The best films I saw in October 2020

Even though the title of this post refers to “the best films I watched,” I’m including two TV series in here. I don’t really have further commentary on that fact, just an acknowledgment of the discrepancy.

The Comey Rule (developed by Billy Ray, September 2020)

Watching this the week before the election, it was difficult to tell if The Comey Rule was even good. Sometimes I’m in a mood where the artistic merits of a narrative are far less important than my receptivity to the tone or message. I’ve spent the better part of the last five years observing the American political milieu with alternating incredulity and misanthropic scorn, and a project like this is almost laboratory-engineered to activate my confirmation bias. Some of The Comey Rule is really clunky. Poor Jennifer Ehle has to rehearse about half a dozen versions of the wifely wheedle that goes something like, “How can you put your personal ethics above the good of our family?” Ugh. But the cast is generally stellar, and Ray has a real gift for investing scenes of professional bureaucrats making procedural decisions with appropriate dramatic urgency. Of course, the big question mark is Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump. It’s a remarkable impersonation, maybe a little too low-key. But I lack the perspective to tell if it’s a good performance or a good impersonation or neither or both. Honestly, it just felt a bit weird. I might return to The Comey Rule in a year or two to see if it holds out outside the context of the moment. I can tell you that, having watched it, it didn’t make me feel particularly good about my country or its prospects. Even now, as I write this after the election has been called for Joe Biden, I’m still not feeling particularly rosy.

The Game (David Fincher, 1997)

Entirely by coincidence, I watched this movie on October 11, Nicholas Van Orten’s birthday. There must be something to the season of tricks that lodged this movie in my mind, but I grabbed it by impulse from the shelf at the library and I popped it in during my son’s nap time, and the synchronicity when Michael Douglas corrects Sean Penn about his birthday just hit me in the best weird way. The conceit of a wealthy white dude who looks like Douglas dealing with a midlife crisis by playing an immersive game built around his psychological foibles is not one that holds up super well for me. It’s really a testament to Douglas and Fincher that I find myself invested in this guy at all. Some of the set pieces are also maybe a bit protracted for where the film ultimately ends up, but I still dig how far Fincher leans into the Hitchcock of it all. It’s a film that punishes its protagonist for his own good and revels in it. Great atmosphere, some great set pieces, and just a good, old-fashioned thriller.

Game Night (John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, 2018)

Of the comedies I’ve seen in the last five or so years, I don’t know how many of them had a first hour as stellar as Game Night. Even if it loses a bit of steam near the end when the stakes compel it to be more of a comedy-thriller, this is what I wish the future of comedy looked like. Just a phenomenal ensemble working from a wickedly funny script guided by visually-assured directors. This is the kind of thing I guess I wish the Russo brothers had cashed in their MCU chips to make, something that people jonesing for more Communityesque projects would lap up. Can’t wait to lob this one at my D&D groups and tell them, “Oh, and the guys who made this are doing the next D&D movie.”

Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993)

Incredibly, I don’t think I’d ever seen this before this October. It’s one of the movies for which people my age have a powerful nostalgia. While I guess I wish I would’ve seen it sooner, I also feel like I never would have fully appreciated just how much heat Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy are pitching. They’re just incredible. It is so rare to get unambiguously evil villains who are absolutely the heroes in their own quest, only to be foiled by some meddling kids (and a fetchingly beleaguered zombie played by Doug Jones!). There’s a very particular 90s-ness to this movie that makes Hocus Pocus both a time capsule and maybe ripe for a remake. In any case, I will be returning to this one.

The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020)

In my previous monthly roundup, I laid down a marker: “if he keeps a steady hand, Leigh Whannell may establish himself as a filmmaker with the stature of John Carpenter in his prime.” That had been my cast of mind having see Insidious 3 and Upgrade within several weeks of each other, but I was also thinking of his Invisible Man when I wrote it. Even with the generally favorable reviews and remarkable worldwide gross, I wonder if this film is going to get its due. Among recent films, only Uncut Gems comes to mind as an apt comparison for how utterly anxiety-inducing Invisible Man is for 3/4 of its runtime. Like Get Out, it also strikes me as a horror film utterly in tune with its cultural moment; the villain is as literal a representation of the male gaze as you can get outside of Powell’s Peeping Tom, a stalker whose camera lenses empower him to surveil and cloak his controlling presence. Pretty much everything here works, from the cast to the production design to the sound to Benjamin Wallfisch’s score. Most importantly, I think, Whannell embraces what his films are—genre flicks—and simply applies his art to packaging the formula in a meaningful, skillfully executed manner. The Wolf Man has never been one of my favorite Universal monsters, but I really cannot wait to see what Whannell does with it. Oh, and Elisabeth Moss? I can’t imagine how absolutely draining this role must have been. She’s amazing.

My Neighbor Totoro [Tonari no Totoro] (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

Though I’m not sure I can add much to what has already been said about this marvel of modern animation, I can share an anecdote. This most recent rewatch was the first time that my son sat through the entire film, and watching him watch it was as much a delight as the film itself. Throughout the film, he kept asking where the soot sprites and Totoro were, eagerly anticipating the next encounter with the forest spirits much as do Satsuki and Mei. After the film, though, it wasn’t playing with Totoro that he imagined. Instead, my son, an only child, spent the next twenty minutes trying to find his “sister.” Never underestimate how well Miyazaki taps into the emotional core of his storytelling, and how much that resonates with each generation of viewers.

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (Henry Dunham, 2018)

I watched this on the first or second of the month, and it unnerved me that only a week later, the FBI announced that they had made arrests in the kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan.  Austere and ambivalent, I kind of get the comparisons to Reservoir Dogs, but only in the sense that it’s a boiler room chamber drama supercharged with threats of masculine violence. It’s a quiet film with meticulous sound design, lighting, and framing, with a cadre of character actors funneling as much suppressed emotion as they can into thin-on-the-page personalities. Tonally, it feels much more like Bergman directing something that might have gone to Lumet in another era (or, honestly, maybe just straight-up Lumet), but absolutely vibing with the contemporary moment.

The Terror, Season 1 (developed by David Kajganich, April-May 2018)

Oddly, adding a quasi-supernatural beast to the harrowing true story of two ships’ worth of explorers dying horribly of cold and starvation is maybe the only thing that made it bearable. There’s something about the direct evocation of a horror trope that took this tale of madness and death and translated it into something consumable as entertainment. A filter for the bleakness. This is great television, and it’s an almost paradigmatic argument for television having replaced cinema as the premier purveyor of mid-budget, high-quality ensemble dramas. (And the season is a single, self-contained story, to boot!) It’s a fable about erasure and the terminal limits of of grasping human endeavor. Like most great horror films, it’s bleak without fully embracing nihilism.

Trollhunter [Trolljegeren] (André Øvredal, 2010)

Speaking of nihilism, one of the things I enjoyed and found offputting about Trollhunter is the mordant sensibility. In its best moments, Trollhunter milks dry humor from the workaday mundanity of the titular character’s attitude toward his job. By the end of the film, though, the sheer meaninglessness of his job and the government’s investment in covering up the truth feels simultaneously jokey and archly cynical. Unlike cynical masterpieces like Network or Brazil, though, there’s very little emotional throughline here. It’s all pretty episodic: a series of set pieces showcasing pretty good CG effects (and brilliant sound design) of trolls doing… troll things. Entertaining on the whole, but even with the trollhunter’s arc being pretty well executed, it strains to hold together. In that sense, I guess it’s more true to what you might expect from a feature film spackled together from hours of found footage. Still a bit disappointing, I guess.

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

This is one of the “wow” viewings of the month. Candidly, I confess that I rather avoided watching this film for years under the assumption that I’d find it a bit impenetrable and downbeat. Turns out, it is both of those things, but it’s also mesmerizing and quite emotionally attuned. For tragedy to work, it has to be tethered to something real and vulnerable. Everything about this film bespeaks tragedy on almost every level, and it works because Glazer is really taking a moonshot here, trying to capture something big about the human experience in a very idiosyncratic and intimate way. Beyond the near-perfection of the shot selections and editing, this feels to me like one of Scarlett Johansson’s deftest moves as a star. Maybe a handful of women in the world could have tackled this material at this point in their career in this decade, and she utterly commits. Besides being a great performance, it’s a career choice that she very obviously did not need to make in order to position herself as a leading actress, but she chose it because it was worthy of someone with her particular charisma and talent and at the right moment for it to shape her star persona. Down the line, this is a fascinating and devastating film made by the right people for the right reasons at the right time. Wow.☕︎

The Books of 2015

I was quite blessed last year to have a read a number of wonderful books, both fiction and nonfiction, some of which were new to me, and some of which were old acquaintances. I’ve read Mansfield Park and Macbeth, for instance, several times already, but they unfold unwonted revelations upon each reading. The following is a list of books that I read for the first time in the last year; it is all fiction, mostly for the sake of categorical clarity (I don’t really think I can justify how I would rank The Principle of Hope, Vol 1, for instance, against Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead; it just don’t sit right). Let me quickly give mention, though, to two impossible-to-categorize memoirs: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. They are required reading for reasons that, in all honesty, elude my critical capacities. They’re simply that good. In any event, the following are all books I read in 2015 that have, in some way, deeply enriched my comprehension of life, the world, and the soul.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Technically, I had already read The Inferno back in high school, but I figure a gap of nearly 20 years ought to qualify reading the Commedia in its entirety as “new.” I’m not sure whether it’s because of arrogance, ignorance, or some bizarre combination thereof, but I went into the Comedy with relatively low expectations. What I learned from Dante is a truth universally acknowledged but not often enough reiterated: the classics have new things to teach us. In particular, Dante pretty nearly revolutionized the way I think about divine love and its relation to sin. Truly, if you haven’t ever read The Divine Comedy, please do so. The edition I read was the translation by Robert and Jean Hollander. To be honest, I didn’t care so much for their translation. It seemed as though I got the content of the poem, and the translation was elegant, but the side-by-side comparison showed me that, even with my tourist’s-level Italian, their English version contained almost none of Dante’s poetry. That said, the endnotes and introductions were enormously helpful and endlessly fascinating. I’m going to make a point of re-reading the Comedy throughout my life, and I will likely try a different translation each time until I finally find the one that’s right for me. I hope you all find the one that’s right for you.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Yes, much like Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s that book that everyone claims to have read (but really hasn’t), because she has borrowed it from the library 20 times with every intention of reading it, only to get a couple hundred pages in (if that) and stop, or she’s had it sitting on her shelf for twenty years, relying upon friends and visitors picking it up and rifling through the pages as a substitute for actually having to dust it off, or has sworn never to read it on general principle, because it’s: a) the book all those obnoxious hipsters/English majors claim to have read and loved, or b) a thousand effing pages long, and screw those endnotes (because, honestly who does that?). So. I read it. The whole thing. Not only worth finishing on its literary merits (which are considerable), but a prophetic diagnosis of a culture that has resorted to self-fulfillment as the ultimate authority, and a remarkable feat of authorial empathy.

Tracks by Louise Erdrich. Opening lines: “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die. For those who survived the spotted sickness from the south, our long fight west to Nadouissoux land where we signed the treaty, and then a wind from the east, bringing exile in a storm of government papers, what descended from the north in 1912 seemed impossible.” If reading those lines doesn’t make you want to read the book, I don’t know what would.

 

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Another feat of authorial empathy, this classic of twentieth century American letters is justly considered to be an epic. It’s Dickensian social realism in the best possible ways: a feel for the vernacular patois of the characters, a masterful control over the rhythm of the sentences, and a surefooted sedimentation of the chapters. This is an edifice erected as a monument to a hard time in our history, to all who survived it, and to all who didn’t.

Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore. One of the great things about science fiction is that it can give thought experiments the moral weight of narrative. To a certain extent, all stories are fables. We are invited to exercise judgment on the actions and meaning of the characters we read about, and the exercise of judgment is a healthy thing to do if we want to keep our consciences in trim, fighting shape. In Bring the Jubilee, Moore mounts one of the great thought experiments on sf about the nature of free will and historical determinism. There are ambiguities, as there must be in most great stories. In the end, however, he implies, in grand existential fashion, that free will or not, we still bear moral responsibility for choosing whether or not to act.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. Can you believe I never read anything by McCarthy until 2015? While I also read Blood Meridian and The Road for the first time, The Crossing is the one that blew me away. It’s really stunning, prophetic. The artistic invention of grace out of the whole cloth of human cruelty and cosmic indifference.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Another one that rather eludes my critical capacities, but it’s another prophetic work that manages to be utterly alienated and utterly tuned in to the need for authentic connection. Somehow caustic, bitter, and unsparing without giving up hope.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I know, another one I can’t believe it took me this long to get around to. I don’t have the excuse, as with Infinite Jest, of it being particularly long or aesthetically forbidding. Le Guin is a challenging and precise writer, but not in that way. I can see why this is considered to be her masterpiece, and while I did appreciate the structure, the overwhelming impression left one me was that it manages to dramatize the complicated nature of social injustice. Le Guin is about as merciless as possible with her socialist-anarchist Anarres, emphasizing that problems remain in even the best of possible worlds, yet she manages to inspire palpable relief when Shevek finally returns home—home to his planet, to his family, to the way of life he knows best. Whatever its flaws and shortcomings, the striving for a better world only has meaning when it is embedded in a particular context, and Le Guin imbues that context with the kind of utopian possibility that can only be illuminated by disappointment, but a disappointment put in its proper perspective—the kind bred by intimate familiarity.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Though it doesn’t really stand alone very well (and, as part of a pre-planned series, it’s not meant to), Hyperion rather lives up to its reputation as a masterpiece of sf worldbuilding. Its rep as “cerebral” sf may be a touch overblown, but only in comparison to, say, The Book of the New Sun. Simmons is a very smart writer, and he manages to weave together a story that is sort of about everything that sf is about: human nature, free will v. determinism, ontological reliability, etc. Each section of the book is a wonderful variation in tone and subgenre, ranging from characters study to action adventure to bildungsroman. No trope is left unturned, and Simmons always ties character development into the weirdnesses of his recognizably alien universe.

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt. This is a book about how neoliberalism screws us from behind. Metaphorically or literally? Sort of both. Satire’s brutal honesty depends on being a bit outré, and as brutal riffs on contemporary society go, this is damned prophetic.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Lily Bart’s decline and fall is full of pathos, but like any good social satire, it’s also shockingly lively and witty. Wharton’s genius is in finding a way to make her ruthlessness a form of empathy. As with Lightning Rods, she’s brutally honest, but her tonic doesn’t taste bitter, just a sad combination of bemused and furious.

Sort of Dishonorable Mention:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. This is the worst novel I’ve ever read that I think ought to be required reading for all Americans. Unlike most folks who hate Atlas Shrugged, I found the prose to be bracing, and for all the tedious sermonizing, Rand knows how to craft rhetorically compelling speeches. This is polemical pulp fiction at its stylistic best. It is also an argument in favor of straight-up anarcho-capitalist plutocratic oligarchy. The heroes are people who actively sabotage civilization so that they don’t have to put up with any peons or government bureaucrats siphoning any of their precious bodily fluids wealth. On the one hand, you might be tempted to feel sympathy for these ingenious captains of industry who have to deal with the incompetent jerks bleeding them dry at every turn. On the other hand, they cause an extinction-level event in order to make more money for themselves. To the extent that anyone can be sympathetic to the plight of genocidal one-percenters, this book makes the best possible case on their behalf. For the rest of us who have something resembling a social conscience, it’s a window into the ideology driving both the Tea Party and Trumpism.☕