christmas panics
an ode to josh o'connor, shakespearean tears and the glen powell problem
Hi friends,
In case you missed it, it got really fucking cold over the weekend, and I immediately developed a sore throat. The upside to all this snow and the bone-chilling drop in temperature is that I’ve finally remembered that Christmas is quickly approaching, a blessing for 1) holiday spirit reasons and 2) gift purchasing reasons. But in the meantime I’ve been eating soup and hauling ass to the Kips Bay AMC in the closest thing I have to snow boots, which of course are not snow boots at all. I churned through a good number of new releases in the last two weeks, some better than others, and a few older picks that blew me away. I also went to the theatahhhh for the first time since moving, which felt like a rite of passage, and read some good books. Yay!
new(ish) releases
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery / dir. Rian Johnson
A more than worthy entry in the Knives Out franchise that, in addition to its sillier elements, earnestly commits to larger ideas about faith and human weakness. The ensemble cast is mostly good (though Andrew Scott is totally wasted), but it honestly never really matters how good they are because Josh O’Connor so completely steals the show out from under everyone, including Detective Benoit Blanc himself. This is O’Connor’s movie, full stop, and he leads it beautifully, nailing the tortured and slapsticky beats equally well. If you didn’t already believe he was going to be a megastar, you should now. (Also shouting out his guest appearance on this weekend’s SNL, during which he made out with both Bowen Yang and Please Don’t Destroy’s Ben Marshall).
Hamnet / dir. Chloe Zhao
Cried like a bitch, obviously. Zhao’s adaptation of the hit Maggie O’Farrell novel is certainly designed to make you sob until you feel like you might turn inside out, but I disagree with the critique that it does so in a manipulative-trauma-porn way—the catharsis of choking on your own tears in response to art, hopefully in a theater full of strangers, feels like the point. Jessie Buckley is lights out unbelievable, and when I found out that the actors playing Hamnet and Hamlet are brothers, I cried all over again (this interview with the two of them is a must-read). A beautiful, soul-shifting movie. (Paul Mescal isn’t bad, per se, but his portrayal of William Shakespeare as absentee playwright husband worked the least for me out of anything going on here).
The Secret Agent / dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
I went in rather blind to this movie, aside from having heard the Oscar buzz around Wagner Moura, who I previously knew only from Civil War and the one episode of Narcos I’ve seen. I really, really enjoyed this movie, though I would prepare you that it’s a 2 hour and 40 minute film for much of which you are not entirely sure what’s going on and/or who you should be paying attention to. But all that looseness is kind of what makes The Secret Agent so wonderful—while there’s a nail-biting cat-and-mouse chase at its center, I loved it mostly as a bright, joyful ode to Brazilian culture, 70s horror movies and found family. This thing is just brimming with life. And Moura is such an interesting, magnetic performer that it’s hard not to want to settle in for the ride.
The Running Man / dir. Edgar Wright
There’s this thing that happens when an actor who’s really great at playing a charismatic sidekick is also super hot, and it’s never good. The action-star-ification of a perfect second lead happened to Miles Teller, and it’s happening to Mr. Powell as well, who is deeply miscast as the angry, anarchic reality show contestant that anchors this movie. (The most Stoic Leading Man Energy I’ll allow for Glen is his beautiful, bonkers work in last year’s Hit Man). The Running Man is tonally confusing, veering wildly between moments of broad physical comedy and aimless political commentary, and it’s missing Wright’s signature snappiness. But it’s hard for me to actually hate a Glen Powell movie, even a messy one, so it’s still a fun time at the movies. Colman Domingo as a Caesar Flickerman-esque TV host is the standout by a mile.
Caught Stealing / dir. Darren Aronofksy
Like Glen Powell, Austin Butler is at his most compelling in roles where he’s not a traditional leading man (I’m obviously referring to Dune: Part Two, which also happens to be the first film that really sold me on his sex appeal, something for me to unpack at a later date). But in Caught Stealing he puts in a committed (if overly solemn) alpha dog performance as a Lower East Side bartender slut with a dirty little heart of gold, who just so happens to 1) love his mom, 2) love his situationship with paramedic Zoe Kravitz, and 3) love cats, however begrudgingly. Zhao critics: THIS is what real manipulation looks like. Like The Running Man, its tone is muddled, half Magic Mike XXL horndog campiness and half genuinely startling violence. And yet, when that lady tells Austin Butler that he and his cat have the same eyes, I welled up. Your classic weirdly upsetting thirst watch.
backlist picks
The Player (1992) / dir. Robert Altman
As a lover of The Studio I was excited to finally watch its spiritual predecessor, especially as I’ve found myself becoming more of an Altman lover with every one of his films I see. The Player, following Tim Robbins as a studio executive being threatened by an anonymous jilted screenwriter, operates as a whirling, delightfully self-referential tour through the movie business, but the extensive in-jokes don’t come at the cost of crime-thriller suspense. It’s tense and deeply nihilistic while also being a great hang, which is a hard thing to pull off! And like The Studio later emulated, it features a sprawling cast of 90s Hollywood royalty, many of whom are playing themselves. Robbins is so good in this, and the fact that he’s always in a slightly baggy suit standing two heads above everyone else in a way that’s both hot and gawky really endeared him to me. Also, Whoopi Goldberg.
Lovely & Amazing (2001) / dir. Nicole Holofcener
The first Holofcener movie I watched was Enough Said (starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the wonderful late James Gandolfini), a mostly warm little romcom with a surprisingly thorny pit of fucked up body talk. While I was initially a bit put off, it took watching Lovely & Amazing, an unabashedly mean film in the way I’m coming to recognize is Holofcener’s signature, to understand that Enough Said’s spikiness is a feature, not a bug. Following the three daughters (one a young, adopted Black girl) of a woman in the hospital for a liposuction procedure, Lovely & Amazing is frequently an uncomfortable, difficult watch, showing how self-loathing gets passed down through generations. The film’s signature scene is one in which Emily Mortimer’s character, a struggling actress, asks Dermot Mulroney’s character (a perfect actor sleazeball) to tell her everything that’s wrong with her appearance after they’ve just had sex. It’s a startling, awful, brilliant sequence that will probably never leave my brain! This film also features a middle-aged Catherine Keener having an affair with her 17-year-old boss at the 1-hour photo store, played rather hilariously by Jake Gyllenhaal with a goth dye job.
Dreams (2024) / dir. Dag Johan Haugerud
Oh, baby. This movie whacked me over the goddamn head. The central conceit is this: a young girl named Johanne falls in love with her teacher, and a year later writes a memoir of sorts about it. She gives the manuscript to her mother and grandmother to read, who are torn between the potential that Johanne was assaulted, the potential that she had a beautiful experience of falling in love for the first time, the potential that all of this is just fiction, and the potential that this young girl’s writing should be published as an actual book. The film itself feels rather bookish - much of it is told in voiceover, with Johanne narrating the events to us and/or narrating the manuscript she’s written (we’re never totally sure which is which; it’s part of the delight). It’s filmed in this gentle, hazy way that feels like a memory, and it so painfully and viscerally captures the feeling of infatuation, and of trying to decipher whether those feelings are reciprocated. It’s dreamy and devastating and warm and I totally adored it/felt sick over it.
other stuff
Initiative / dir. Else Went
I saw a play! It was 5.5 hours long and largely about Dungeons & Dragons, and I knew that going in! While the runtime was perhaps a bit indulgent, it was generally worth it to be able to really sit with the characters of this coming-of-age story set in early 90s California as they move through their four years of high school. Often very funny, often very sad, always extremely well-written and performed. I hope it gets staged again soon.
Cowboys Are My Weakness / Pam Houston
A fantastic little short story collection whose grocery store romance novel title belies its keenly emotionally tuned observations about sex and passion and emotional unavailability, all centered around women living out west. My favorite story is “Selway,” but they’re all wonderful. This short story of hers (available for free online), “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” isn’t in the collection but is a great example of what Houston can do. I can’t wait to read more of her work.
P.S.
Finn Wolfhard directed a tender, lovely animated short as the official music video for George Harrison’s “Give Me Love.” Maintaining my stance that this guy has the directorial juice and is not to be underestimated!
This month I also read Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru, which was okay, and Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan, which I really enjoyed. I’m currently engrossed in Susan Choi’s My Education, a smart, saucy story about a relationship between a grad student and her skeezy professor that is nothing short of delicious on a sentence level.
In case you missed it, Sabrina Carpenter put out a stellar Christmas EP a few years ago. This thing goes triple platinum in my house every December.
xo, Lael
