My Favorite Movies of 2021
A second year of the pandemic passed in which I didn’t attend any film festivals in person. I miss it. My viewing output of is lower than usual but still much much higher than that of the median filmgoer.
Film is one category of media in which human recommendations still feel superior to algorithmic ones. It is notable that none of my favorite Netflix movies this year came via their recommendations. Some I might have never heard of had some critic or friend not written about them.
Film remains a difficult category for machine learning to crack. Most people only watch movies once. In a category like music, people listen to their favorite tracks repeatedly. Films are very long while music tracks only last a few minutes. As a result, the frequency of feedback is much higher for music than film.
Viewers generally provide a single point of feedback on a film, if they even choose to sample it: they either finish the movie or they don’t. In music, you not only gather many more data points per hour because of the short duration of each track, but you gather feedback within each piece. People hit skip, or rewind, or repeat. People add songs to playlists or ask their streaming service to generate radio stations off of that track.
As I’ve written before about TikTok, one of its most critical design choices was to full-screen videos, allowing it to gather really accurate signal from the viewer on each video. TikTok videos are even shorter than music tracks, but they often contain snippets of music tracks. In many ways a TikTok is about as short a piece of media as could be designed that can be said to still tell a narrative (though maybe a dating app profile photo is even more concise).
The ways that music tracks resemble each other feel easier to see with math. This makes it easier to generate a playlist of similar tracks even before gathering listener feedback. Machine learning algorithms have learned to write music that often sounds like specific composer and musicians. I’ve yet to see an algorithm that can just spit out a Wes Anderson-like movie.
It’s no surprise to me that Netflix seems largely to have given up on much of the work that came out of the Netflix Prize and instead focuses on using the massive funnel of its above-the-fold home screen real estate to push its latest original production. I didn’t like Red Notice, but I can understand what types of metrics would lead Netflix to just splash it across every subscriber’s eyeballs.
Film is also a category in which we still haven’t fully understood the variation in people’s aesthetic preferences. Even people I consider to share many of my movie tastes will disagree with me vociferously on particular movies. I doubt anyone will agree with all my movie choices below.
Rather than a bug, this variance in taste is to be treasured. I’m not interested in terse recommendations like “this film is good” or “this film was terrible.” Given the individuality of aesthetic preferences, there’s little signal in a binary expression of one person’s preferences.
Instead, give me a review which can articulate why someone enjoyed a film or not. Some of my favorite reviews are pans of movies I loved, or vice versa. It’s a rare gift for someone to be able to express just how a film works on them given the subconscious and emotional nature of the medium. Moving images are pre-verbal. Something is almost always lost in translation to text. It’s even rarer for someone to be able to tie that to film craft given how visually illiterate our educational systems have left us.
This doesn’t mean I rely exclusively on professional film critics. More and more, I’ve come to rely on the film buffs of Letterboxd to guide my film choices. Unlike Rotten Tomatoes or MetacriticThe way those two sites compress the quality of film into a single numeric score has always been reductive. That's by design, but my aesthetic response to a film can't be mapped that way. Some of my favorite restaurants and books don't rate highly on Yelp or Amazon. Similarly, often it's the movie that's divisive that I find most compelling. Sometimes what you want is a work that attracts you with equal force as it repels others., you can curate your own panel of people to follow and filter film reviews by their tastes. Since many of the members are not professional critics, they don’t feel a need to conform to some standard review template. Many reviews are just humorous quips. Many are just a line or two. But taken as a group, they simulate that feeling of standing outside on the sidewalk after a festival screening, debating the movie with other film buffs.
Pauline Kael made famous a particular type of deeply subjective film criticism. Along with Susan Sontag, she treated as legitimate her very personal aesthetic response to art. The logical successor to that is not any single film critic today but the pluralistic critical response of the public via the Internet. Sometimes it can be toxic and suffocating as in the angrier strains of franchise fandom. Other times, it can feel like a warm fellowship, trying to tease out why some films work for some of us and not others, the nature of the medium's alchemy.
That’s a community I’ve missed these past two years. The pandemic accelerated many trends, and the decline in theater-going is one of them. Studios adapted by pushing even more movies day-and-date. I’ll always prefer to see a movie in theaters, but more than that I just appreciate being able to see movies. Bemoan the death of the mid-budget adult drama all you want, but complaining is not a strategy. I’ve worked too long in the technology industry to know how this plays out. The world changes, and you either change with it or get left behind. These forces sweeping Hollywood are exogenous to its world and will sweep it along regardless of what it does.
For example, the traditional release model for prestige films has always been festival to limited release in NY and LA and then much later to wider release. The pandemic brought some films to VOD more quickly, even day-and-date at times, but in 2021 most prestige indies are still next to impossible to watch unless you live in NYC or LA.
It’s long past the time when this model should be updated. I often hear buzz out of festivals for movies like The Worst Person in the World or Licorice Pizza but then realize I won’t be able to see them until months later, sometimes not until the following year. That type of delayed anticipation is fine for a blockbuster like Batman, but for indie films it is questionable at best. Sometimes I don’t realize that a movie released in theaters until it has already come and gone. That used to never happen in the era before the Big Bang of Content.
In a previous era, this staged build-up of anticipation worked for indie films. Now, it actively hurts them. When the public is bombarded with what is effectively an infinite number of contenders for their attention, movies need publicity and availability to crest together.
Furthermore, the idea of a movie moving through a period of unavailability because of a gap in release windows is just absurd in an age of abundance. Once a movie has left theaters, it should always be available somewhere for people who want to seek it out. Windowing worked great in a content scarce world where people would wait patiently for some piece of media to hit the market, but nowadays, it just means an audience whose attention will get diverted elsewhere. I’m still amazed by how many movies I can’t find streaming anywhere even though they’ve left their theatrical run. This hurts a specific type of movie more than others, and it’s not the Spider-Man: No Way Home’s of the world.
In his new book The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman chronicles how the rise of a the video rental store like Blockbuster spawned a new and specific type of cinephile. Never before had so many movies been available to watch on near demand, and people from Kevin Smith to Quentin Tarantino had their film tastes broadened by exposure to movies from around the world, in all sorts of genres. The combination of the VCR and video stores enabled an explosion of cinephilia. I was one of those freshly minted film buffs, birthed in dimly lit aisles housing one box cover after another of films I'd never heard of.It began for me in grade school when my father would rent films from the library, then Hollywood and Blockbuster video, and would reach full bloom when I moved to Seattle to work at Amazon and discovered Scarecrow Video. It was there that I'd rent Criterion edition Laserdiscs of movies and a Laserdisc player to play them on. I have such fond memories of putting down deposits of a few hundred dollars in case I somehow absconded with the the Criterion Edition Laserdisc of John Woo's The Killer or something like that.
We now have, via the internet, the ability to make every film available on demand at all times. We've already seen what Netflix licensing and streaming content from all over the world has done for people's exposure to international film and television. Studios need to ensure that it's as easy as possible to fall into a lifelong romance with the medium. This is an aesthetic abundance strategy for an industry which spent its entire history built around scarcity-based business models. It's not that I don't love the occasional screening of a rare 70mm print of some film. It's that withholding things in an age of abundance is more likely to make the public forget it entirely than to seek it out.
My last memory from this past year is the escalation in what’s commonly referred to as the Discourse (capital D because it’s a very specific, modern form I’m referencing). It’s not just the world of film that’s been prey to this as it’s an output of the structure of Western social media.
Any film lover on social media will be familiar with some forms of it. The most prominent was the Scorsese versus MCU debate. Then it was the debate over The Oscars, and this past week it's arguments over whether Steven Spielberg should direct a remake of BullittEven if you aren't a fan of Spielberg's sentimentality, he is an S-Tier mover of the camera. The way some people worship the linguistic stylings of certain writers, I know few film buffs who don't stand in awe of how Spielberg chooses to cover a scene. We need an 80 hour documentary that consists solely of Spielberg and his DP's discussing how and why they choose to move the camera a specific way in every scene of every movie he ever directed. Purity tests are especially useful when roaming a threat-filled landscape, to separate friend from foe. It just so happens that Western social media is just such a post-apocalyptic desert of tribal warfare.
The Scorsese-MCU debate is an ideal purity test because the MCU movies are the most watched films in the world now. Almost anyone has at least heard of if not seen at least one MCU movie. That means even a casual filmgoer can be tossed in the water like a witch to see if they float. Spoiler alert: everyone floats.
As with a mistaken mass bcc: email incident, the only way to make the Discourse stop is to ignore it. But given enough participants, it can't be helped. Someone always presses reply all to request to be removed from the distribution, which leads to people asking to be removed, which leads to other people telling them to stop replying all.
This same snowball effect propels arguments like the Scorsese-MCU debate. Like Neil McCauley headed to freedom near the end of Heat, with Eady in the passenger seat next to him, we should just drive on. But it’s irresistible to weigh in, and so we yank the steering wheel to the right, cut through three lanes of traffic to the exit, just so we can hunt down Waingro to let him know that Scorsese possesses more talent in his pinkie than every MCU director put together, or that Spider-Man: No Way Home deserves the Best Picture Oscar, or whatever.
This type of exhausting Discourse is a headless, distributed phenomenon. It’s a monster we animate, and it only lives because we keep feeding it our own anger. Even complaining about the Discourse is part of the Discourse. It changes nothing except to punish and exhaust the participants.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard writes of "the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory...it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map." Today the Discourse begins as an illusory shadow online and then assumes corporeal form. This is the reflexive loop between the internet and the world at large: we put the ghost into the machine, then we pull it out of the machine with a look of surprise.
I beg of you, don’t feed the Discourse. We’re all better than that. I confront enough tribal debate in every other aspect of my online life, I just want to preserve movies as a peaceful corner of civilized dialogue. The worst type of prisoner’s dilemma is one which the two prisoners construct themselves, where they defect against each other when there are no prison guards or police to enforce any judgment. We're playing ourselves.
Movies I Enjoyed This Year
In no particular order...
The Power of the Dog
I love Westerns, one of the most storied of Western film genres, and this year added a new entry to the syllabus.
The Power of the Dog’s violence is of the psychological variety. If your ideal Western consists of six-shooters at high noon, just know that much of the conflict in this movie is waged via banjos, pianos, the occasional venomous quip, and leather weaving. I mean, one of this movie’s main characters is present only via his old saddle hanging in a barn.
Some people won't consider this much of a Western at all. But the power of this genre is its ability to speak to so much of the human condition. The West has always represented the frontier in the American imagination, a place where one goes to try to escape structure, the place of maximal freedom, but it also represents a site where society can be built anew. That tug and pull is core to the genre.
Campion explores this tension in a new way. Many of the characters in this film, from Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons' Phil and George Burbank to Kirsten Dunst's Rose Gordon to Kodi Smit-McPhee's Peter Gordon, are in search of the both the freedom and the community promised by the West. But each runs into invisible structures imposed by society and culture, and each tries to cope in their own way.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting style often feels overly theatrical. In many movies it’s a distraction. Here, it’s perfect. His Phil Burbank’s cruelty is itself a conscious pose, for reasons we learn by movie’s endThe least believable thing in the movie is that Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons could be biological brothers. Someone check a photo of the Pony Express delivery guy.. Cumberbatch menaces every frame of this movie; he is Chekhov’s gun, or so we’re meant to believe.
Campion is a master of visual iconography that lends her films a psychoanalytic portent. Who can forget Holly Hunter underwater, tied to the anchor of her titular piano? In The Power of the Dog, a character stumbles upon a tunnel in the woods near town. To enter it and traverse to the other side is to crawl back through a birth canal into a mother’s womb, to a place of psychic security and unconditional love. I won’t ruin who built the tunnel or where it leads, but the movie is full of imagery that burrows into your subconscious. Even the title is cryptic, forebodingIt comes from Psalm 22:20. “Deliver my soul from the sword; my precious life from the power of the dog.”. In the Bible it references Jesus on the cross, his is the precious life. In the case of Campion's film, there is more than one person who could be the precious life, and more than one person or force who could be the power of the dog. To say more would be a spoiler; the fun is in working it out for yourself by movie's end..
The end of the movie is a bit of a shock, but walk the movie back in your head and the clues were there all along.
The Lost Daughter
I don’t know that Netflix has to continue to fund arthouse films in an effort to win a Best Picture Oscar, but I understand the impulse. Despite the precipitous decline in the ratings of the Oscars, almost every one I know would lose their minds just to attend the ceremony. Hollywood’s ability to manufacture its own cultural prestige will live long past the decline of the mid-budget adult drama.
The Lost Daughter is an example of a book adaptation that honors the tone of the source material while recognizing the unavoidable differences in film as a medium. The book is told in the first person, but absent a voice-over, movies have to externalize that type of subjectivity. Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her directorial debut, succeeds in doing so through shot choices and the sheer acting chops of Olivia Colman. Much of the text of the movie consists of long, wordless, tight closeups of Colman’s face.
A latent dread haunts Ferrante’s novels. The Lost Daughter honors that. All the mothers out there who’ve been trapped at home with young children going on some two years now will look upon Colman and think, I understand. Damn it momma, I understand.
The Worst Person in the World
They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders. What they hold dear are family life, local activism, national parks, penny loafers and mountain bikes. They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix.
This appeared in Time Magazine in July, 1990Quentin Tarantino is clearly Gen X by this definition. His Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the most anti-hippie movies I've ever seen. At movie's end, Brad Pitt and Leonardo Dicaprio take comically violent revenge on the hippies for ruining Hollywood. It takes the place of Dirty Harry, my previous benchmark for most anti-hippie film.
. It was pointed at twenty-somethings at that time, or, as we know them today, Generation XI'm a member of one of the later cohorts of Generation X. I recently read Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties and he makes the point that Generation X is the least annoying of those yet living because we are the smallest in population, exceeded in size by both the Boomers and the Millenials that sandwich us. Since this is a positive rather than descriptive statement, I declare it indisputable. (BANGS GAVEL).
A common description of The Worst Person in the World, the final chapter of Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, is that it’s about millennial late-twenties, early-thirties indecision. What should I do with my life? Who should I settle down with? When should I have kids, if at all?
But as the Time excerpt shows, most of the same critiques of millennials were directed at the previous generation. This type of pre-midlife-crisis of indecision is more and more common in any post-modern Western society. Think of it as a type of post-industrial paradox of choice. Free of religious, societal, institutional, and cultural guide rails as to how to lead our lives, we find ourselves, like this movie’s protagonist Julie (Renata Reinsve), wandering a maze of options at the age of 30 in a haze of existential bewilderment.
The decline of power structures can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, many of them were coercive. In another era, Julie’s career options would have been curtailed even more by sexual discrimination or societal notions of what a woman could be. Back then, even those who earned a taste of freedom had to wait until after their kids had left the nest. Today, for many, the mid-life crisis has been pulled up by two decades. Absent tradition and authority, told we can be anything we want to be, we are trapped by our freedom. The neoliberal marketplace tells us to follow our own desires while assailing us with imagery of what we should covet.
The internet has turned this dynamic collective. Social media cocoons us in the never-ending hall of mirrors of other people’s lives. It has never been easier to visualize the opportunity costs of our own choices, so much so that we gave it an explicit name: FOMO. In the moment, we feel a momentary fear of missing out, but over time, we’re even more haunted by a persistent fear of having missed out for good. It turns out that the promise of unfettered pleasure and choice of the postmodern age was a mirage for many.
Marriage, a stable job, children, all the things Julie foregoes as she explores her freedom are structures that organize the span of one’s life. They are anchor points in one’s timeline. Without them, one’s life can flow any which way. That is both blessing and a curse, as you can feel unmoored, destabilized. The fact that the movie is structured into twelve chapters and an epilogue, with specific titles, is ironic. That the movie is able to impose an artificial structure to what is otherwise a life of spontaneity is only because it is a work of art, created from an explicit artist’s mind. It is less certain whether Julie herself can find a coherent arc in herself.
The description of Liquid Love by Zygmunt Bauman reads:
This book is about the central figure of our contemporary, ‘liquid modern’ times – the man or woman with no bonds, and particularly with none of the fixed or durable bonds that would allow the effort of self-definition and self-assertion to come to a rest. Having no permanent bonds, the denizen of our liquid modern society must tie whatever bonds they can to engage with others, using their own wits, skill and dedication. But none of these bonds are guaranteed to last. Moreover, they must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change – as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.
Within, Bauman writes:
The principal hero of this book is human relationship. This book’s central characters are men and women, our contemporaries, despairing at being abandoned to their own wits and feeling easily disposable, yearning for the security of togetherness and for a helping hand to count on in a moment of trouble, and so desperate to ‘relate’; yet wary of the state of ‘being related’ and particularly of being related ‘for good’, not to mention forever – since they fear that such a state may bring burdens and cause strains they neither feel able nor are willing to bear, and so may severely limit the freedom they need – yes, your guess is right – to relate…
He references a laboratory study which epitomizes this tension:
In their famous experiment, Miller and Dollard saw their laboratory rats ascending the peak of excitement and agitation when ‘the adiance equalled the abiance’ – that is, when the threat of electric shock and the promise of tasty food were finely balanced…
No wonder that ‘relationships’ are one of the main engines of the present-day ‘counselling boom’. The complexity is too dense, too stubborn and too difficult to unpack or unravel for individuals to do the job unassisted. The agitation of Miller and Dollard’s rats all too often collapsed into a paralysis of action. An inability to choose between attraction and repulsion, between hopes and fears, rebounded as an incapacity to act.
Julie seems to be one of Bauman’s liquid loversSpeaking of our modern liquid times, what could epitomize that more than dating apps? With one swipe, another option appears at our fingertips on our phone screen. Apps like Tinder and Hinge not only represent the postmodern allure of infinite choice but also the triumph of neoliberalism. It's not a coincidence that we use the term dating economy when referring to modern courtship. The market is our solution to everything. It's the same with gaming, where we refer to virtual economies. Baudrillard would surely be both delighted and horrified that so many modern games center around repetitive work. We complain about our actual jobs but embrace virtual work in grind games like Farmville.
Any decision that forecloses future options both attracts and repulses in equal measure. Julie dives in and then flees for another life again and again. In his review of the film in The American Conservative, Matthew Schmitz notes:
Julie knows the risks of intimacy. Love causes suffering. It brings with it the shadow of death, and not just because we injure others and are injured by them. Love requires us to die to self, a foretaste of the death all experience.
Schmitz points at millennial precarity as a subject of the film:
The middle-class life that was the classic setting of the mid-life crisis has become less attainable for millennials, a fact reflected in Julie’s transition from the financially independent Aksel to the hourly worker Eivind. Soon the majority of my fellow millennials will have turned 35, the age Julie is approaching at the end of the film. The oldest millennials are already in their forties. Social scientists have painstakingly described our low rates of marriage, childbearing, and homeownership. Trier gets at something that is harder to capture: the ambivalent experience of people who came of age in these years.
It seemed that we could do what we wanted, except form lasting relationships; go where we liked, unless it was home. For no other generation have the possibilities been so limitless and the reality so limited. The Supreme Court proclaimed that anyone could marry, even as marriage became unattainable for the poor. AirBnB opened up houses across the world, even as houses became something that fewer could afford.
I’m less certain that’s the primary preoccupation of The Worst Person in the World given Norway’s renowned social safety net. Instead, Julie’s story embodies one of the popular critiques of 60’s and 70’s postmodernism which urged a rejection of elite authorities in favor of following our desires. What was promised was a liberation and authenticity.
In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote of desire:
It is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence – desire, not left-wing holidays! – and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.
Earlier, they wrote:
Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.
Follow your desires instead of the herd, don’t be a sheep, be your authentic self. A few decades later, similar slogans permeate corporate culture slogans and self-help paeans.
Anti-Oedipal theories promised to throw off our shackles. What we ended up with is more ambivalent. Freud wrote:
...we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love.
Two images are shared most often from The Worst Person in the World. One is the opening shot, of Julie in profile, wearing a black dress, standing alone on a balcony, a cityscape behind her. She holds a cigarette in one hand and her cell phone in the other, and she seems bored. After a few beats, she swipes open her cell phone and starts tapping away.
If the film were in black and white she could be one of Antonioni’s post-modern heroines, wandering vast cities alone, disinterested but free of burdens, smothered by a vague sense of alienation.
This is no coincidence. Julie is a spiritaul descendant of Antonioni’s figures of anomie from his Trilogy of DecadenceThe three films in this trilogy were L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse, shot one a year from 1960-2. Quite a three year run. For my money, though, his greatest postmodern classic is The Passenger. I'm waiting for someone to direct an update called The Influencer, a masterpice capturing the fluid identity construction of the 2010's and 2020's., updated for a more precarious and distraction-filled age. At the briefest sense of boredom, today’s Westerner turns to her cell phone for relief.
The other image, the one on the movie poster, is of Julie running with a smile on her face. In that magical realist scene, she is running from one life to another through a world frozen around her. It’s a way of capturing that sense of breaking off from the world when in the early throes of love.
But her smile is also that of the joy of leaving a life behind. Julie is reveling in that sense of freedom, the power of being able to hit the shuffle button on life and skip to a new track. At that moment, mid-film, the opportunity costs of her freedom, and the specter of mortality, have yet to bubble up. They will.
The epilogue is a bit tidy and blunt. It’s the only chapter that feels forced. Julie is confronted with a coincidental and convenient Sliding Doors-style vision of what her life could have been if she settled down and had kids. By that point, Reinsve has long since let made it clear she’s conscious of the trade-offs in her life, if not at peace with them.
A lot of people I know found the movie’s title off-putting. It sounds like a Buzzfeed article. While there were more understated alternatives, it captures an important sense of societal judgment that envelops women who embrace their freedom to its fullest and choose more unconventional life paths. At least some of Julie’s regret arises from the general fog of impatience of those around her, from her boyfriend to her friends to her parents.
It’s not nearly as glum or didactic as it sounds. Its vibe is a sweet melancholy, and occasionally, like one particular meet-cute, it sparkles.
Give Reinsve a lot of credit for that. Director Joachim Trier said he wrote the movie with her in mind, and it shows. Her face is incapable of emotional dishonesty. She’s the friend you can’t help rooting for even as she stacks one uncertain life choice atop the next. She deserved a Best Actress nomination. Alas. Neon holding the movie back from wide release until this weekend didn’t help. At least she’ll always have her Cannes Best Actress win. She shouldn’t have to wait long for her next role.
I love all three of Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, the two previous entries being Reprise and Oslo, August 31. Very few directors of his age can channel the crippling weight of twenty-something identity crises with such empathy. But this entry is particularly apt for this moment. Film has, to date, tended to focus on the traditional notion of hedonic marriage in genres like the romantic comedy. We need more movies, like this one, that contemplate the actual lives many young people are choosing in post-industrial societies.
Drive My Car
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
The 2020 winner of the pandemic’s honorary “Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague” productivity award was Taylor Swift for Folklore and Evermore. 2021’s winner is Ryusuke Hamagachi for directing two critically-acclaimed movies.
I once thought that Haruki Murakami’s novels and short stories were ill-suited to film, but after seeing Drive My Car and Burning, I’ve done a one-eighty. More of his work should be adapted.
Drive My Car (coming to HBO Max in a few days on Mar 2) feels like a dialogue between the sometimes whimsical urban alienation of Murakami and the disillusionment of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Like the Murakami short story on which it’s based, this movie is the duck gliding placidly across the surface of a pond while subtext churns furiously beneath the surface.
At 3 hours long, it will be too slow for many audiences. For those struggling with the now two years of pandemic life, however, it maps one cathartic path out of stasis and tragedy.
I’ve always loved Sonya’s speech from Uncle Vanya, but I never thought I’d see a new rendition as moving as the one in the film, performed via Korean Sign Language. For me, it was the most rapturous moment in cinema all year.
And when our final hour comes, we shall meet it humbly, and there beyond the grave, we shall say that we have known suffering and tears, that our life was bitter. And God will pity us.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a triptych of short films, is not an adaptation of Murakami short stories, but it feels as if it could be. The middle short of the three, “Door Wide Open,” is more interesting on cancel culture than the usual squabbles online. If you’re tired of the all-too predictable Joe Rogan-Spotify arguments, watch this as a palate cleanser.
The closing short “Once Again” concerns a coincidence at a high school reunion. I won’t ruin the plot, but it is wise to how much easier it is to help others with their problems than it is to solve our own. It’s a great argument for therapy.
Dune
If you’ve never read the book, I can understand why this Part One might feel slow. Having read the book multiple times, the first time as a high school freshman during my formative years as a science fiction reader, I carried the anticipation and context of the book’s back story to every scene. Whereas the novel has multiple long appendices and even a glossary, for me the entire novel was the appendix to the movie.
Fans of Dune the novel any time any iconic character or scene is referenced in the movie. If you hadn’t read the novel, you might have found the movie lacking in action. I don’t blame you, but I was the annoying Leo pointing meme throughout, and I apologize for nothing.
I’ve long thought Dune should be adapted as a miniseries instead of a film. There’s just so much ground to cover, especially in world building. Much of what bring me back to the book again and again is the journey its hero Paul traverses, to synthesize the divergent teachings of his Father and Mother and the two hemispheres of his brain, to achieve hyper consciousness and through it a form of transcendent mastery of his own mind and emotions. In decisive moments, when the stakes couldn’t be higher, Paul enters a flow state that connects him to the world. Though it’s referred to as a sci-fi novel, Dune’s beating heart is mystical, spiritual.
At the preview screening I attended, I had no idea the movie only covered the first 60% or so of the book. Near 3 hours in, with my bladder about to explode, I was never so relieved to see a To Be Continued appear on screen. News of an HBO prequel series built around the women of Dune is good news, though Dune as IP really drops off quickly in appeal after that. I never made it past the third book in the series as a kid, and it’s not clear it’s even worth adapting the second book.
What Denis Villeneuve channels best from the novel is a sense of pervasive political intrigue built up over centuries of jockeying between noble houses. When House Atreides is granted control of Arrakis, Duke Leto just assumes it’s a plot against him. This is how deep the rot goes. This is when you live life at the efficient frontier of the prisoner’s dilemma, defecting over and over, as the game theory predicts, because you know your opponent already has.
Of all the major narrative feature films I’ve seen, Dune features more IMAX footage than any I’ve seen. It’s a different film in IMAX in so many ways. Director of Photography Greg Fraser tried something new to me. He shot digitally, processed it, filmed it out to film stock, then scanned it back to digital to do the final color grade. It’s a sort of variant of scanning analog film grain and then overlaying it on digital images so they aren’t quite so clean. I only saw Dune in IMAX once, and to my eye the results were striking. To date, I continue to prefer the output from shooting digitally on location to shooting film against green screen.Some inematography buffs found the single light source setup of lots of Dune to be a flaw. Crafts people love to recognize higher degrees of difficulty like certain shots in West Side Story, for example. I was less bothered. The heavy shadows work in the traditional film noir way to visualize the political threats from every direction. And you're in the desert, where often there is just one light source, the sun, and it is relentless.
Richard Brody of The New Yorker named this the best movie of the year, which, as it’s a movie inspired by The New Yorker, feels like a mild conflict of interest. But damn if Wes Anderson didn’t make a movie that captures the feeling of The New Yorker’s house style, its meandering, understated rhetorical authority.
Anderson’s signature visual tropes, the perpendicular camera angles and symmetrical framing, the muted line readings, are both a signature of his individual style and a way of producing a sort of neutrality. The same could be said of The New Yorker’s plain house style.
The fidelity of this aesthetic homage was so pleasing to me as a longtime New Yorker reader that it functioned as a sort of ASMR. This is what a New Yorker article looks and sounds like.
My sister fell asleep watching the movie. The New Yorker doesn't use exclamation points. These things are correlated.
Jason Statham’s still, focused intensity is the oak tree that all the other twitchy, male violence wraps itself around in this slow-burn thriller. He never seems nonplussed; this is because he is badder than the other people around him and he knows it. This gives him the zen-like calm of a monk; his gleaming bald head is appropriate.
Also, for once, a Guy Ritchie film without some oddball speaking in an indecipherable accent. Instead, just a thrilling meditation on the corrosive nature of greed. Every scene constricts the suspense one notch tighter. If you have a subwoofer it will get a workout, like someone sounding the horns of hell.
The spatial geometry of the climactic set piece could be cleaner, but otherwise this is a tonal territory I’d love to see Ritchie revisit. Scott Eastwood was meant to play a dirtbag.
Bergman Island
The Souvenir: Part II
You don’t need to be an Ingmar Bergman fan to enjoy Bergman Island (though it’s recommended on its own terms). More useful might be knowing that director Mia Hansen-Love was once a partner to director Olivier Assayas, for whom she acted before she became a director, and that this movie is based loosely on and haunted by the dissolution of their relationship.
On the other hand, I would recommend you watch The Souvenir before watching The Souvenir Part II.
Both are films about filmmaking, but more than that, about how artists make sense of their lives through their work. It’s often said that creatives draw inspiration from their lives, but the creative process isn’t just a form of transcription. Often, the act of creation is how the artist makes sense of life.
ABBA has my favorite musical cue of the year in Bergman Island, and I can never get enough of Vicky Krieps and Mia Wasikowska. Bergman Island understands this paradox of love, that we can be haunted by the one who got away and why they never loved us while also being puzzled by how we ever loved the person we ended up with.
The Souvenir: Part II had me both laughing and convulsing in horror at its dead accurate depiction of the insufferable drama on film school sets. But while those scenes seemed lifted from my days on film school sets, they also reminded me of so many heated tech company meetings. A director struggling to articulate their artistic vision to her cast and crew is like a CEO or VP of Product who can’t articulate product vision to engineering and design.
In my favorite moment in the movie, the protagonist Julie runs into an older director named Patrick for whom she has been crewing on a studio project. He is pretentious, a tyrant, and because of that the studio has cut him out of post-production. Chastened, and in a self-reflective mood, he offers her some much needed perspective.
“Did you resist the urge to be obvious?” he asks about her just completed student thesis. All during her tumultuous shoot, her cast and crew pestered her to clarify what her movie was about. What Patrick recognizes, and what she has come to peace with, is how to preserve an individuality of expression in what is a collaborative creative process.
Whiplash but if the J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller characters were one person. A tactile film about that particular type of obsession in which we hurtle ourselves against the limits of our bodies. But also, perhaps more than that, about how obsessive ambition is viewed as treachery in a zero-sum environment.
Any type-A high-achiever will recognize some of themselves in Alex. She’s a freshman who walks on to her college crew team and sets her sights on making the rare first-year leap to varsity. Through much of life, you can compete on all sorts of achievement ladders to surpass those around you, but true transcendence and grace comes when your ambitions are those you’d pursue when no one is watching. Except you.
In The Novice, Isabelle Fuhrman confronts us with the question of what you call it if you Tiger Mom yourself
A Hero
Not my favorite Farhadi, but as with many of his movies, an X-ray one how financial and social capital interact within Iranian society and institutions. His movies have a Chekhovian soul.
The lesson here is as timeless as it is difficult for us to accept. One’s reputation is contextual, relative. It is defined, in large part, by others. Our character is absolute. Our integrity is all we can grasp in full.
TV Shows I Enjoyed This Year
Okay, I lied, this post isn’t just about 2021 movies I enjoyed. What qualifies as TV instead of film? It matters less than it once did. Here are a handful of episodic works I enjoyed.
Can’t Get You Out of My Head
(All six parts of this series are on YouTube. Not sure if they are there legally, but they haven’t been pulled, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Here’s Part 1, for example.)
Adam Curtis dances in that shared territory between stark raving mad conspiracy theory and sweeping grand history narrative. One thing that separates him from other charismatic intellectuals seeking to connect the dots in history is his access to copious archival video footage and music and his willingness to wade through it. You think writing an essay is hard, try creating one in film.
A lot of this six episode history feels like a film yarn-and-headshot conspiracy wall, but damn if that signature Adam Curtis montage style isn’t a real vibe. At times, when Curtis’ signature voiceover drops out and all we see is grainy footage from various eras of history spliced together one after the other while “Song for Zula” by Phosphorescent plays in the background, what lingers in the memory is not airtight logic but the kind of associative implication that seems especially profound when in a pot-induced haze. Curtis’s coherence is an aesthetic one.
In our increasingly multimedia saturated discourse online, it’s not surprising to see memes come to dominate. But underrated is a style of argumentation built on vibes. TikTok is just the latest platform that enables this type of hyper-emotive rhetoric at scale. In every era, but especially this one, underestimate the emotional high ground at your peril.
I don’t doubt that if you asked Curtis to write an essay on these same ideas, with copious footnotes, his arguments would feel more convincing in some ways and diminished in others. The medium is the message, as they say.
Imagine what types of video essayists we’d unlock if we made it easier to access and use archival footage. When Musical.ly which then became TikTok licensed music tracks from the labels for its users to deploy in their videos, they subsidized millions of creatives with one of the most powerful elements of film, commercial music for the soundtrack. In the same way that the video store birthed a new form of cinephilia, unlocking or shared film and television corpus for easier sampling would unlock a new level of visual discourse.
Get Back
The year’s best series about the upside of in-person work. A movie like The Lighthouse hinted at the same but by depicting the negative; it gave us one hellish vision of the effects of the prolonged isolation of remote work.
Get Back is also a testament to the power of editing since much of the same event was assembled into a movie with a much different valence decades earlier. And to think, they plan to remove editing from this year's live Oscars broadcast.
I’ve long yearned for more slow cinema about craftsmanship. Instead of a puff piece of an hour-and-a-half documentary with dozens of talking heads praising some master of their craft, just show me 20 hours of unedited footage of them actually working. This documentary, to me, is some proof that this genre would act as am ambient boost to societal productivity.
I’m not a Beatles-phile by any stretch, so much of the narrative drama is lost to me. But even minus that context, the frissons and frictions of their creative process mesmerized me.Ian Leslie's "The Banality of Genius" is a great long read from someone much more well-versed in the Beatles history and mythology. When people ask writers “how did you write this?” it can feel as if you’re being asked to describe a color to someone who can’t see. But Get Back may be as close an answer to “how did you make this album” as anything we’ve seen yet.
Succession
In this age of streaming on demand, there is a nostalgic comfort in Sunday night prestige television that some critical mass of urban elites (I plead guilty) keep as appointment viewing. Succession was one of the only candidates in 2021. Thank goodness it was an operatic banger.
This season attracted some grumbling about the show’s circularity. Third seasons can be that way. But in many ways, this is the show’s theme, that the hell of the wealthy really just is an endless death match for Daddy’s love, or better yet, the keys to his kingdom. In this respect, the rich are like us; they too crave status.
What they don’t struggle with are material needs. From episode to episode this season they hop helicopters and private jets from one exotic locale to the next. When more and more TV is shot against green screen, and while I was stuck at home waiting out the pandemic, Succession's world-hopping felt like a treat. In many ways, the distinguishing feature of the elites of society is the amount of time they spend in limousines, helicopters, private jets, and yachts traveling from one meeting to the next. How bodies move through space will become an even more scarce status signal in this post-pandemic age. Already Zoom is beginning to feel like the low budget metaversal compromise for the masses.
As to that fantastic Jeremy Strong profile in The New Yorker, it’s the rare celebrity profile that enhanced my enjoyment of the show. That Strong is hardcore method on set, to the likely annoyance of his fellow cast-mates, is some bizarro parallel to the way Kendall drives the rest of the Roy clan insane. When I picture Strong hearing the news that Al Pacino has absconded with the chalice for the made-up award they used to entice Pacino to Yale, what I picture is Kendall Roy’s hangdog face.
The series also feels like a critique of postmodern irony. Logan is old-school, crass, but virile, direct, the canonical lion. He’s the decisive man of action who constantly cuts deliberation short. His children, in contrast, especially Roman, crack quips and snide remarks, reveling in each other’s hypocrisy and faults. But when push comes to shove, none of them seem to have any strong beliefs. In key business strategy sessions, they constantly waffle and hedge. A lifetime of Logan withholding his love has left them with a sort of PTSD. They’re the hectoring foxes, nipping at Logan’s lion until he swats them away.
Logan senses his children’s impotence and deploys it against them. Kendall becomes some social justice activist against Waystar RoyCo not because he believes in the cause but as a way of acting out. But both of them know the sword of Damocles hovering over Kendall’s head: it’s Daddy who bailed him out of his personal Chappaquiddick.
Shiv acts like a girlboss except when in the presence of her father, who alternately flatters and debases her. She hangs on to the emotional yo-yo for dear life. Her only means of avoiding spiraling in shame is to take her frustrations out on her husband Tom. In his spineless bureaucrat’s nature she is confronted with her own weakness and it disgusts her. By demeaning him she finds some relative high ground from which to avoid wading through her own humiliation.
Roman is the purest postmodern ironist. His soul seems corroded beyond repair. A lifetime of paternal abuse has left him unable to speak to his siblings except in the rhetoric of contempt. This also manifests in his odd sexual proclivities, especially in his Oedipal, S&M relationship to Gerri. She is the nurturing parent he never had as a child, but what he wants from her is a variant of what his father has always given him: humiliation. He could have a surrogate mother, but he wants a dominatrix. Roman is the living embodiment of the “men will literally X instead of going to therapy” meme.
If Kendall is oddly sympathetic, it’s because he’s the only one of the Roy clan who occasionally buckles under the weight of self-awareness. At times, he sees himself for who he really is, and it crushes him. Near season’s end, he was in such a spiral of despair that viewers spent a week debating whether he’d killed himself.
Everyone finds some emotional vindication in the series. By season’s end, it’s never been more evident that mommy and daddy don’t love their kids. It’s the Ok Boomer vibe on an operatic scale for this generation of kids who feel betrayed by their parents. The Roys are all wealthy, but technically the Roy children are also part of this first U.S. generation that is less well off than their parents. For the Boomers, the Roy children seem like the purest distillation of the entitled millennial archetype. For those of lesser means, it’s reassurance that the rich may have finer linens but burn in a hell of their own making.
It’s as acidic a show as I can remember, devoid of love. Few shows capture the feeling of Western culture at this moment better. It reminds me of Twitter.