"Common Side Effects" and a "Harley Quinn" Check-In

"Common Side Effects" was co-created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, and shares a lot of crew with the short-lived Max series "Scavengers' Reign."  "Common Side Effects," however, takes place in the present day and has a very different style and verve.  Our hero is an eco-warrior fungi expert named Marshall Cuso (Dave King), who discovers a Blue Angel mushroom in Peru that can cure all ills, and even revive the dying.  He's constantly on the run from the DEA, specifically Agent Harrington (Martha Kelly) and Agent Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) for his possession of controlled substances, but makes his way back to the U.S. to try and cultivate the mushroom there.  He happens across his old high school crush, Frances (Emily Pendergast) and shares his discovery with her, unaware that she works for a pharmaceutical executive named Rick Kruger (Mike Judge). 

I've seen the show promoted as an adult thriller that is critical of the pharmaceutical industry, but it's actually much lighter and stranger than it seems at first glance.  "Common Side Effects" features an interesting mix of conspiracy theory what-if, ensemble comedy, and trippy tall tale.  There are certainly exciting developments as everyone fights for control of the Blue Angel, and more than a few resort to violence.  However, this is a show where death is awfully impermanent, and the big emotional throughline comes down to Marshall and Frances figuring out how to be friends again as they deal with all the chaos that they inadvertently cause with the mushroom.  Yes, there are environmental and anti-Capitalist messages in the story, but our hero is also a rotund hippie who spends a lot of time getting into and out of ridiculous situations, so the primary goal here is definitely to amuse and entertain.  Also, there are the wonderfully trippy hallucination sequences that happen whenever anybody eats a Blue Angel, which could only happen in animation.  

A note about the visuals, while we're on the subject.  The look of "Common SIde Effects" is very distinct, because all the characters have oversized heads, and oddly proportioned faces, so they all look a little bug-eyed and weird at first.  The characters include an interesting variety of types - law enforcement, business opportunists, scientists, Marshall's community of mycology oddballs, and related allies.  Nearly everyone is sympathetic and relatable to some degree,  but most have pretty skewed priorities, and react to the existence of the mushroom in foolhardy ways.  Even Marshall, who wants to use the mushroom to cure the world, repeatedly puts his trust in people he shouldn't be trusting.  However, he's also not the only good guy we meet, and I really enjoyed watching a couple of characters figure things out and end up on the right side of the fight in the end.  Also, gotta love that Peruvian flute theme.

And now, a quick check-in with Max's "Harley Quinn" series, which recently finished its fifth season.  Because we have a new "Superman" movie coming out, corporate synergy likely decreed that there should be a season of the show set in Metropolis.  Harley and Ivy use the excuse that they've thoroughly screwed up Gotham City to the point where they don't have much else to do, and move to the unnervingly perfect Metropolis, where even Superman (Clark Kent) is feeling obsolete because of how well the city is running.  New adversaries this season include Lena Luthor (Aisha Taylor) and Brainiac (Stephen Fry), with more attention on characters like Lois Lane (Natalie Morales) and King Shark's son Shaun (Kimberly Brooks).

Any show getting five seasons is an achievement these days, but "Harley Quinn" isn't in very good shape this year.  A lot of the original roster of regulars has moved on, and there just aren't compelling stakes to their adventures anymore, even though the show's stakes have always been pretty low.  We meet Ivy's ex and get into Harley's family troubles a bit, and both of the major villains this year are pretty good.  However, it's clear that our leading ladies are never going to break up and don't face any threats that are beyond their ability to handle, so there's not much excitement to be had.  It's not a bad watch as a hangout show, but way too many of the characters are now the kids or relatives of other characters, and the creators have apparently exhausted the supply of obscure comic book characters they can dredge out of the DC archives.  It may be time to let Harley and friends have one last hurrah, and bow out.  

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"Presence" and "Love Me"

Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp are collaborating again, this time for a movie told from the POV of a ghost.  It's a tiny production, filmed entirely in a suburban house, with each scene comprising a single long take.  Like the recent "Nickel Boys," the whole film is shot from a first person perspective.  Despite what the marketing might lead you to believe, this is not a traditional horror film.  It's about a ghost, but a ghost who has to figure out its own identity and why it's trapped in this house, watching over the lives of a typical family of four.  

For most of "Presence," events play out like a non-supernatural domestic drama.  Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) move into the house  with their teenage children, Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday).  The family dynamics are difficult.  Chloe is mourning the loss of a friend.  Rebekah is unsympathetic, heavily favoring her son Tyler, who is an insensitive jock.  Chris is more empathetic, but often frustrated in his attempts to communicate with his wife and children.  Tyler becomes friends with a boy named Ryan (West Mulholland), who becomes close with Chloe.  All five of them start experiencing strange phenomena in the house as the ghost becomes more active.

"Presence" feels like the kind of experimental low-budget movie that a couple of promising first-time filmmakers would make.  It's got a few big twists and some awkward dialogue that don't quite come off as well as I was hoping they would, and the first person camera takes some getting used to, especially when it starts whip-panning in some of the later scenes.  Like many of Soderbergh's recent films, it feels like he's mostly interested in playing with the cinematic visual language - specifically the use of certain camera techniques and the first person perspective.  Not all of these experiments have been very watchable or entertaining, but I thought that everything paid off in "Presence," especially the ending.  And I really appreciate seeing Lucy Liu in a relatively straight dramatic film role for once.  I really wish it happened more often.  

On to "Love Me," which I'd been keeping an eye out for since it premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Brothers Andy and Sam Zuchero have made a romantic comedy about two AI - a weather buoy and a satellite - who gradually gain sentience after humanity goes extinct, and eventually develop a relationship with each other.  It's extremely high concept, very experimental, and I don't think most of it works.  However, it makes for a fascinating thinkpiece and I enjoyed watching the film come up with different ways to portray the different stages of Me (Kristen Stewart) and Iam (Steven Yeun) becoming more and more anthropomorphized over the passing aeons.   

The biggest problem with "Love Me" is that it jumps into the romance before it establishes who Me and Iam are as characters, and blunders a lot of the character development.  It also relies on tropes and meta commentary very heavily, and the fact that the film is self-aware about this doesn't help much.  Me, the buoy, who eventually self-identifies as a girl, is initially the pursuer.  She creates a fake persona for herself by borrowing heavily from the social media of a real couple, Deja and Liam.  Her idea of being in a relationship is copying what she likes.  This means endlessly acting out scenes from existing videos, repeating other people's words and actions.  The message about performative online interactions couldn't be plainer.  It takes some significant conflicts and self-discovery to get our two AI on the right track.

The visuals shift from screenlife text messaging and search engine results to virtual world animated avatars, to finally the live actors interacting physically in the last act.  Frankly, none of it looks very good, but the attempt to piece all this together coherently is admirable in and of itself.  I also do not believe Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun have any screen chemistry together at all, which may have been the point.  In any case, this is a weird little movie, but innovative and earnestly trying new things, and the filmmakers deserve nothing but encouragement in their future endeavors.  

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"The Pitt," Year One

A prestige streaming series with a fifteen episode season?  How can this be?  The new Max medical drama looks like "ER" at first glance, and apparently was originally conceived of as a sequel series until rights issues quashed it.  Showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, executive producer John Wells, and star Noah Wyle are all "ER" alums.  However, "The Pitt" is a different beast.  For one thing, it takes place in real time, like "24," with each episode covering an hour of a marathon shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital ER, from 7:00 AM all the way until 10:00 PM.

Much has been said about how much more realistic "The Pitt" is than other medical shows.  We get to hear curse words!  Sensitive body parts and medical gore are uncensored!  I can't attest to the accuracy of the medical procedures being performed.  However, it is nice to see a much more realistically diverse group of doctors, nurses, and social workers, plus acknowledgement of long wait times, administrative pressures, and the still lingering trauma of the COVID pandemic.  "The Pitt" is not a documentary, and there's plenty of played-up drama. Nobody is wearing a surgical mask.  Morally and emotionally difficult situations seem to arise every few minutes.  The writers tackle every current hot-button issue affecting medical practice, from abortion to anti-vaxxers.  However, I appreciate that the focus stays on the medicine.  We stay in and around the hospital the whole way through, and whatever information we learn about the characters we learn in the course of their day at work.  No flashbacks or cutaways are deployed.

There are a lot of characters to keep track of - Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch (Wyle) is the senior attending physician, and the man in charge of the doctors.  Under him are the senior residents, Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) and Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball), and residents Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), and Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif).  New to the hospital and working their first shift are a newly transferred resident, Dr. King (Taylor Dearden), an intern, Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), and a pair of medical students, Whitaker (Gerran Howell) and Javadi (Shabana Azeez).  Nurses are sparse in the cast, because of the focus on the doctors, but the most important are the ER's charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) and everyone's secret crush, Mateo (Jalen Thomas Brooks).  And just when you think you have everyone sorted out, the night shift starts showing up, led by Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy).

The real-time storytelling format is a big plus, because it allows stories to unfold in a more realistic way from episode to episode.  We see the ER workers dealing with cases that are ongoing from previous shifts, and eventually have to hand off their work to others.  Some situations drag on over multiple hours, including a patient named Doug (Drew Powell) who is stuck in the waiting room.  You can spot him in episode after episode, his frustrations building as the hours pass.  There's also an emphasis on how so much of the doctors' work is complicated by other issues - language barriers, patient combativeness, cultural differences, and thorny domestic situations.  One patient may be a trafficking victim.  Another may be plotting something terrible.  Kiara (Krystel V. McNeil), the department social worker, frequently has to be called on.  

Watching The Pitt's newbies learning how to navigate this world is the main driver of the show's excellent character drama.  Noah Wyle's great as Dr. Robby, trying to stave off emotional and spiritual exhaustion as he struggles to lead during one of the worst shifts of his career.  However, I was far more invested in Drs. Javadi, Whitaker, Santos, and King.  Part of the fun of "The Pitt" is the competence porn, where we're watching smart, capable, dedicated people doing good work.  However, at the same time it's about watching people at major inflection points in their lives and careers - learning, maturing, and facing new challenges with every new patient.  Everyone loves Dr. King, who is hinted to be on the spectrum, and blossoms quickly as she gains more confidence under pressure.  However, it's also fascinating to chart the progress of overconfident, pain-in-the-ass Dr. Santos, who shows up with a slew of bad impulses and a troublemaking streak.

All the teaching and learning does mean that the writing sometimes gets awfully didactic.  All the characters are fallible, but they do get self-righteous at times without much pushback.  My biggest criticism of the show is that it allows the doctors to get away with some very risky behavior without enough consequences.  There's some self-awareness of this, especially with Santos's and Langdon's storylines, and all the really touchy subject matter is generally handled well, but I think the show could do better.  

Frankly, I like "The Pitt" so much that I'm really excited that it has the opportunity to do better.  For the few things that rub me the wrong way, there are so many more that delight me.  You don't see many shows this dense with new characters and new information, week after week.  The cinematography and editing do a great job of showing more than you'd expect without showing too much.  There's no backing score and all the music is diegetic.  And there are gossipping Filipino nurses!  

 

Fifteen hours were over too quick.  Pay off Crichton and get the next season into production ASAP.  

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The Time Machine

The Internet Archive went through a rough patch recently, and I'm glad that it's back on its feet.  The site is a repository for so much media that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else.  It's also the closest thing I've found to a real time machine.  

A while ago I stumbled across the Internet Archive's trove of picture books - not just the classics like "Curious George" and "Goodnight Moon" that everyone knows, but all the junk books and ephemera that cluttered our bookshelves and got lost under the bed when I was a kid in the '80s.  I'm talking about the movie tie-ins, the McDonalds give-aways, and the read-along books that came with cassettes or records.  Those were the flimsy, cheap, bottom of the barrel books that somehow stuck around much longer than some of my favorites, even though they were so disposable.  An awful lot of them have been preserved in the Internet Archive, right along with all the classics.  And I'm so glad that they're there.  

I spent so much of my childhood around books that now nothing unlocks my old memories like books.  I got obsessed with finding some of the old 80s and 90s children's media I'd enjoyed as a kid when my kids hit certain milestones - mostly for my benefit rather than theirs.  Looking in on those old pieces of my childhood through the Internet Archive was instantly transporting.  I could feel some of the old synapses firing to life again, the sense memories of dog-eared pages and crayon-scrawled covers returning full force.  I remembered the toys those books were often mixed together with, the carpets and furniture of my childhood home, and the sounds of my parents telling me "five more minutes" or "time to clean up."  It was a shock to see the whole, unblemished versions of volumes like "Over in the Meadow" that I only remember as a half-mangled collection of damaged pages, barely held together by peeling sticky-tape.   Or a "Sesame Street" dictionary where the endpages weren't covered in Smurfs stickers and temporary tattoos.  

It was also fun to suddenly have access to all the books I didn't have as a kid.  I think everybody had at least one book that was part of a series that they were never able to find the rest of.  Sometimes the other volumes were pictured on the back cover or on an insert, to let us know they existed.  I remember loving Graeme Base's "Eleventh Hour" and "Animalia," and wishing I could find his newer books.  And suddenly, there was his entire bibliography, along with all the obscure, out-of-print Dr. Seuss books, the books Roald Dahl had written for grown-ups, and the whole Disney Fun-to-Read library.  I found out that "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" had two sequels.   "Babar" has six more books written by the original author, and over thirty more by his son.  And part of me felt like I was seven years old again, and the luckiest kid in the world. 

I understand that every generation has its own media, and have done my best to encourage my kids to explore everything available to them, but it does unsettle me that so few of the books I loved as a kid are available in libraries or bookstores anymore - and, if they are they've been repackaged or re-illustrated, or rewritten to appeal to the current crop of tots.  I can only seem to find the adventures of a younger, more attractive Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, or graphic novel versions of The Babysitters Club books at the local library.  Of course, that happened generations before me, and will happen generations after.  It took some work to find the exact version of "The Little Engine That Could" that I remembered on my bookshelf, which had different illustrations than the original.  Other books I had turned out to be abridged versions or updated classroom versions.  A couple had content so outdated that they're no longer kid-appropriate.    

 

I'm glad that time marches on, and my kids get to enjoy their Mo Willems and Dav Pilkey, but also that I can read them the Bill Peet and Louis Slobodkin books that aren't so easy to find copies of anymore.  I get some reassurance that the books that existed when I was little have been preserved somewhere, and I can visit them once in a while.  It's not the same as having the physical books in your hands, but for me it's enough.   

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Can't Take a "Joker"

Well, "Joker: Folie à Deux" is not the blockbuster that Warner Brothers was hoping for.  And it's certainly not the film that the fans of  the Joker character were hoping for either.  Todd Phillips, by all accounts, was given carte blanche with the sequel to the surprisingly successful 2019 "Joker" movie, and he made a movie that will only be of interest to a very, very few.  I'm honestly not sure whether or not it's a good movie, but as one of the few people who actually seems to be in the target audience for "Joker: Folie à Deux," I admit that I came away entertained.  However, I completely understand why most viewers were appalled and the studio is treating this as a complete disaster.

Since the first "Joker" was an homage to the early films of Martin Scorsese, and "Joker: Folie à Deux" was rumored to be a musical, I prepped for it by rewatching "New York, New York," and Francis Ford Coppola's "One From the Heart."  "Joker: Folie à Deux," despite Phillips' protestations, is definitely a musical film, but the one I find myself comparing it to is "Pennies From Heaven," the tragic Depression-era anti-musical that juxtaposes its heroes' increasingly miserable lives with elaborate fantasy musical numbers.    "Joker: Folie à Deux" does something similar, taking place mostly in Arkham State Hospital, where Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been locked up, awaiting trial for the murders he committed in "Joker."  After he connects with a fellow patient, Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), in a music class, he starts imagining himself in musical numbers set to oldies and show tunes.  Yes, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse's "The Joker" is on the soundtrack.  

The common criticism I've seen of "Joker: Folie à Deux" is that it's determined not to be a crowd-pleaser on any level, and I don't disagree.  The movie actively undercuts the notion that Arthur Fleck is any kind of heroic figure, so the fans who saw him as a pro-anarchy icon in "Joker" get no satisfaction.  Nearly all the violence in the film is directed against him, with no opportunity for reprisal.  The courtroom drama is farcical and devolves into nonsense.  The romance is promising, but comes up pretty half-baked.  Despite the involvement of Lady Gaga, the musical numbers aren't up the standard of your typical song-and-dance picture.  The raw style and Joaquin Phoenix's shaky vocals match the tone of the piece, but none if it's very memorable.  Plus, there are a couple of fake-outs that seem deliberately positioned to frustrate the audience even further.  

It's admirable that Todd Fields has committed to such a starkly bleak vision for this character, and used Warners' money and resources to do it, but my trouble with the film is that the execution is so lacking.  While the film looks gorgeous and expensive, "Joker: Folie à Deux" is badly paced, with a second act that drags interminably.  The scripting is repetitive, disjointed, and dwells on the unpleasantness.  For the first hour or so, I was keeping an open mind as the love story was being set up, and the first few musical numbers were introduced.  However, the movie is not good at actually being a romance or a musical, and wastes the talents of so many talented people.  Lady Gaga is earnestly striving to distinguish her version of Harley Quinn, but gets little of interest to actually do.  Brendan Gleeson plays a guard who is Arthur's primary tormeter in Arkham, and Catherine Keener is his lawyer - both doing their best with pretty empty roles.  As for Joaquin Phoenix, who won an Oscar for playing Arthur Fleck - well, the singing and dancing is new, but the misguided romance and the mental unwinding isn't.  

I'm very happy that Phillips took such a big swing with "Joker: Folie à Deux," even if it didn't turn out the way that anyone wanted.  I think that he could have gone much harder on the spectacle and violence, and darker on the themes and relationships.  I'm glad that there was no attempt whatsoever to make this more related to the Batman universe, but at the same time Philips has also given up on the Scorsese pastiche, which leaves his movie stylistically adrift.  There are a few individual sequences that I enjoyed, and the use of old standards like "That's Entertainment!" and opening with a Sylvain Chomet  animated sequence are points in its favor, but "Joker: Folie à Deux" never seems to find its footing.  Even the ending feels less like a shocker than just putting the movie out of its misery.  

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The "Cinematrix" Fix

My new favorite web based movie themed online game is Cinematrix, currently presented by Vulture.com, but which appears to have originated at MovieGrid.io.  The gameplay is simple.  Every day you get a nine-square grid, with one axis listing three actors or directors, and the other axis listing three descriptors for movies like "1995-2004," "Academy Award Nominee" or "co-starring Will Ferrell."  Your job is to fill in all the squares with movie titles.  If you're especially ambitious, you can try and fill in the most obscure matching films that you can, because the game keeps track of the most common and the rarest answers, and will score you accordingly.  

I'm not very good at Cinematrix, and only manage to fill out the entire grid about half the time.  The most difficult part of the game is that it allows no mistakes - you only have nine guesses.  I have an especially tough time staying within date ranges.  However, I consistently score in the top 30% of players anyway, which suggests that the average Cinematrix player is similarly prone to the same kind of mistakes I make.  However, that's what keeps the game fun for me.  I like to think that I'm pretty knowledgeable about movies, but I'm definitely more interested in some kinds of movies than others. 

It's very clear where the limits of my movie knowledge are, trying to remember a Richard Gere movie with "A Title Starting with I or J," or any movie starring Julia Roberts that came out after 2010.  I'm usually so focused on directors that I have real trouble keeping character actors straight.  I regularly mix up Regina King and Regina Hall, Jon Bernthal and Joe Manganiello, and I'm still not entirely convinced that Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker are different actresses.  Cinematrix does one of those little post-game stats reviews at the end of each game, so you can see where you rank, the hardest squares to fill based on how many players got them right, and the most obscure correct titles that people managed to come up with.  I think I've only gotten one of the most obscure titles once, which really helps to keep my movie nerd ego in check.

I have a few things on my side, however.  My secret weapon is animated films, which often have large casts and multiple sequels.  I might not remember the efforts of Adam Sandler and his regular crew in many live action movies, but they were in three "Hotel Transylvania" movies together.  Cameos and narration jobs count, including all those dubs of Ghibli movies with star-studded casts.  I'm also an avid Academy Awards watcher, and Oscar-related categories come up pretty frequently.  An awful lot of popular films count as Oscar-nominated when you look at categories like Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, and the ever nutty Best Song categories.

Most of the other movie-related web games I was playing a few years ago after the Wordle boom have slipped out of my regular rotation.  I don't know if I'll play Cinematrix for much longer.  But for now, I look forward to a new grid every day, along with NYT's Connections and the occasional round of Wridges.  I like that Cinematrix offers a lot of variety and the categories can get very challenging - one of the Thanksgiving categories wanted movie titles that included the names of NFL teams - so I'm definitely not bored yet.  And I like that I'm getting some entertainment value out of my hopeless movie nerdery.

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"I'm Still Here" and "A Complete Unknown"

Let's finish up the Oscar movies today.

"I'm Still Here" was a big hit in Brazil, a film about the arrest and disappearance of retired politician Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) when a fascist regime was in control of the country in the 1970s.  We initially meet Rubens and his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) living with their five children near the seaside, enjoying a quiet life out of the spotlight together.  However, after increased activity by far-left radicals, Rubens is arrested.  Shortly afterwards Eunice and teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are also taken into custody, and Eunice is interrogated.  

What makes "I'm Still Here" a particularly effective piece of drama is getting the audience situated with the Paiva family first.  We watch the kids play, oldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) preparing to go overseas, and Rubens working as a civil engineer.  The violence of the regime is only present in the background, through news broadcasts on the radio or snatches of conversations with friends.  A good amount of time passes before the police appear in the Paiva home, insisting that Rubens come with them.  And suddenly everything about the Paivas' lives is upended, with Fernanda Torres emerging as the lead of the film as Eunice tries to get answers and survive the abusive treatment of her oppressors.  The interrogation sequences are harrowing, but where the film really shines is in the aftermath, as Eunice struggles to keep her family going and maintain her resolve in her hunt for answers.    

I probably built this film up too much in my mind, because this was the hardest Best Picture nominee to actually find and watch in the runup to the Oscars, but I expected more from "I'm Still Here."  We watch terrible things happen to some good people, for apparently no good reason.  An epilogue twenty-five years later provides some closure, but no real answers.  Not knowing much about Brazilian history, and nothing about Rubens Paiva, I had to go and look up a lot of the missing context for the disappearances   after finishing the movie.  Torres's performance is very good, lovely and subtle for the most part, but I wish I could have seen more of what Eunice was up to during those twenty-five years the movie skipped over.  It feels like there was much more to the story than what we saw onscreen.

On to "A Complete Unknown," which is an interesting take on the life and career of Bob Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet.  We get plenty of context for Dylan and his music, as "A Complete Unknown" focuses on the period from 1961 to 1965, when he moved to New York and became a part of the folk music scene.  We see him  befriend other musicians like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), with Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) making appearances.  And when Dylan's star begins to rise, we see it in relation to the careers of the other musicians in his orbit at the time.    

I don't know much about Bob Dylan aside from his most famous songs.  I like the way he's portrayed here, first as a bright young discovery that everyone wants to know, and then as an increasingly frustrated artist who can't stand being pigeonholed in the folk genre, and eventually burns several bridges to get himself out.  He's shown from the POVs of several people close to him, including his girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning), often being a monumental ass.  At no point was I able to see Chalamet as Bob Dylan, but he's charming enough and does a decent enough job with the songs, so I didn't mind.  I'm grateful that Chalamet didn't attempt to sound or behave more like the actual Dylan, which would have probably been very distracting.

The ensemble cast is great, with a magnetic Monica Barbaro leaving the biggest impression as someone I need to pay more attention to.  If you're a fan of folk music, "A Complete Unknown" almost plays like an all-star concert, with plenty of rousing musical interludes and nostalgic recreations of '60s New York.  Director James Mangold, who gave us a much more traditional biopic with "Walk the Line" twenty years ago, is very surefooted here, both building up and undercutting Dylan's image as necessary.  Though this never gets much into the biographical details, "A Complete Unknown" does an excellent job of getting across why Bob Dylan is famous, and how he fits into musical history.  And it's a good time at the movies too.    

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Rank 'Em: "Black Mirror" Season Seven

Yes, this is the seventh batch of episodes from Charlie Brooker and friends, since that first series way back in 2011 that I couldn't figure out how to watch legally in the U.S.  As always, I'm reviewing each episode separately below in the format of a "Rank 'Em" post.  This was a very good year, despite the larger episode count, and I liked nearly every installment.  Minor spoilers ahead, including for previous "Black Mirror" episodes.  

Common People - Probably the most nerve-wracking and bleakly devastating thing I've seen all year.  Brooker is taking aim at subscription based services and the healthcare industry, but the reason it hits so close to home is because Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones do such a great job of playing an average couple who are so normal and easy to relate to.  So when things get dark, it's truly gutting, and as we all know "Black Mirror" is not afraid of getting very, very dark.  Special kudos to Tracee Ellis Ross for making me want to wring her neck by her final appearance.     

Bete Noir - This one seems to be divisive, and I'm with the critics who have pointed out that this is more of a "Twilight Zone" story than the typical "Black Mirror" story.  However, the level of anxiety achieved here means it fits right in with the rest of the season.  Why this one worked so well for me is a combination of two things.  One, the dark humor is very mean and borderline absurd, culminating in a wild ending that is very old-school science-fiction in the best way.  Two, our protagonist is not a heroine, and it's genuinely difficult to know whether to root for her.  

Eulogy - I mean, it's Paul Giamatti.  How could a "Black Mirror" episode starring him not be great?  "Eulogy" has similarities to several other "Black Mirror" episodes in the way that the use of technology inadvertently captures parts of the past, but the writing is pretty solid and Giamatti sells it.  The tech visualizations are also novel and interesting, especially the way that the characters are able to climb into and explore old photographs.  I also appreciate that the ending, while far from happy, is fairly restrained and allows everyone involved a measure of closure.   

USS Callister: Into Infinity - The first real sequel in "Black Mirror" definitely chose the right universe to come revisit.  There's plenty more to see and do in the online game Infinity, where our main characters are now stranded and running low on resources.  While "Into Infinity" doesn't have the existential horror of the original, it was great to catch up with this set of characters and some of their counterparts.  I missed Michaela Coel, but the rest of the cast was firing on all cylinders, especially Cristin Miloti, Jimmi Simpson, and a special guest star.  It felt like no time had passed at all.

Playthings - I'll never say no to an episode starring Peter Capaldi with Will Poulter reprising his role from "Bandersnatch."  However, this is a very old science-fiction plot that I've seen done before, and there isn't much new or innovative here.  The thronglets aren't visually interesting.  Capaldi narrating in flashback felt too removed from the story.  The minor characters, particularly the cops, are very thinly drawn for "Black Mirror."  I wonder if this got edited down from something longer and more involved, since this is the shortest episode of the season.  

Hotel Reverie - Emma Corrin's performance is excellent.  And that's about the end of the nice things I can say about this episode.  There's simply too much contrivance here that doesn't hold up under the slightest scrutiny.  Who on earth would make a movie in this convoluted, ridiculous way?  The idea of a film remake being warped out of shape by AI characters holds some promise, but trying to shoehorn an earnest romance into the works just didn't work.  And I'm sorry to say that Issa Rae as the lead was a terrible bit of miscasting that I can't get my head around. 

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"Hard Truths" Has the Performance of the Year

Everyone who has seen "Hard Truths" is not happy that Marianne Jean-Baptiste was not nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.  Personally, I am also pretty miffed that "Hard Truths" wasn't a contender for Best Picture either.  This is Mike Leigh's latest film, and if you're not familiar with Mike Leigh, he's a British director who has been making excellent domestic dramas about ordinary British people for decades.  One of his earlier films, "Secrets & Lies," is where I first saw Marianne Jean-Baptiste onscreen, incidentally.  That one was nominated for Best Picture, and Jean-Baptiste got a Supporting Actress nomination, way back in 1997.  

"Hard Truths" is about a woman named Pansy Deacon (Jean-Baptiste).  I think everyone has encountered a Pansy at some point in their lives - a bitter, angry, paranoid person who instinctively lashes out at everyone around them, and is altogether very unpleasant to be around.  "Hard Truths" follows Pansy through a brief period of her life leading up to Mother's Day.  We meet Pansy's husband Curtley (David Webber), and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).  We meet her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser with a much nicer personality and two grown daughters (Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown) of her own.  We learn that Pansy and Chantelle's mother passed away a few years ago, and perhaps this has led to Pansy having to deal with some uncomfortable emotions.

It's difficult to say exactly what is wrong with Pansy.  She seems to be perpetually in a bad mood, and stuck in a cycle of being hostile to and critical of everyone she meets.  Her rude, demanding rants border on the comical at first, because they're so unfiltered and over-the-top.  However, Pansy also cleans compulsively, can't seem to stand being outside, and tends to wake up screaming from bad dreams.  She's anxious and scared and in pain from various ailments that haven't been properly treated, but refuses to ask for anyone's help.  Instead, she stubbornly pushes back against anything that resembles concern.  How much control she has over her own behavior is uncertain, but she cares very much about being in control.  Marianne Jean-Baptiste does an incredible job of keeping Pansy sympathetic while simultaneously being utterly detestable.  And the whole way through, she's very very watchable. 

"Hard Truths" also examines the people who have been the most impacted by Pansy's behavior, specifically her hardworking husband and directionless son.  Both seem numb to Pansy's constant verbal abuse, but eventually we do get a sense of what's going on with the two of them under the surface.  David Webber is wonderful at getting across how Curtley really feels about his wife and their toxic dynamic while hardly saying a word.  His silences say just as much as her deluge of dialogue.  Then there's Chantelle - the only person who Pansy seems willing to be civil with, and is able to talk to with something like honesty.  Reading between the lines, she provides the most likely answers as to why Pansy's family has been reluctant to abandon her to her own misery.  

Leigh also pointedly includes scenes of other characters biting their tongues in other daily interactions - Chantelle's daughters navigating microaggressions at work, and Moses being bullied - putting Pansy's behavior into context and suggesting that her hostility didn't come from nowhere.  The POV shifts to focus on different family members throughout the film, giving us glimpses of each of their private worlds, and their moments of isolation and loneliness between the bigger scenes where they come together.  Despite all the unhappiness on display, I found "Hard Truths" one of Mike Leigh's more uplifting films.  Nothing is anywhere close to fixed or resolved in the end, but we do close out on a hopeful note. 

And I hope Mike Leigh keeps making films for as long as he can, and I hope that Marianne Jean-Baptiste gets more chances in the future to deliver performances like this one.    

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My Favorite Claude Chabrol Film

Claude Chabrol is one of the last New Wave directors I'm writing a "Great Directors" post for, because he tends to make unnerving crime and suspense films that leave me a little cold.  His protagonists, especially in his early films, are usually secret psychopaths who nurse grudges and harbor dark feelings toward those around them.  An awful lot of the stories end in murder, and the murders in Chabrol films are genuinely upsetting in the way that they're staged and the context in which they happen.  I've also held off, because Claude Chabrol was one of those prolific directors who turned out excellent work well into his seventies, and I'm always worried about overlooking important titles.

The clear standout for me, however, is "La Cérémonie," a psychological drama about a maid who murders the family that she works for with the help of a local friend.  Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert play the killers, and a good deal of the film is about their developing friendship.  They are a terrible influence on each other, but find a common kinship in their outsider status and resentment toward those around them.  Bonnaire plays the maid, Sophie, who is deeply insecure about her shortcomings, but projects a facade of competency and confidence to hide them.  However, she's not very good at maintaining this facade, and inevitably the mask keeps slipping.  Her employers are rich, cultured, and make assumptions about Sophie that she can't live up to, frustrating her.  Huppert, playing the friend, Jeanne, puts the blame on the employers for being stuck up.  Jeanne seems to be angry with everyone who has money.   

One of the major themes of New Wave film was rebelling against the bourgeoisie, which I often found difficult because politics were boring and I couldn't spell "bourgeoisie."  "La Cérémonie," which Chabrol joked was the "last Marxist film" is about the class divide in a way that is completely accessible and compelling. Sophie's anxieties about how she's seen by others is at the root of everything that happens in the film.  The employers seem to be nice people and well-meaning, but they constantly challenge her self-esteem by existing in a world that Sophie can't access.  The major transgression they commit against her is discovering a secret that she's been hiding - something that isn't shameful in their eyes, but widens the gulf between them in a way that Sophie can't bear.   

Roger Ebert surmised that the title of the film, "La Cérémonie," refers to the events leading up to an execution by guillotine.  The film works wonderfully as a thriller, with Chabrol building tense scenes out of the most mundane domestic interactions.  Sophie is initially the source of many mysteries, acting strangely in the new household and contradicting instructions for unknown reasons.  Once Jeanne enters the picture, with all her jealousies and resentments, we know it's only a matter of time before she's going to give Sophie all the reasons she needs to turn against her employers.  It's fascinating to watch as the family's normal daily activities start getting on Sophie's nerves, and even fairly innocuous behavior, like watching television and using the dishwasher, becomes imbued with all kinds of meaning.

Bonnaire and Huppert's performances are fabulous, as they usually are.  Bonnaire in particular is so skilled at telling the audience exactly what they need to know when they need to know it, and absolutely nothing more.  Plenty of mysteries are left at the end of "La Cérémonie," and you could dig much deeper into them than I have.  However, I'm wary of revisiting "La Cérémonie" too often.  What Chabrol is particularly good at is making his murderers relatable in ways that remind the viewer that they're human beings - flawed and faulty, but often all too familiar.  Sophie and Jeanne are killers, but only in the last few minutes of the film.  For most of the movie, they're completely ordinary people, who I found myself agreeing with more often than not.   

What I've Seen - Claude Chabrol

Le Beau Serge (1958)

Les Cousins (1959)

Les Bonnes Femmes (1960)

The Third Lover (1962)

The Champagne Murders (1967)

The Unfaithful Wife (1969)

This Man Must Die (1969)

Le Boucher (1970)

Nada (1974)

Violette Nozière (1978)

Cop au Vin (1985)

L'enfer (1994)

La Cérémonie (1995)

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Trailers! Trailers! 2025 is Alive Edition

It's not just you.  The gap between the release of a trailer and whatever it's promoting has gotten awfully brief, especially in the case of streaming content.  I'm regularly seeing trailers show up a scant few weeks ahead of release dates, and you really do have to keep an eye out to avoid things falling through the cracks.  It's been a long time since my last trailers post, and I was spurred to finally write up this one because I saw a few really good, attention grabbing trailers this past month that I wanted to give their due.  Theatrical movies only, for this post.

The Phoenician Scheme - Wes Anderson has a formula for trailers, and it works, so why change anything?  The creators know that we're here to see which faces are new, and which regulars are returning.  There's a heavy emphasis on the slapstick that probably won't carry over to the actual film, and that's fine.  There are plenty of hints of the more melancholy parts of the film amidst all the chaos.  The credits roll is quicker than it has been in trailers past, with several of the cast members grouped together, but otherwise this is Anderson in familiar territory. 

Him - This is the reason I wrote this post.  The switch from the imagery and editing style of a typical Nike commercial to the stomach-drop realization that this is a horror promo was so much fun to see play out on the big screen before "Sinners."  The guy who made "Kicks" is back for "Him," backed by Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions.  This was on the 2022 Black List as "GOAT," and will be potentially giving Marlon Wayans his best dramatic role in years.  I'll be avoiding any further ads until I see "Him" in full,  which brings us to…   

Weapons - I'm linking the teaser for the latest Zach Cregger movie because it's more effective than the full trailer that came a few days later.  The imagery is so startling, and the scant information offered by the initial promo is so unsettling that I don't think you need anything else.  I'll just say that apparently New Line actually sent some film journalists alarm clocks set to go off at 2:17 AM as promo items, which is right up there with NEON's busload of decapitated cheerleaders promoting "The Monkey" earlier this year on the WTF meter.

The Long Walk - At last.  It's always good to see a long-gestating project claw its way free from development hell.  That's Mark Hamill playing the Major, and Roman Griffin Davis from "Jojo Rabbit" as the first guy down.  While I don't think that the adaptation is going to be as faithful to the original Stephen King short story as its fans want, I think it's a good thing that this is being made in 2025, post "Squid Game,"  and not any earlier.  Audiences are a lot less squeamish about the level of violence in YA death games than they used to be.   

Honey Don't! - Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke return with their follow-up to "Drive Away Dolls," which I liked better than most.  Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza are always going to get my attention in any circumstances, and I'm definitely up for a neo-noir with Qualley as a lesbian PI named Honey O'Donahue.  I also support Chris Evans' ongoing attempt to rebrand himself as the go-to actor for smug assholes.  He's really very good at it.  Apparently this is the second of Ethan Coen's planned "lesbian B-movie" trilogy.  Still no word on what Joel's been up to.      

The Roses - "The Roses" is remaking one of my favorite '80s black comedies, "The War of the Roses," with Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a feuding couple.  No word on who's playing the Danny DeVito role.  Apparently the action has been moved to the San Francisco Bay area, and I don't know what accent Ncuti Gatwa thinks he's doing, but it needs some help.  Director Jay Roach has a very mixed track record, but I'm hopeful that the Tony McNamara  script and the high calibre cast will add up to good things.  Fingers crossed.

Eddington - Here's an eye-catching teaser, something that definitely got my attention without saying too much.  This is Ari Aster's neo-western, and emphasis on the neo with the use of social media scrolling to reveal this is taking place during the pandemic, and introducing Pedro Pascal, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Watson, and Austin Butler's  characters.  It's Interesting how A24 is the first thing we see onscreen, which is another indicator of how much they've become a brand over the past few years.  Aster and Phoenix pair well together, so I expect great things.

Tron: Ares - Finally, I'm not sure what to do with this teaser.  It is doing its best to look as un-nerdy as possible, and thereby does not appeal to me at all.  We're really not bringing anybody back from "Tron: Legacy" except Jeff Bridges?  Jared Leto is the lead?  The filmmakers have a few more chances to impress me, but we've definitely gotten off on the wrong foot here.

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Remember "September 5"

One of the more interesting Oscar also-rans this season is "September 5," directed and co-written by Tim Fehlbaum.  The chatter around the film suggests that it was the wrong movie at the wrong time, an account of the Munich Olympics hostage crisis of 1972, told from the POV of the ABC television broadcasting team that covered it.  "September 5" depicts the event as an act of terror perpetrated by the Black September organization, and says almost nothing about the underlying Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which some modern commentators have deemed unforgivable in the current political climate. 

However, "September 5" isn't really about the hostage crisis.  It's about the media's reaction to the crisis, and all the ways that the people in charge of the broadcast, led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), make bad calls and set terrible precedents, in the name of getting the story out.  Initially, they're set up as the underdogs.  The crew stationed in Munich is from ABC Sports, not ABC News, and covering events live as they're unfolding is a relatively new innovation.  Much of the film plays like a 70s thriller in the vein of "All the President's Men" or "The Parallax View," with as much focus placed on process as on sensationalism.  It's fascinating to watch the television crew at work behind the scenes, getting the cameramen in the right places, trying to ensure new information is confirmed, and juggling all the myriad technical necessities of putting a television broadcast together.  An added complication is that no one speaks German except for a single interpreter, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch).    

"September 5" makes all the same points as movies like "Network" and "Nightcrawler" about the dangers of reckless journalism, but the difference here is that the wrongdoers are not raving madmen or lurid immoral sociopaths.  These are highly trained media professionals who are working under enormous pressure and time constraints.  When they realize they've made mistakes that potentially impact the hostage situation, no one is more horrified than they are.  It also makes a considerable difference that the events of September 5 are real historical events.  I wasn't alive in 1972, but a lot of the archive footage pings as awfully familiar, and I admit I sat up straighter when I realized that the barely glimpsed newscaster being given directions by the control room was Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker).  There are ABC logos everywhere, and as far as I can tell "September 5" has no ties whatsoever to ABC or Disney.  Paramount is the distributor in the US.   

Not being familiar with the actual events, I found the film's suspenseful ending very effective.  Even if you know how the crisis plays out, however, there's plenty of tension that comes  from watching how the main characters are making decisions in response.  Bader emerges as the film's lead, and John Magaro delivers a memorable performance, as a man doing his best to look like he knows what he's doing as the situation grows more and more dire.  Peter Sarsgaard is in imperturbable authority mode, and a solid presence as always.  Finally, most of the filmmakers are German, and through the Gebhardt character they find a way to include a thoughtful German POV on the tragedy.  As a non-American and as a bystander to many of the decisions being made, she becomes the closest thing we have to an audience surrogate. 

I understand why "September 5" is being largely ignored, because it's not telling the kind of story that viewers are interested in right now.  However, it is quietly one of the better criticisms of the news media that I've seen in a while, and a reminder that there are real, fallible people who decide what we see on our screens, and how we perceive the events of the day.  The louder, more pointed satires of the current news ecosystem don't get the point across nearly as well as "September 5," which presents the original sins of live television broadcasting in far more sympathetic, cautionary terms.    

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"Lost" Year Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

So, this is the season where everybody goes in the hatch and pushes a button every 108 minutes.  This is also the season where we get a bunch of new cast members, playing characters who happened to be in the tail section of the plane, and crashed on the other side of the island.  Also, apparently there's a significant community of "Others" who are hanging out in the jungle, mysteriously kidnapping people for reasons yet unknown.  And we learn about the Dharma Initiative.  And the supernatural stuff starts ramping up.  And how big is this island, exactly?

J.J. Abrams' famous mystery box is fully in effect this year.  I know that not all of the answers are going to be satisfying, which helps in curbing my expectations.  I can see a lot of Abrams' familiar bad habits already in place - specifically not really having concrete answers to several of the bigger questions in place by this point.  Still, without "Lost," we wouldn't have all the better mystery shows that would follow in its wake, like "The Leftovers" and "Severance."  I prefer the conspiracy mumbo-jumbo to the religious and spiritual mumbo-jumbo that crops up this season, because the latter follows no real logic and therefore tends to drive me nuts.  One of the new main characters, Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is an African drug-lord who becomes a Christian priest and is the instigator of a lot of this.  The actor's great, but the character is a walking stereotype, and not a good one.

The severe gender imbalance continues to nag at me - it's actually worse than the first season by the time we get to the finale.  We get one really great new female character in the hostile cop Ana-Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez), while psychologist Libby (Cynthia Watros) mostly settles into being a love interest for Hurley.  However, it's hard to complain when it becomes very apparent that there are way too many characters to give most of them anything close to satisfying personal development.  Also, the quality of the writing is all over the place this year.  We start out nicely with the episodes filling in what happened to the survivors on the other side of the island, and the new discoveries in the hatch.  However, with the big episode order, inevitably there are a ton of filler episodes.  Some are good, like learning how Sayid became an interrogator.  Some are bad, like Charlie having a mental crisis and insisting the baby needs to be baptized.  Saying much about Michael and Shannon gets into too many spoilers, but  those two probably got the shortest end of the stick this year for completely different reasons.  Oh, and we all knew they were keeping Walt offscreen because his actor, Malcolm David Kelley, grew about a foot between seasons when only two months should have passed in the show, right?

I've noticed a recurring trope which applies to too many of the male characters - when they get angry and frustrated, they start yelling and making irrational demands with no justification, and the audience is still supposed to be on their side.  Jack and Sawyer did it a few times last season, but this year it feels like it's everybody - Michael, Charlie, Hugo, Bernard (Sam Anderson), and more.  I have to remind myself that these episodes were airing in 2005-2006, and this was essentially a prime time network soap opera, so the broader melodramatic acting and more shouty exposition was pretty normal.  I think that's why newcomer Henry Gale (Michael Emerson) is such a great addition.  His performance is subtle and soft-spoken and contrasts nicely with all the posturing alpha-males jockeying for attention.  The last of the new characters is Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the guy that Locke finds in the hatch.  There are too many of his kind of character on the show already for me to care much about him at this point.  Still, "Lost" runs for four more seasons, so he has time to improve.  

 

Looking at the production, it feels like the second season had more money and resources available, so you could have more locations, some ambitious set pieces, and a few special effects shots.  There are also more familiar faces showing up as guest stars - Clancy Brown, Francois Chau, and Katey Sagal notably.  The flashback structure feels more important than ever, giving us a nice break from the island's increasingly weird mysteries.  I'm still enjoying the series, in spite of finding it so easy to snark about it, and I expect I'll soldier on regardless of how bad it gets.  However, it's become clear to me that while "Lost" may be innovative and influential, it's not a great show - at least not very often.         

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"Piece by Piece" and "Better Man"

"Piece by Piece," a biopic about Pharrell Williams, and "Better Man," a biopic about Robbie Williams each make a very bold artistic choice that ensure that they stand out from the crowd, even if the stories are very familiar.  "Piece by Piece" is an animated film that tells Pharrell Williams' life story entirely with stop-motion Lego pieces, and all the characters are Lego minifigures. Well, except Snoop Dogg, who is a Lego dog.  "Better Man" is more conventional, except that Robbie Williams has been swapped out with an anthropomorphic chimpanzee version of himself, created by WETA FX.  He still sings, dances, and has a drug problem, but he's a chimp.  Clearly, I had to write about these two films together.

It's been a common complaint over the past few years that musician biopics have been getting stale and repetitive.  I think what "Piece by Piece" and "Better Man" have each managed to do is to tell their stories with the visual language of films that are more bombastic, more attention-grabbing, and definitely more financially successful at the box office than your traditional biopic.  The "Lego" movies were part of the zeitgeist only briefly, but they have a very particular appeal and an innovative approach to animation that is a good fit for Pharrell Williams - who has been this overlooked but ubiquitous presence in the US music scene for twenty years.  Williams' life is not a particularly eventful one, so "Piece by Piece" focuses on his career and creative aspirations.  The bright, colorful Lego animation provides a way to visualize Pharrell Williams' creative process in some genuinely charming ways.  There are some drawbacks, like the minifigures being pretty bad at emoting, and sometimes difficult to distinguish from each other, but I thought the experiment was mostly successful.  

"Better Man," of course, is trying to evoke some of the aura of the recent "Planet of the Apes" films, since the character design and animation of the ape Robbie Williams is very close to the animation of Cesar and friends.  The conceit here is that Robbie Williams sees himself as an animal as he goes through life, though this is never explicitly spelled out in the film.  There are other fantasy elements, such as dream sequences, fanciful musical numbers, and Robbie having recurring visions of evil versions of himself appearing during performances, fueling his self-doubt.  The visions eventually build up to a big climactic action sequence that wouldn't be out of place in any recent superhero movie.  This all looks like it was a ton of work, and plays wonderfully onscreen.  However, "Better Man" is a very typical musician biopic when you just look at the underlying narrative, and it didn't help that I had never heard of Robbie Williams before watching this film, and was not familiar with his music.  It felt very much like watching "Rocketman," the Elton John biopic, except with none of the Elton John music that helped get me through the rougher bits of that film.

I prefer "Piece by Piece" to "Better Man," though I'd recommend both.  "Piece by Piece" is a messier, weirder film that feels more like a documentary than a biopic at times, incorporating interviews with other artists and Pharrell talking about his own work.  And in addition to having a yen for movies about the creative process, I just enjoy Pharrell's contributions to music more.  I'd pick the "Piece by Piece" soundtrack over the "Better Man" soundtrack in a heartbeat.  At the same time, it was truly refreshing to see a WETA ape character outside the confines of a "Planet of the Apes" adventure, confirming that a digital character has absolutely no trouble being the lead of a movie, even if it's not an action-adventure spectacle. 

An interesting wrinkle here is that both musical artists end up playing themselves in the film without really having to do any traditional screen acting.  This puts more of the burden on the special effects artists, animators, performance capture artists, technicians, and other below-the-line crewmembers than ever.  Directors Morgan Neville and Michael Gracey deserve a lot of credit for shepherding these films, and enabling their experimental impulses, but more than ever these movies are team efforts and couldn't exist without the collaboration of hundreds and hundreds of talented artists.            

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How I'm Learning to Read for Fun

So, the one type of media that I don't think I've ever talked about on this blog is books.  It's not that I don't love and appreciate books.  I used to be a voracious reader as a kid.  However, somewhere along the line I completely stopped reading for fun.  It wasn't something that happened overnight.  I always wanted to be somebody who read books regularly.  I asked for books every Christmas that I inevitably would never actually read, or started but never finished.  

For a long time I used the excuse that I was too busy to read.  When I was still in school this was true.  I suspect a big reason I stopped reading for fun was because I was reading too much in order to finish my degree.  I started associating long stretches of text with reading as work.  Then social media came along, and I was doing most of my fun reading online.  My entertainment media of choice were always movies and television, which I finally had more access to, and could really dig into the way I hadn't as a kid.  When I did read physical books for fun, it was usually anthologies.  I still collect Stephen King's short story collections.    

It took me a while to get into ebooks.  I started reading on an iPad when the COVID pandemic came around, and I lost access to the public library.  I might not have read books myself for fun, but I always read to my kids as much as I could.  Suddenly public domain collections of ebooks became an important source of new reading material.  Even after we could get physical books again, I kept reading to my kids using ebooks.  I downloaded all the terrible apps and online readers.  My kids got older and the books got longer.  For Christmases and birthdays my brother kept sending me the kinds of books that won literary awards, and I found myself feeling guilty just looking at them.  

Then last year, I read two books roughly around the same time.  I read Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, a fun, tricky, and fairly short book that my brother gave me for my birthday.  It was possibly the closest thing to a genre book he had ever sent me, one of those puzzle-like meta creations with a lot of wordplay that only works in the format of a book.  I also found a fairly long excerpt of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios online, a book written by podcasters I regularly listened to, Johanna Robinson and Da7e Gonzales.  I decided I wanted to read the whole thing, and whaddaya know - my library didn't have a physical copy, but there was an ebook version available.  

I took stock.  It didn't take me nearly as long to read these books as I thought it would.  I was spending too much time on mobile games and doomscrolling, especially in the wake of the recent election.  Why not make a real effort to start reading again in 2025?  Get back into the habit of digesting longform content?  I decided it was worth doing, and I gave myself a couple of rules to prevent burnout.  I could only read one book at a time, and borrow one book at a time from the library, to make sure I finished them.  I could make lists of books I wanted to read in the library app, but not a queue, so as not to make the experience too rigid and potentially overwhelm myself.  I was also not allowed to read any books that didn't look like fun.

So, what did I want to read?  When I really thought about it, the books that I had always liked best were science-fiction and fantasy books - and not the classics either, which could sometimes get awfully stuffy.  I preferred the books with some humor, like the ones by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.  I liked the ones that offered some thrills and chills, like the ones by Michael Crichton.  I also remain a gigantic movie and television nerd, so anything being readied for an adaptation was also a plus.  Mostly, however, I was curious about what was out there since the last time I'd really bothered to browse the sci-fi/fantasy shelves twenty years ago.  I recognized several of the authors by reputation, but I'd never read anything they wrote.  So recent books would be getting priority.  

At the time of writing I'm six books into this experiment.  I've read three funny science-fiction books, including ones written by John Scalzi and Andy Weir.  One horror novel, not by Stephen King.  One Barbara Hambly romantic-fantasy novel written decades before "romantasy" became a thing.  One lesbian Hollywood romance which I read by accident, because the title was unreasonably similar to the book I had meant to read.  I enjoyed it though, so I don't mind.  I can finish a 300 page book in a week, but I try to keep a slower pace than that so I don't rush.  So far, so good.  Nothing amazing or life-changing, but no real strikeouts either.  

I don't feel the need to write any reviews of these books at this time, but I'll update again in a few months to see where we are.  

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