, and the ways we are interconnected with one another and vulnerable and open to one another. The possibilities of our own vulnerability and openness might have something to teach us about complicity... I'm going to keep thinking about this.
Honestly, I don't understand why Aaron Taylor-Johnson's abs aren't on the poster. They're definitely the most important feature of J.C. Chandor's Kraven the Hunter.
While we're talking about it, this is the strangest J.C. Chandor movie. It has a cast like a normal J.C. Chandor movie—ATJ, Alessandro Nivola, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Christopher Abbott—and they're all pretty great. But then this is a superhero action movie extravaganza slash family drama and not serious at all. In fact, the chief problems with Kraven the Hunter are with the script. The dialogue is terrible, and some of the acting does not make it any better.
But, the action is great and the visual effects are pretty excellent. When Kraven the Hunter is doing action, it's doing a good job. This movie is rated R, and so the fights are bloody and very violent. But this is also very silly even though it wishes to be taken quite seriously at times.
Listen, the thing is, it's just not that bad. I think the critiques of this are unfair. It's a fine Marvel movie. It has a couple good monsters, and it has a fun lead. And other Marvel movies are just as dumb.
I'm sorry to report, but Moana 2 is not good. The plot is deeply confused and it borders on utterly nonsensical. The animation keeps changing, too, which is weird. Whenever the characters are wet they look like they’ve been animated completely differently (maybe this is a technology thing; maybe it is a skill thing; but what it looks like is that Disney just didn't invest quite enough money into Moana 2).
There also just some truly insane sequences involving typical gross-out humor with nasty fluids (kids love these kinds of jokes for some reason), weird theatrical animated sequences that I didn’t understand at all (there’s a strangely surreal musical number in which Maui cheers Moana up, and they are in a completely different world for some reason), and there are animate coconuts who seem evil but are good and know a great deal about poisons? I have no idea. At one point I leaned over to my companion and asked What is happening?
This thing moves along with the logic of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants or maybe I mean a Minions sequel. Much worse: the songs are forgettable. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Lin-Manuel Miranda. Does this mean I'm going to actually enjoy Mufasa: the Lion King?
Wicked: Part I is successful on all fronts. The first time Cynthia Erivo sang in this I let out a little cheer.
It’s so nice to hear a Hollywood musical sung well (Michelle Yeoh excepted—who gave her this part?)! This is something I complain about nearly every time I see a Hollywood musical (The Prom is one of the most egregious recent outings in this vein). But Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sing very well, and it's just so good to hear a song in a movie well sung. In fact, I also liked that this movie never pretends not to be a musical like some Rob Marshall piece of junk or the truly absurd Color Purple from last year. This movie starts us off with a musical number and never lets up. It knows what it is and it sets us up to get it quickly
Wicked: Part I also looks great, it’s choreographed well, Paul Tazewell’s costumes are gorgeous, and it’s quite funny. The whole thing just works. To be honest, I didn’t even really notice that this movie is as long as it is (I only got slightly bored when we were being welcomed to Oz by Emerald City street theatre and the cameos from Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth kept going); this movie really moves very well, and it's almost always visually interesting.
But also... this is Wicked. For me, this means that there's really a rather hard ceiling on how good it could actually be. It's a series of winking in-jokes that were cutesy in Gregory Maguire's original novel and which I've always found really trite in the Stephen Schwartz musical. I'm also just, like, not a teenage girl. And I recognize that this film isn't really aimed at me. It is to John Chu's credit that his film doesn't try to be more than that. It leans into its material and does that to its absolute best. This is precisely what he should have done. And that more or less means it's only ever going to be middlebrow. (I might as well tell you that last year I ranked Wonka very similarly to how I rank Wicked this year.)
PS. Stacy Wolf was right about Wicked, and it’s very easy to see why it’s so available for lesbian and other queer identifications.
Gladiator II doesn’t quite work in all the ways it wants to, but it works in a lot of those ways. This is a big, soulless spectacle in the vein of Ridley Scott’s most recent outing, Napoleon, but to be generous, Gladiator II is much much better than last year’s Ridley Scott film. Still, this thing is big and nonsensical and soulless, and one even has trouble figuring out who to root for.
Gladiator II's ostensible protagonist, Hanno, tells us very little about what he wants, and so although we admire him, he is hard to love. There's also Pedro Pascal's general something-or-other, but he's not a character who makes much sense, actually. He strains credibility in that he's a ruthlessly bloody general working in the service of Rome who seems to have no ambition except to do the right thing. The film’s most compelling character is Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, and even when he’s behaving very badly, it’s difficult to turn on someone so charismatic. Perhaps this makes me more of an ancient Roman than a morally upstanding US American in 2024, but I would vote with Macrinus. He knows what he’s doing and he played the game well.
There is more to say about Macrinus (who was a real emperor of Rome after he murdered emperor Caracalla). Denzel ate. He chewed. He feasted on this part. He’s a pleasure to watch.
My companion thought Paul Mescal lacked charisma, but I don’t know. I thought he was fine. I blame Ridley Scott. The whole thing feels sort of bland and generic (and, frankly, if I remember correctly from 24 years ago, I think that was mostly true of Gladiator itself). Gladiator II is epic, though, and I enjoyed most of it. I like it when people quote Virgil and Cicero and Seneca. And it's fun to watch muscled dudes play with swords and fight wild animals. For me this was better than the critics said it was. I was not bored.
I have more to say. I’ll believe lots of things: gladiators riding rhinoceroses wearing bespoke saddles, fine; gladiators fighting starving baboons, fine. But sharks? Sharks??? In a naumachia? How? You’re telling me they caught a half dozen sharks from the ocean without injuring them and transported them from the sea (in what vessel?) and then let them loose in the Roman Coliseum after flooding it? I do not believe it.
Anora is easily Sean Baker’s best film. This is very funny; the editing is great. the performances are excellent, and the physical comedy is top-notch. Best of all, Baker sticks the landing. He’s terrible with endings, but this one works very well. Anora ends with empathy and care.
Still, I kind of can't believe this won the Palme d'Or. This is a filmmaker who almost uniformly shows contempt for his characters, despite coaxing brilliant performances out of his actors. And yet, I was stunned by this film’s last few moments. They don’t make the movie into something great or anything like that—it's a rather silly farce with a stellar ending—but I was still stunned; I didn’t know Baker had it in him.
It's worth saying, too, that the supporting performance by Mark Eydelshteyn is wonderful.
My good friend Dayne once said to me that an Andrea Arnold movie looks the way it feels—it’s one of the hallmarks of her brilliant filmmaking, and this statement characterizes Bird through and through.
This movie is about feeling alone even when you’re not physically alone; it’s about trying to fit in, trying to make a way in the world. And Bird is also about the world, by which I mean the greater-than-human world of birds, dogs, horses, snakes, toads, and the way our human lives intertwine with theirs. And this is a film about magic and love and needing other people.
Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! is a filmed evening at the theatre (it's TheatroVision), watching James Whitmore in his celebrated role as Harry S. Truman in Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! and there’s nothing cinematic about it. It’s clearly filmed for television, in fact, with blackouts timed helpfully for commercial breaks. Whitmore is great, of course, and the play is filled with the kind of generic liberal political ideas that most people agree with across the board. The whole idea is a kind of no-nonsense politics that at least feels reasonable. The audience in the theatre loves the show and applauds throughout at various clever stories in Samuel Gallu’s play. It’s a one-man show, though, and that can make for tiring viewing. Once I realized the gist of the thing about 20 minutes in, I got rather bored. It’s a clever note, but there’s only one note.
I don't think you can watch this film anywhere...? I watched it on a bootleg DVD, and I'm sort of surprised to find it's not streaming and there is no DVD.
Twisters is a fun time. The script is absurd, but I had a good time. Glen Powell is a star. And Maura Tierney is really great. (This film does suffer from a severe and bewildering lack of Helen Hunt.)
My lord the script is stupid though. For some reason we are supposed to believe that these YouTubers aren’t really YouTubers but are actually like humanitarians in disguise? They don’t even chase the last tornado; they drive into the town it’s about to hit and try to save people’s lives? And people listen to them? Makes no sense. But I dunno. It’s hard to be mad at this. It’s loud and suspenseful and has a good soundtrack.
Nu Aștepta Prea Mult de la Sfârșitul Lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) is the bleakest of dark comedies. This is a funny satire from Radu Jude, delivered in his insouciant, constantly innovative and unexpected style. This is a very challenging film, and it offers its laughs and its critiques in an uncompromising and bold way. This is hardcore, even brave.
Honestly I just fucking love Radu Jude. This is so hard to watch at times, but fucking hell it’s smart… so smart. There are so many amazing, bananas sequences. And just so much heartbreaking, cutting absurdity.
Felipe Gálvez's Los Colonos (The Settlers) is very intense. We begin with these gorgeous views of Tierra del Fuego. A Scottish mercenary working for a Spanish settler–colonizer maps a path to the sea and kills native people. The film analyzes colonialism in no uncertain terms – it is about extracting land and people, destroying life in order to transform both land and people into property. "Nation" appears in this film as a nonsensical concept in the first part of the movie (the same colonizer owns the land on either side of the national border between Chile and Argentina) and then in the movie’s third act, nation has become something insisted on by the colonizers, forming a new nation with “justice” and “truth” and “equality” for everyone. The concept is just as absurd in the third act as it is in the first.
This film gets even better the more I think about it.
In preparation for The Bikeriders, I wanted to watch a kind of legendary old British biker movie I had heard about called The Leather Boys from 1965 that has a homosexual twist (or a homophobic one, depending on how you're looking at things).
Well The Leather Boys is not nearly as gay as I wanted it to be. It’s actually a very typical angry young man/woman drama from the 1960s. Lots of married young people yelling at one another and living in tiny rooms when they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. From the perspective of The Leather Boys, hanging out with the boys while riding around on bikes looks a lot better than going home to tea and baked beans from a can. But I’m not sure the movie really says anything about queerness or queer bike riders or any of that. This seems like a sort of strange addition to the angry young man genre. But it's clear that some of the men in the biker gangs just really don't do well with society—with going to college and getting a job and, like, raising a family and stuff—and then some of the men in the biker gang are there to wear leather and get their rocks off with other leather boys. Seems reasonable enough to me.
Anyway, that is how I prepared for The Bikeriders. And, well, it was fine.
The Bikeriders is shot in a cool way—it reproduces a series of documentary photos taken by the (completely undeveloped) Mike Faist character—but I don't really understand what Jeff Nichols has to say about this gang of bikers. The character development for all of the men is pretty much nonexistent. We don't really know Austin Butler or Tom Hardy at all. Who are these guys? Why do they hang out together? What are they doing? They actually almost never talk about bikes, so it's probably not really that. But, then, they don't really talk about anything. They’re violent and awful and drink too much and fight for no real reason, but I guess we’re supposed to find that charming. But, like, why??
What’s strange is that The Bikeriders just doesn’t have much of a point of view about them. I think I know why, too. The film almost completely avoids politics—there’s one part where a guy gets beaten up because he says he wants to become a cop and another where a guy says he hates “pinkos” who go to college—but the film doesn’t agree with any of this stuff. It’s just sort of presented for us. The same guy who hates pinkos tells us that he really really wanted to go to be in the Vietnam War, except that he didn't really because he got super drunk the night before and then slept through his alarm the day he was supposed to sign up. These biker guys are counterculture dudes, right? They hate cops and the government and having a job and the man. This is what I understand. They're violent, and they think cops and firemen are schmucks, which is why they flout the law and start fights and stuff. It’s the only real reason I can think of for their antiestablishment antics. And it must also be what ties the men together. But none of them ever talks about any of that. And the film doesn’t ask them to.
Consider, for example, the gang going to Brucey's funeral. Why does the family send their flowers back? And why does the old woman spit in Johnny's face? There's literally no reason for these old folks to hate this group so much—as far as we know. Have they done something horrible that we don't understand? The screenplay, in other words, leaves a very large lacuna in the center of the film. The Bikeriders just seems sort of there, like a documentary that never presses its subjects on anything they say.
As for my homo-preparation for this movie, I was glad I prepped with The Leather Boys. There's this crazy erotic sequence in The Bikeriders when Tom Hardy asks Austin Butler to run the club after he quits (although he's not quitting, so the scene's purpose is actually just for Tom to tell Austin he's his favorite person). But the whole scene is firelit, and they are just so close together that it feels like they should be kissing. They didn't. And I'm not actually sure why they didn't.
Miss Joy did not learn her lesson in the first film. So we need another movie to teach us all the same things.
Inside Out 2 has three or four good jokes and a really funny reference to that famous 1984 Apple commercial, but this movie is really stupid. I was bored for most of it.
Why must Pixar movies all be about forcing the child to explain herself, with making sense of the darkness within all children? In fact, Pixar now makes movies where they intensely project their feelings onto the kids in their films. I imagine these Pixar folks as really, really anxious parents, intensely worried about what’s going on inside their kids’ heads. They made a film about a teenager having anxiety, but of course teenagers didn’t make Inside Out 2. This is actually a film about parents’ anxiety about what their kids aren’t telling them.
The clue to this is that we're supposed to identify with a rainbow of characters who are trying to take care of the teenager at the center of the film rather than the teenager herself, whose actions we consistently judge. And then the big lesson that Anxiety and Joy and the other emotions need to learn is that they have no control over who the teenager will grow up to be. At whom might such a lesson be directed? Right: parents.
The filmmakers show their hand at the end of the movie when we find that "This film is dedicated to our kids. We love you just the way you are."
If my impatience with all of this is exasperatingly obvious, it's because one of the arguments I make in my book Love Is Love Is Love is that animated films seem these days to be overwhelmingly about adults' frustrations with their children's inscrutability. I put it this way in my book:
Frozen and its sequels, in this sense, take part in a larger (adult) discourse within contemporary animated films – about children whose choices cannot be explained, who "act out," whose behavior is antisocial or mysterious or queer. Films such as Song of the Sea (2014), When Marnie Was There (2014), InsideOut (2015), My Life as a Courgette (2016), Your Name (2016), The Boss Baby (2017), Bao (2018), Over the Moon (2020), Soul (2020), Wolfwalkers (2020), Belle (2021), Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021), Luca (2021), Encanto (2021), and The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) represent the child as frustratingly obtuse and distant, its desires inscrutable, its thought processes impossible (for the adult) to access. These are, in other words, all films about the queer child, the child who resists growing up according to the approved path laid out by adults or, as [Kathryn Bond] Stockton puts it, the child who grows sideways. Unlike many of these films, Frozen appears to celebrate the idea of Elsa leaning into this sideways growth, even if the film’s narrative still insists that she illuminate – "show herself" – so that her darkness no longer remains a mystery.
And if this makes you think that I'm calling Riley, the teenager in Inside Out 2, a proto-lesbian that is because of course I am. But, unlike the parents who made this movie, I see no reason to be so anxious about it.
George Miller made the very intelligent decision to give Anya Taylor-Joy around 20 total lines of dialogue in this film. Instead, the script allows the brilliant Chris Hemsworth to do the screenplay’s heavy lifting. This means that the film’s emotional center is almost non-existent and that the most interesting character is Furiosa’s nihilistic villain. In other words, there are both drawbacks and benefits to this. Taylor-Joy can’t actually carry a movie, and Miller needed Hemsworth to do this, but it makes for a very jaded, emotionless film.
Anyway Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga is visually relatively boring – there is nothing visually new about this film compared to Mad Max: Fury Road; it’s visually identical to its predecessor.
And one wonders, after all, what the point of all this is? (I wondered this with MM:FR – a film I didn’t like – as well, honestly.null) Revenge, blood, bullets, gore, oil, depravity. OK. But why? Obviously this universe is terrible and bloodthirsty and hateful. And obviously Miller believes our own universe is headed in this direction, but, like, what does the movie have to do with that?
I liked Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない) so much better than Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy! This is a mysterious, slow-building eco-thriller that had me thinking about it hours and hours after I watched it. The film is still bogged down by Hamaguchi’s penchant for long sequences of boring conversations in cars and other static locations, but weirdly those worked for me better in Evil Does Not Exist. And because the movie begins much more slowly and contemplatively, I forgave the long conversations in the car and at the community center. The ending is great!!
Civil War is a movie about journalism—it is not a movie about politics or humanity. And, in fact, it follows most of the tropes of those movies, just without any serious emotional depth. I hated this movie, and mostly I hated it because this movie loves war and plays to the audience’s enjoyment of violence.
There is a case to be made that Garland’s film tries to make a movie about journalism in a war-torn country while also avoiding the usual Orientalist or paternalist gaze that those movies turn toward the places where the stories are set. I think that’s probably true. The movie does avoid that.
But the movie still gets off on showing the audience a war zone and asking us to enjoy the thrill of destruction, murder, death, and wholesale slaughter.
I did like the scene with Jesse Plemons. It’s taut and interesting, and it’s also politically sound, by which I mean that that sequence makes a smart anti-war case. The rest of the movie thinks guns are fun.
Also, have you all heard of Joe Dante's film The Second Civil War? It's much better than this business.
Challengers is the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross show.
Actually, look, everyone in this is a star. And they’re all sexy as hell. And this is shot gorgeously. And the editing is fucking brilliant. And the script is just a silly sports melodrama, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so perfectly made and exquisitely directed.
The fucking shot when everyone is turning their heads back and forth to watch the ball and Zendaya just is staring straight ahead??! Perfection.
I know not everyone will love the ending of this movie, but what I love about the ending is the way that Challengers moves into the realm of the metaphorical more and more steadily as the match goes on until it just exists purely as metaphor and refuses to go back to the real. It's so great.
This is a great time from start to finish. The jokes are funny and they’re delivered very well by an excellent cast. The fights are so much fun. Really the whole thing is just a blast. The thing is, Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling are fucking stars, and they just run the whole thing perfectly.
This is very much like David Leitch's last movie, Bullet Train, which I also thought was a very good time.
This movie is visually stunning with absolutely exquisite worldbuilding; this is a very smart movie about AI. It’s the kind of intelligent, generous, and humane exploration of AI that we need. But Mars Express is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants action–crime thriller that kept me guessing and surprised me constantly. Great stuff.
Housekeeping for Beginners (Домаќинство за Почетници) is good. Goran Stolevski is an interesting filmmaker who really has a way with writing characters. I wish this film surprised me a bit more, but although it started off with some twists that were very interesting it moved into more familiar territory in act two. Still, I liked this despite its rather conventional ending.
I love Dev Patel. I think he’s beautiful and I think he has good ideas. I’m glad he got funding to make this very very expensive movie, and I’m glad he made this movie. I’m glad lots of people went to see this movie. But I did not like this movie.
Monkey Man is so slooooow, and then all the revenge killing is fun and brutal and just kinda disgusting but definitely fun. Then it goes back to being so slooooow. The revenge plot was unclear, and I found the monkey man kind of hard to root for. I did root for him, don’t get me wrong, and like sure, cops are awful, but I do find it difficult to root for a man who will just kill literally anyone. The information about motivation for the revenge was given to us so slowly I just couldn’t get behind the force of it. And anyway why now? This guy looks about 30. What’s he been doing with his time?
Also, there's a little army of hijras? Who are like really violent and happy to kill people while wearing sequence gowns? I'm lost.
Holy shit! Looking for Mr. Goodbar is pretty incredible. It’s so intense and intriguing. It’s a fascinating character study and a pretty extraordinary portrait of female freedom amid a deeply misogynist world. It also has truly great performances from Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, and Tom Berenger.
The ending is… shocking and kind of insane and I feel completely stunned.
Honestly this is good. I know a movie like this could basically not be made today, but that’s what makes it so interesting. I am not at all sure why Goodbar is out of print, but you can't find it streaming anywhere and it's never been released on DVD.
Femme is an ancient Athenian tragedy disguised as a psychological thriller. It did some things very well. I was constantly afraid of violence erupting at any moment so it was very tense watching. I like this film’s point of view and politics, too. I thought it was pretty smart. Some of the plot is not really believable, though, if I’m being honest (you’re telling me this violently closeted man went to a bathhouse?), and Femme takes a bit too long to get where it is inevitably going.
When I originally saw the trailer for Godzilla x Kong: the New Empire I thought Wait didn't we already see this movie? Everything in the trailer looked like something from Adam Wingard's 2021 offering Godzilla vs. Kong. As it turns out, this is a sequel to that movie, and it has new monsters if not new visuals.
I love monsters, so yes I went to see this movie, but I didn't like Godzilla vs. Kong, so I also went in knowing what I was going to get and expecting it to be nonsense. The monsters were cool. I was especially into the new pink Gojira and the Ice Princess Gojira. But y’all this movie is so dumb. The script, especially, is so. fucking. dumb. Honestly the most fun part of the movie was making jokes about it with my companion.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but Mothra shows up as a kind of hippy Grandmother Willow in act three, and Brian Tyree Henry’s explanations of the faux-Indigenous science and engineering in this movie are so stupid they make Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs seem like Oppenheimer by comparison.
One thing I did find cute: Godzilla curls up to sleep in the Coliseum. I guess we know how often he thinks of the Roman Empire.
I just barely squeezed through! Neon finally released Perfect Days for VOD on Tuesday, and so I was able to watch it last night. None of these movies will win on Sunday, but they are our last three:
Perfect Days
1 nomination
International Feature: Japan (Drive My Car, Shoplifters, Departures, The Twilight Samurai, Muddy River, Kagemusha: the Shadow Warrior, Sandakan No. 8, Dodes'ka-den, Portrait of Chieko, Woman in the Dunes, Kwaidon, Koto, Immortal Love, The Burmese Harp, Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto, Gate of Hell, Rashomon)
This is very good. It is a simple, quiet film (the main character, Hirayama, hardly speaks at all) about approaching each day with happiness. We do not know, really, what has happened to Hirayama before the film, and though we gradually learn a bit about his previous life, we mostly just spend time in the present. This, of course, is what the film is about, and Hirayama greets each day positively and richly. While I was watching this film, I felt like I got it, like the film's ideas made sense to me, but I think Perfect Days is better and better the more I think about it. It is sticking with me, and asking me to think more deeply about what it showed me. This is a very good movie.
International Feature: Germany (All Quiet on the Western Front, Never Look Away, Toni Erdmann, The White Ribbon, The Baader Meinhof Complex, The Lives of Others, Sophie Scholl: the Final Days, Downfall, Nowhere in Africa, Beyond Silence, Schtonk, The Nasty Girl)
Cast: Leonie Benesch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer, Rafael Stachowiak, Sarah Bauerett, Kathrin Wehlisch, Leonard Stettnisch, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Katharina M. Schubert, Uygar Tamer, Özgür Karadeniz, Tim Porath, Kersten Reimann
İlker Çatak’s film is a modern nightmare of right and wrong set in a middle school. It’s truly terrifying. We watch a young, righteous teacher navigate between moral choices but seemingly misunderstand the human beings in her community. The Teachers' Lounge is a tense, ticking time bomb of a movie structured like one of Asghar Farhadi’s films, where a seemingly small injustice spins the characters out of control and into a terrifying world. The Farhadi structure is important here, because the way İlker Çatak and Johannes Duncker's script works is really modeled after movies like A Separation and The Salesman, but I don't think Çatak works his way toward finality of any kind, and the end of The Teachers' Lounge is unsatisfying. It is an exciting ride, though, with its taut, horror-film score and its building tension. Good stuff.
International Feature: Italy (The Hand of God, The Great Beauty, Don't Tell, Life Is Beautiful, The Starmaker, Mediterraneo, Open Doors, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, La Famiglia, Three Brothers, Dimenticare Venezia, The New Monsters, A Special Day, Seven Beauties, Scent of a Woman, Amarcord, Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, La Ragazza con la Pistola, The Battle of Algiers, Marriage Italian Style, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 8 1/2, The Four Days of Naples, La Grande Guerra, Kapò, Big Deal on Madonna Street, Nights of Cabiria, La Strada, The Bicycle Thief, The Walls of Malapaga, Shoeshine)
This definitely tugged at my heartstrings, but it felt like an Italian movie from the 1990s. Très romantique! It has a kind of triumphal, soaring, beat-the-odds quality that I associate with a kind 1990s filmmaking. This is a grueling portrait of young men attempting to leave their home in Senegal for what they believe will be a better life in Italy. The odyssey from Senegal to Mali to Niger to Libya is insane and almost unimaginably dangerous. And then there's the boat ride to Italy, which is also nearly impossible. This is an extraordinary portrait of young men (and the many, many other people who the film pictures only briefly), who are not given the freedom to move through the world, who are restricted by government violence and militamen, who are exploited by grifters because governments do not let people move freely. Still, the movie didn't quite work for me because it treats all of these things rather like small obstacles for our main characters that don't need their own interrogation. The world these young men have to navigate has been created by irresponsible governments in all of these countries (including Italy), but because we focus on the boys – their wonder, their difficulties, their tenacity – Garrone's portrait of this world takes on a romantic hue.Io Capitano is very well made, but this kind of thing is not what I want from Matteo Garrone and his usual portraits of crime.
