→ April 24, 2025
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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat marries the dark history of the United States’ assassination of Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba, done with the full consent of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskold and several other western leaders, with music from some of the great American jazz musicians of the time – as the U.S. was sending them on friendly missions to emerging post-colonial Africa. The contrast between this blue-note diplomacy and the vile, racist machinations of the CIA, President Eisenhower, and their co-conspirators makes it a tense, compelling watch, even though you probably already know how this ends. It was one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. (I watched it free on Kanopy, which I can access through my local library, and it’s also on iTunes, Amazon, etc. for rental.)

The film has no narration but does use some on-screen quotes to keep things moving along, which allows the music to continue throughout almost the entire film. It’s a who’s who of mid-century American jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Melba Liston, and others, most of whom visited Africa on state-sponsored goodwill tours and/or became pan-African activists at home, tying the movement to U.S. civil rights efforts. (Gillespie’s quixotic campaign for President in 1964 gets prominent mention, even though it came three years after the Lumumba assassination.) The story begins several years before Congo’s independence, with scenes from independence movements across colonial Africa, speeches from African and American activists – including several from Malcolm X – and significant footage of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who became a champion for African independence movements because those groups often espoused socialist or communist ideology. Much of what plays out before Lumumba is elected happens at the UN, where we see speeches from Khrushchev and from ambassadors from Belgium, the U.S., and many non-aligned nations that had already obtained independence. The on-screen text also explains the importance of the Congo’s vast mineral resources, which at the time were led by huge uranium deposits that could be used in nuclear weapons, although today the emphasis has shifted towards coltan, a mixture of niobium (columbium) and tantalum that is extremely important to the manufacture of capacitors for electronic circuits – like you’d find in whatever device you’re using to read this.

This all sets the scene for the intrigue that ultimately led to the torture and murder of Lumumba by a rival leader, Moïse Tshombe, who led the breakaway State of Katanga. Tshombe was interested in power, and Katanga is the most resource-rich region of the country, so he had plenty of backers in the west. Days before Congo became independent, Belgium privatized the mining company Union Minière, taking the dominant force in the Congolese economy away from the native population and depriving the new government of a major revenue source – the final insult in Belgium’s seventy-year misrule of the territory and abuse of its citizens. Union Minière was based in Katanga, so Tshombe was the perfect stooge for the west, and was happy to oblige first through his political activities, smearing Lumumba as a communist, and then later through violence.

Throughout the film, director Johan Grimonprez (who is Belgian) intersperses the history of the conflict and subterfuge with the music, a jarring but effective choice that turns the whole endeavor into a visual fugue, with the music the counterpoint to the infuriating history on the other side. The struggle for independence across Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, went on just as Black Americans were fighting Jim Crow laws, and the response of the United States government in both cases was built on suppression and violence. At the same time, President Dwight Eisenhower, who apparently was an early proponent of assassinating Lumumba, tried to use American jazz stars to spread American culture to these new and emerging nations, calling them “jazz ambassadors” and sending them around the world to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, and to Africa. Louis Armstrong’s tour of the Congo, which appears to be the only time the State Department sponsored such a tour in the continent, turned out to be a cover for the CIA’s coup. Over 100,000 people showed up to watch him perform in the capital, then still called Léopoldville, while Lumumba was under house arrest; less than two months later, he would be dead at the CIA’s hands.

No country bears more responsibility for the now 65-year tragedy of the Congo, a fake nation with borders set up by Belgium’s King Leopold that has been beset by civil war for nearly all of its history, than Belgium does. Grimonprez gives more attention to the United States and the UN, but gets a few stabs in at Belgium, particularly in how Belgian leaders and officials tried to claim that colonizing the Congo was almost an altruistic affair, bringing civilization to a “less developed” people. Their colonial rule was one of the most brutal and damaging of any, a story hinted at here and told at great and gruesome length in Adam Hochschild’s tremendous book King Leopold’s Ghost.

The film ends with Lumumba’s death and the turning of sentiment on the part of the jazz ambassadors against the U.S. government, although there will still a few more such tours into the early 1960s. There isn’t so much a conclusion here, as the stories of the Congo and the CIA’s involvement in coups and assassinations would continue for decades, and the U.S. does still occasionally send musicians out on goodwill tours, if not quite to the same level as they did in the late 1950s. It’s an important slice of history, not just for Africa but for the United States as well, a reminder of the great power we can wield through the impact of our culture and the value of our diversity, and the great evil we can do when we do not hold the powers that be accountable for their actions.

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→ April 23, 2025
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Surely You Can’t Be Serious.

My favorite movie when I was a kid was Top Secret!, the third feature and second studio film from the writing team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, who were, of course, responsible for Airplane! and the greatest television series of all time, Police Squad! I actually didn’t see the full Airplane! until much later, probably because my parents thought it was stupid … and it is stupid, gloriously so, and so much of it still holds up today.

Jim Abrahams died in 2024 at age 80, but not long before his death, the trio collaborated on Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, a hilarious recounting of the making of that movie and their lives and careers up to that point. A friend suggested I track down the audiobook, which you can get on Apple Books or Amazon, because it’s read by the authors with a huge cast of people reading their own reminiscences from working on the film – including stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty – and comedians who remember how influential the film was in their lives and careers. Even Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, both studio execs who were there as the film was greenlit and produced, chime in. It’s a blast, not just funny, but fascinating because of how the trio recall coming into the movie business as rank amateurs, having to figure it out as they went along while also convincing established actors to go along with a script many of them didn’t understand until they saw the finished product.

The three men were childhood friends from Wisconsin who naturally always gravitated towards comedy, and while in college in Madison they created a playhouse where they put on sketch-comedy shows, eventually settling on the name Kentucky Fried Theater. They took that show to Los Angeles and turned it into a movie called, of course, Kentucky Fried Movie, written by ZAZ and directed by a then-unknown John Landis, who went on to direct Animal House because of his work on this film. They’d already started work on the film that would become Airplane!, which was built around a spoof of a mediocre air-disaster film called Zero Hour, from which the trio cribbed not just the framework of the story but entire bits of dialogue. The resulting movie was like nothing else, packed with jokes, non sequiturs, sight gags, puns, wordplay, and an inexplicable shot of a topless woman, and it was both a huge box-office success and a turning point in the history of comedy.

I rewatched Airplane while about halfway through the book, and most of it is still pretty funny, probably because so many of the jokes are just silly, like the one that provides the title of the book, the “The hospital? What is it?” running gag, and several of the visual jokes that it would be pointless to describe. It’s hard to watch that film, then or now, and think that some of the main actors, like Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, and Robert Stack, were seen as dramatic actors incapable of comedy. They all nail the deadpan style that ZAZ wanted, and it’s essential to the film that they do so. Only Bridges really does anything overtly funny, when he sniffs glue; the others are just reciting ridiculous dialogue like it’s Shakespeare. There are a few jokes that sound dated now because they refer to something contemporary to the film, and a few that you probably just couldn’t tell today due to changing norms, although I was pleasantly surprised to see how little in the film might truly be offensive by today’s standards. I’m sure someone could find offense with a lot of what’s in Airplane!, but it’s all pretty tame compared to modern comedy; maybe Captain Oveur’s lines to Joey wouldn’t make the cut, but they’re just so stupid I found it hard to see them in that light. (The movie was on Hoopla, available through my local library.)

I’ve never been anywhere near the movie business, so much of what the book describes is new to me, even though I’m sure much of it doesn’t apply now, forty-five years later. I also couldn’t get enough of hearing the actors describe what it was like reading the script and working on the set; the book still has quotes from some of the older actors who died well before the book came out from previous interviews, just read by a narrator, and they’re almost all interesting. Most of them didn’t get what the script was; several had to be convinced by a loved one just to take the offered parts.

I wish the main part of the book hadn’t ended with Airplane!, although we do get one Top Secret! Fact, around the origins of that film’s “skeet surfing” scene. (I didn’t know that film was a box-office bomb; I was eleven when I saw it, and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever watched.) There’s also a three-part epilogue where each of the writers talks about his career and life after Airplane!, which goes off the rails at several points, including one of them veering into some weird anti-science territory. You could probably skip that part, as none of it has much of anything to do with why you’re here. The rest of the book is either funny, interesting, or both throughout. The only catch is that if you haven’t seen Airplane! … well, what’s wrong with you?

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→ April 21, 2025
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I’m Still Here + top films of 2024.

I’m Still Here won the Oscar for Best International Feature this year and earned nominations for Best Picture – becoming the first Brazilian film to do either of those things – and a nomination for Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who delivers a commanding performance as a woman trying to hold her family together after the disappearance of her husband in the police state of Brazil, 1971. Based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens was arrested, tortured, and murdered by the secret police, it shows their beautiful, happy family, and the ways in which Eunice has to swallow her fear and grief to move forward and raise their four children without him. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

As the film opens, we see just faint signs of the terror to come, including a scene where the Paivas’ eldest daughter, Vera, is in a car with friends when they come up against a police roadblock. They’re forced out of the car and roughed up a little as the cops search for “terrorists,” mostly people suspected of engaging in any sort of activities opposing the dictatorship. Rubens is a former congressman who participates in clandestine, peaceful activities like passing letters to families of disappeared people – dissidents or innocent people – and coordinating with other like-minded people. They don’t seem to see any risk in their actions, but, of course, one day the secret police come knocking, taking Rubens away and barricading the Paivas in their house for what appears to be a day or two, after which they then take Eunice and another daughter in for interrogation as well. (Vera has gone to study in London and live with another Brazilian family that fled the country out of fear for what was coming.) The daughter is released in a day, but Eunice is kept for nearly two weeks, during which she’s tortured and asked to inform on her husband.

Eventually, she’s released, and begins to try to fight through the judicial system first to find out where Rubens is, and then later to get the state to admit they kidnapped and killed him. At the same time, she has four children, three girls and a boy, to raise, while the house’s breadwinner is gone and she finds herself unable to even cash a check because he can’t sign it or call to confirm. The hour or so spent in this time period is by far the strongest, as it focuses entirely on her, and all of the burdens placed on her as a mother, a de facto widow, a dissident, and more. It could be a metaphor for modern motherhood and all of the things we ask mothers in western societies to be, including how we ask them to hide or subjugate their own feelings to take care of their families (which reminded me of Jess Grose’s excellent book Screaming on the Inside), although I don’t know if that was intended, since the source material is the Paivas’ son’s memoir, a best-seller in Brazil about ten years ago.

After about 100 minutes, the film jumps forward 25 years to 1996, when Eunice gets word that the death certificate for Rubens has been found. By that point, she has returned to school and become a lawyer, while also making a name for herself as an activist for the families of the disappeared, making this a public event as well as a deeply personal one. Then we get a second flash-forward to shortly before Eunice’s death, a scene that is sentimental and doesn’t need to be in the film at all, although it allowed director Walter Salles to reunite with actress Fernanda Montenegro, who starred in his acclaimed 1998 film Central Station … and who happens to be Torres’s mother.

Torres just is this film; the whole endeavor hinges on her performance and she is superb. Any time she is on screen, she owns it – and the glory is in how subtle Torres’s performance is. There are no big, showy scenes, no giant outbursts, no soliloquies. Had she won the Oscar over Mikey Madison, I wouldn’t object; they’re the two best performances I saw in any 2024 movie, regardless of gender. No other character has half as much to do or matters a tenth as much to the credibility of the story. Once Rubens disappears, you’ll probably suspect we’re not going to see him again even if you don’t know the true story, at which point the script hands everything to Torres and asks her to carry it … which is pretty much what life did to Eunice Paiva, come to think of it.

I would have given the Best International Feature award to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, another film about life under an authoritarian regime, but this was the second-best of the nominees and of all eligible films I saw from 2024. And, if you’re curious, here’s my mostly-final ranking of the best movies I saw from 2024. I haven’t seen No Other Land, but I think that’s the only film out there from the 2024 cycle that might crack this list. I’ve seen 43 movies in total that were Oscar-eligible or were released to streaming in 2024, to give you some perspective; #43 was The Apprentice.

1. Anora
2. Nickel Boys
3. Nosferatu
4. A Real Pain
5. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
6. The Brutalist
7. September 5
8. Hard Truths
9. Sing Sing
10. Daughters
11. Kinds of Kindness
12. Memoir of a Snail
13. I’m Still Here
14. The Room Next Door
15. Sugarcane
16. Challengers
17. I Saw the TV Glow
18. All That We Imagine As Light
19. Kneecap
20. Rebel Ridge

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→ April 11, 2025
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Nosferatu.

I came into Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu knowing relatively little of the lore behind the story; I’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but had never seen any adaptation of it, not even the 1922 silent film of which this is a remake. It’s about as spot-on a gothic horror film as I’ve seen … maybe ever, really, with sound effects that will curdle your soul and a strong-as-always performance from Nicholas Hoult as the tragic real estate agent Thomas Hutter. (You can stream it free on Peacock or rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Eggers’s screenplay adheres closely to the 1922 story, which changed several substantial elements of the Stoker novel, altering some major plot events and making the story darker and more violent while removing much of the sexual subtext in favor of more physical horror. Hutter is a young, ambitious real estate agent whose wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) has a psychic connection to the monster Nosferatu, who poses as the Romanian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and demands that Hutter visit him to sign the contract for Orlok to purchase an estate in Wisburg, where the Hutters live. Thomas has no idea of the grip the vampire has on his wife, other than that she has intensely realistic dreams and a history of sleepwalking and seizures, but he is terrified by Orlok and realizes that he’s some sort of undead or otherwise unnatural creature during his brief stay at the castle. Upon his return home, he finds that bubonic plague is spreading through Wisburg, along with a huge number of rats, but the occultist Prof. Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) sees that this is not a medical disease but a spiritual one and leads the effort to find Orlok and kill him once and for all to save Ellen and the surviving townspeople.

The story is somewhat beside the point in Nosferatu and even in Dracula, as neither even has a real protagonist; the main character is the vampire, and he’s off screen (or page) for large portions of both works. He is everpresent, often working through his acolyte Knock (Simon McBurney) or just spreading fear because we know he’s coming for Ellen and know of the destruction he’ll wreak when he arrives. It’s all atmosphere, amplified by the way Eggers always shows Orlok in shadow, or from the back, so that we very rarely see him clearly until his final scenes in the film, when we see just what a deformed monster he has become; we hear Orlok much more than we see him, with Skarsgård speaking in a slow, guttural, overenunciated accent that sounds like he’s moonlighting (pun intended) from his job as the lead singer for a melodic death metal band from Gothenburg.

Most of the best scenes in the film don’t involve Skarsgård at all, though; he’s scarier when we don’t know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. McBurney is just as horrific, because he is utterly insane; we know what the vampire is doing, but Knock is unpredictable and his violence is all the more shocking for it. (He’s the equivalent to Renfield from Stoker’s novel, but here Knock is Hutter’s boss and appears at first to be a mild-mannered real estate man, more like an accountant or a barrister than the asylum inmate that Renfield is when he first appears in the book.) Rose-Depp’s main function in the movie is to appear terrified, which she does well, as she’s the only character who understands all along what the true nature of the threat is. For most of the film nobody believes her, including her best friend Anna (Emma Corrin, underutilized here), except for Dr. Von Franz, the man everyone else thinks is a crank, further underscoring Ellen’s terror – she knows he’s coming, she knows she is inextricably bound to him, and everyone thinks she’s a hysterical woman.

Nosferatu sounds great, by which I mean it sounds absolutely awful, especially if you watch it with headphones. You may never want to eat again after hearing this movie. I would imagine sales of black pudding plummeted after this film hit theatres. Some of this is obvious – you wouldn’t expect any less from a scene where a vampire feeds on a victim – but even when Hutter is eating dinner at Orlok’s castle, every bite or sip feels like a menace. It’s a crime that this film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, didn’t get anything for sound; three of the five nominees in that category went to musicals or films about music, which seems to exclude films that rely on other forms of sound, which Nosferatu did more than almost any other movie in 2024.

Hoult is excellent here, as he is in pretty much everything, although even his character isn’t that well-developed, and the acting as a whole is probably the one weak point of the film. Ellen is a damsel in distress who only develops any sort of agency at the very end of the film, so Rose-Depp doesn’t have a lot to do, and spends most of her time on screen looking terrorized (with reason) but not doing much else. Dafoe seems like an obvious choice for a mad scientist, but that works against him here – he is so obviously Willem Dafoe, and is the only actor who doesn’t really do a proper accent for his character, that he isn’t terribly convincing as a character whose main job is to convince everyone, us included, that he isn’t mad. It’s also not a film that depends on the performances to work its dark magic, as Eggers creates such a bleak, foreboding atmosphere, and then layers increasing degrees of shocking violence on top of it, that it works extremely well throughout without getting as much from its actors as it might have. I’ve got one more major 2024 release to see, but this is easily in my top 5 from last year.

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→ April 8, 2025
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The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It’s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, with too much inconsistency in the pacing and the level of specificity from scene to scene. (You can rent it now on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Brody plays László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect in Hungary before World War II who is sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald by the Nazis, while his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are sent to Dachau. Tóth survives the camp and immigrates the United States, where he works in his cousin Attila’s furniture store, although Attila’s Catholic wife clearly doesn’t approve. Attila lands a major renovation project for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise for his father, the wealthy Carnegie-esque Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), putting Tóth in charge. Tóth’s designs transform the library space, but Van Buren is enraged that his son made these plans without him, firing the contractors and refusing to pay. Attila kicks László out, which leads to him working as a manual laborer and living in a charity workhouse, while his previous use of morphine has devolved into a heroin addiction. Tóth’s design for the library ends up earning so much praise that Van Buren tracks him down and hires him for a major new project … and that’s all before the intermission, before Erszébet and Zsófia make it to the United States, before the stresses of the project and the exacting (and conflicting) standards of the two men begin to clash.

The Brutalist is a biopic of a fictional character, much like 2022’s Tár, that feels so specific that it’s easy to forget that Lázsló Tóth never existed. Brody is as good as ever – and I’d argue he’s always good, even in small roles like in Grand Budapest Hotel or Midnight in Paris – as the complex, tortured genius, who has some of the expected art-over-commerce philosophy, but also carries the weight of the trauma of his time in Buchenwald, his long separation from his wife, and his flight to a culture that is deeply foreign to him and that faces him with both its xenophobia and its antisemitism. Even in some of the film’s least believable scenes, his portrayal never wavers in the least, and he carries huge portions of the overlong script by himself.

The padding in The Brutalist is all around the edges, rather than entire scenes that needed to go (although the first scene of the Tóths in bed after their reunion probably could have been left on the cutting room floor). There’s a brief shot of László and some workers carrying a model of the community center he’s building for Van Buren up a flight of stairs into the mansion, probably lasting ten or fifteen seconds; the scene adds nothing, and there are tiny moments like that throughout the film that add up to make the film feel too long. Corbet, who directed and co-wrote the film, has a pace-of-play problem. It’s like he hired James Murphy as his editor.

Jones is somewhat lost here in a bad haircut and overdone accent, although the real problem is that her character barely exists outside of László’s orbit until her very last scene, when she acquires a force and gravity we haven’t seen before, underscored by the character’s infirmity and Jones’s own petite stature. (She’s nearly a foot shorter than Brody.) The movie isn’t about her, of course, but her absence is a huge shadow cast over the first half of the film, with László grieving the possibility of her death and then finding out she’s alive but can’t emigrate legally to join him, making the incomplete development of her character in the second half more obvious.

That’s generally a problem with the plot as a whole: the first half is itself a whole movie, and the second half isn’t. It’s the shell of a movie, but tries to pack in too much while giving it a similar level of detail, and that makes for irregular pacing and some portions that were just outright boring. There are also two sexual assault scenes, one entirely implied, one on-screen but shot from a distance, and neither is handled well – the first one is just dropped entirely, and the second has absolutely nothing to foreshadow it, making it seem like either a clumsy attempt at metaphor or just a very cheap plot contrivance to set up the denouement. After thinking about it what broader points Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold might have been trying to make, I’m leaning towards the metaphor argument: A huge theme in The Brutalist is how inhospitable Tóth finds the United States, a country that, then and now, has held great hostility towards people from just about any other country, and has a very long and shameful history of antisemitism that still exists today. The assault is an act of degradation and dehumanization, emphasized by his assailant’s taunts during the attack. I don’t think the scene fits in the least in the film, but that’s the best I’ve been able to make sense of it.

The Brutalist is a proper epic, an ambitious film that tries to do more than almost any film I’ve seen in the last few years; the closest parallel I could think of was 2018’s Never Look Away, another long film covering a huge portion of an artist’s life, although even that one doesn’t try to tackle the giant themes Corbet and Fastvold cover here. Brody’s performance is remarkable – and I didn’t even mention how great some of his suits are, which would be useful information for me if I weren’t half his size – and the film looks like it should have cost as much as a Marvel movie. I’m holding it to a higher standard primarily because it’s over 200 minutes long, and if you’re going to ask that of your audience, you need to earn their attention repeatedly. I’m not entirely sure The Brutalist does that; even so, it’s a film to laud in the hopes it inspires more big swings just like it.

The Brutalist earned ten nominations at this year’s Oscars and won three, for Brody as Best Actor, for Lol Crawley for Best Cinematography, and for Daniel Blumberg for Best Original Score, deserving of all three of them. (I’ll note that 1) Tim Grierson pointed out to me that Blumberg was briefly the lead singer & guitarist for a British band called Yuck, and 2) the strongest competitors for those last two awards weren’t nominated, Nickel Boys for Cinematography and Challengers for Original Score.) Pearce is strong as Van Buren and certainly has enough to do that he was worthy of a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Jones’s character isn’t that well-written and her performance within it is one of the film’s weak points; I would have much preferred to see her Best Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door. I have The Brutalist in my top ten for the year, with probably just one more worthy film to go (I’m Still Here), but I wouldn’t have picked it over Anora for Best Picture.

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→ April 4, 2025
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The Wallcreeper.

I found Nell Zink’s debut novel The Wallcreeper in the $4 section at the back of Changing Hands in Tempe, and figured it was worth the shot given that it was less than 200 pages and seemed on a quick search to be rather critically acclaimed. It was more than worth the cost, although I am having a hard time explaining exactly why this book is so good. It’s a mad, meandering, hilarious book that obeys very few of the rules of postmodern literature, which doesn’t have any rules to begin with.

The Wallcreeper is narrated by Tiffany, who is married to Steve; the two of them are birders, although Steve is the more ardent of the two, and they have a pet wallcreeper. That bird isn’t native to Germany or Switzerland, where they live during the course of the novel, but they kept it because Steve was driving one day while Tiff was pregnant, and when he swerved to avoid hitting the bird, it caused Tiff to miscarry. This sequence, right at the start of the novel, is stated with almost comic nonchalance, setting the tone from the start. Tiff’s narration is close to stream-of-consciousness; it’s nonlinear, nonsensical, unreliable, and very funny, often when it’s hardly appropriate.

The story follows the couple through copious infidelities on both sides, Steve’s obscure job that is keeping the two Americans in Europe, a relocation, more infidelities, a tragedy, another tragedy, and some birds. The two even hook up with an activist group and go on to commit some light ecoterrorism, which has unexpected consequences.

Through it all, it’s hard to tell what Tiff really feels about anything – herself, her husband, her various lovers, everything except for the destruction of the planet, which has Tiff, like most of us who realize what’s happening, reeling from utter hopelessness to the desire to do anything that might make a difference. She’s inscrutable as a character, other than her sheer determination, even though it’s not always applied to the best courses of action.

To say anything more about The Wallcreeper risks spoiling the few plot elements that remain – and the wonder of discovering this character, and Zink’s unique voice. The only novel I can recall reading in the last five years that was anything like this was No One Is Talking About This, where author Patricia Lockwood also utilized a stream-of-consciousness narration technique, although hers is more informed by social media. Both authors employ postmodern techniques without dispensing with plot or character development as so many other postmodern authors do (in my lay opinion), and even when I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on in Wallcreeper or whether I liked the novel, I couldn’t stop reading.

Next up: As I’m writing this review, I’m still reading T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call.

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→ April 3, 2025
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The Room Next Door.

Pedro Almodóvar waited until his 23rd feature film to make his first one in English, released the same month as the Spanish director turned 75. The Room Next Door, an adaptation of part of a Sigrid Nunez novel, is an intense movie about friendship and duty, driven by two outstanding performances by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, a sort of women-centered parallel to his 2022 film Pain & Glory. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Ingrid (Moore) is signing copes of her latest book when an old acquaintance reaches the table and informs her that their former colleague Martha (Swinton) has cervical cancer. Ingrid visits Martha, whom she hasn’t seen in many years, and the two begin spending more time together, as Ingrid realizes Martha is quite lonely, with only an estranged daughter remaining of her family. When a promising treatment turns out to be unsuccessful, Martha decides to end her life on her own terms and asks Ingrid to accompany her to a house in the country, so that Martha knows someone who cares about her is in the room next door as she dies. Ingrid ends up agreeing, and the remainder of the film follows the two women through the last few weeks of Martha’s life.

There are only three characters of any significance in The Room Next Door, with John Turturro appearing as Martha’s former husband and Ingrid’s former lover, putting all of the pressure on Swinton and Moore to carry the film – and, naturally, two of the greatest actors of their generation are up to the task. Swinton’s performance is the more surprising of the pair’s, as she’s largely understated throughout the film; she’s played big or weird or both so often in recent years that it’s a treat to see her dial it back like this. Martha’s insecure and maybe neurotic, but resigned to her death, in contrast to Ingrid, whose latest book is about her own crippling fear of dying, and Swinton gives the character the right combination of nervous energy with a touch of irascibility. Ingrid is the more straightforward character, although Moore’s challenge is navigating the wide range of emotions she faces across the film – it’s clear at the start that she and Martha were never that close, or at least Ingrid didn’t think they were, so she ends up growing fonder of Martha as Martha’s death becomes inevitable and the favors she asks become more significant.

(As an aside, I realized after watching this that I’d never seen Michael Clayton, the 2007 film for which Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress – still her only Oscar nomination – so I watched it. That performance is also quite understated, and also one of her best.)

The production itself is lavish, visually and metaphorically. Nearly every scene pops with strong, vivid colors, even more so when they head out of the city to a luxurious house in the woods, with gorgeous shots of the forest just beyond the house’s deck. Almodóvar has a long history of using red for its symbolic value; the door to Martha’s room is red, and she wears deep reds many times in the film, while the chaise longue where Ingrid usually reclines on the deck is also red, certainly an unusual color (and fabric) for outdoor furniture. (Martha lays on the green one.) There’s also a sense of wealth and even abundance throughout the film that cuts both ways –these are two privileged women who can afford to do this and, for Martha, face the potential consequences; yet the contrast between this lush setting and the inevitability of Martha’s death underscores that all the money in the world can’t change the fact that we’re mortal.

The estranged daughter does appear near the end of the film, providing a brief but somewhat telling coda that gives a little more insight into Martha’s character – and into Ingrid’s as well. We know Martha’s going to die before the end, but rather than concluding on the most morbid note, or with something clichéd like a funeral, the story ends with a conversation and a scene on the deck that connects to an earlier scene. Both scenes include passages from Joyce’s short story The Dead, while earlier Martha and Ingrid also watch John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation – laying it on a bit thick, I suppose, although it is considered one of the greatest short stories written in the English language. Almodóvar has settled into a mellower groove as he’s aged, dispensing with the sort of shocking elements that helped make his reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker while he focuses more on character development and dialogue. The Room Next Door is (at least) his third straight film in this vein, and I think it’s the best of the trio thanks to the two lead performances.

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→ April 1, 2025
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American Fiction.

American Fiction is the first film adaptation of any of Percival Everett’s thirty novels, although its resounding success means it won’t be the last – an adaptation of James is already in the works (good!) with Taika Waititi possibly directing (so very, very bad). Directed by Cord Jefferson, who won the Oscar for his screenplay, the film adheres quite closely to the novel, which was called Erasure, until the very end, when Jefferson takes some creative license that pokes a little fun at Everett’s own ending but doesn’t entirely stick its metafictional landing. (It’s streaming free on Amazon Prime or you can rent it on iTunes.)

Once again, we meet Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a professor and author of arcane novels that don’t sell, here in a new scene where he lashes out at a performatively offended white student in one of his classes, leading his employers to put him on leave. He travels to New York to meet with his agent, and to visit his aging mother (Lesley Uggams) and his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor who provides reproductive health services. His mother is showing early signs of dementia, while we learn that his relationship with Lisa and their brother Bill (Sterling K. Brown) has always been distant. While traveling, he comes across a bestselling novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, by Black author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), an Oberlin graduate who has written a book that Monk thinks panders to white guilt, engaging in gross and dated stereotypes about Black Americans. Lisa dies very early in the film, in one of the most significant alterations from Erasure, and when their mother clearly needs to enter assisted living, Monk suddenly has some significant financial issues. He sits down and writes a novel, My Pafology, that parodies Golden’s book and the benevolent racism of the publishing industry, intending (he says) to offend the editors who receive it. Instead, he gets a seven-figure bonus (25% higher than the figure in the book, which was written 25 years ago) and everyone wants to meet the fictitious author Stagg R. Leigh, whom Monk invents as he goes along. As his personal life becomes more difficult, the book becomes more successful, until he finds himself on the judging panel for the Literary Award … and his book is one of the leading candidates.

Jefferson does a fantastic job weaving the twin narratives of the book – the family subplot and the Pafology subplot – together in a way that feels fluid, since he lacks the natural transitions that come with chapter breaks, and the two only truly intersect a few times in the novel. He’s kept the bones of the plot and most of the details are the same, although he changes a few character names (including Adam Brody’s movie producer) and creates some overly dramatic scenes involving Monk’s mother. There are also more outright laughs here than in the source, and the relationships between Monk and his two siblings are softened, which allows some fantastic scenes between Wright and Brown later in the film.

Wright is spectacular here – this is a well-written, three-dimensional character, and Wright just is Monk. He inhabits this character in every way, and when Monk has to act as Stagg, Wright telegraphs not just his discomfort at playing “Black,” but that this character was raised to not speak or act a certain way, leaving him flummoxed when he has to become Stagg R. Leigh on the phone and once in person. He’s just as strong in the family scenes, showing how Monk struggles with his interpersonal relationships even with people he clearly cares about; he doesn’t lack empathy or feelings, but – forgive the hackneyed phrase – sometimes he can’t get out of his own way. Brown and Uggams are also excellent in their respective roles, with Brown, like Wright, earning an Oscar nomination for this performance; Uggams probably just doesn’t get enough screen time to say she was robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nod – I don’t think she passes the Judi Dench Barrier here – but she’s superb in the limited time she gets, as is Erika Alexander as Monk’s love interest, Coraline.

I wasn’t bothered by Jefferson sharpening some of the edges and inserting some extra drama; Brody’s movie producer character even says in the film at one point that a movie made from a novel can’t be the novel, because you just don’t have enough time, and I think that can also apply to character development. Even changing the manner of Lisa’s death makes sense, because what happens in the book is tied to something larger that the movie would simply not have time to address, at least not in a satisfying fashion.

The ending, however … I will concede the argument that the book ends in a way that would probably not work on film. The movie might not even get made. I liked the ending of Erasure, but it’s unconventional, and would have been even more so in a movie. Jefferson’s solution is creative, certainly, but I’m not sure it works. Metafictional twists like that one are hard to pull off, and if you start thinking about this one, you’ll probably end up with a headache. The final, final shot, though, is excellent, so maybe it’s best to just not ponder the climax too thoroughly. Adapting a book as rich and sardonic as Erasure could not have been easy, and Jefferson managed to get the tone right without having to make any significant changes to the meat of the novel.

I’ve seen nine of the ten movies that were nominated for Best Picture in this year, and I’d put American Fiction pretty comfortably in the middle of the group. The Zone of Interest, which I didn’t see until November of last year and never wrote up, would be my top choice, and I wouldn’t put this over Past Lives or Oppenheimer, but it’s in the next tier with Barbie and The Holdovers for me. Wright never had a chance to beat Cillian Murphy for Best Actor, but if this movie were going to win any award for anything, he would have been my pick.

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→ March 31, 2025
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Erasure.

Erasure was Percival Everett’s breakthrough novel, the twelfth one he published but the first to gain widespread acclaim and attention – ironic, in a small way, as it is in part a novel about the conflict between art and commerce, the need to create against the need to make a buck. Adapted into 2023’s Oscar-winning film American Fiction, Erasure is a masterpiece of biting, humorous satire, a work that holds up twenty years later in a world that hasn’t actually changed that much from the one in which it’s set.

Thelonious Ellison, known to friends and acquaintances as Monk, is a professor of literature and an author of inscrutable, dense novels that don’t sell. He lives in Los Angeles, far from his aging mother and sister Lisa, the latter of whom provides reproductive health services, including abortions, at her clinic in or outside D.C. Their brother Bill, who recently came out as gay, lives in Arizona; Bill and Lisa are close, but Monk is distant from both of them, and was their late father’s favorite in their telling.

Monk is appalled to find that a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a Black woman named Juanita Mae Jenkins, has become a critical and commercial success by pandering to white people’s sterotypes of Black America – even though Jenkins herself grew up privileged and the stories within the book aren’t hers. In his indignation over Jenkins’s success, and facing a sudden need to help pay for his mother to enter a memory-care facility, Monk writes a pandering novel of his own called My Pafology, submitting it under the pseudonym Stagg R. Lee. To his surprise, and his agent’s, the book sells immediately, and suddenly Monk has a Springtime for Hitler-like smash on his hands – and eventually ends up faced with the potential that he might win the Literary Award, a National Book Award-like honor for which Monk is also one of the judges.

Erasure is a masterpiece. It’s bursting with different themes and potential interpretations; Monk is a wonderfully complex and three-dimensional character; Everett balances his protagonist’s difficult personal life against the madness of his commercial breakthrough. It’s a satire of the publishing industry, sure, but Everett’s eye is much more on the white-savior racism of publishing and later Hollywood, and how Black creators are happy to contribute to it if it makes them rich. My Pafology, which Monk later retitles to something else I won’t spoil, has Black poverty, absentee fathers, guns, drugs, promiscuity, and the other requirements of white-published Black literature of the time, all written in a parody of AAVE that flies right over every white reader’s heads … but Monk is appalled to find that there’s a Black audience for the book as well, with an Oprah-like TV host also praising both his book and Jenkins’s for their realism and authenticity.

Everett’s biting wit and sense of irony are in top form here, with humor both from the repartee between Monk and some of the other characters and from the situations Monk encounters in the publishing side of the story. These characters are all intelligent, so the dialogue is sharp and often extremely funny, especially between Monk and Bill. The entire farcical plot line of the book becoming a sensation when Monk didn’t think any publisher would want it – and his agent refuses at first to even submit it to publishers – provides a natural “and of course that happened next” subtext that’s more facepalm-funny than the laugh-out-loud kind. The white critics on the Literary Award panel might seem a little overdrawn, but a look at the novels that have won the major U.S. literary prizes in the last fifteen or so years only underlines Everett’s point – if anything, he predicted this shift towards awarding fiction that critics think is Very Important, which isn’t to say they’re picking the wrong books but that the’ve gone from one type of bias in the selection process to another.

The farce of My Pafology is a stark contrast to the second story within Erasure, that of Monk’s family and his difficulty maintaining strong interpersonal relationships. He learns early in the book that his mother has Alzheimer’s, while there’s another death in the family around the same point in the story, both of which serve to push him to write the pandering novel, but also create new situations where he has to confront some of his past choices to remain separate from his family, which includes Lorraine, who has been the Ellisons’ housekeeper since Monk and his siblings were little. Everett also gives Monk a romantic subplot when he connects with someone who lives near their family beach house, but after the initial sparks cool off, Monk finds himself in familiar waters, erecting new boundaries and holding himself apart from – or perhaps just above – his new girlfriend. It might have felt leaden if it weren’t all set against a ridiculous parallel plot where Monk has fallen into a big pile of money and the potential for fame he doesn’t want.

This all has to come to a head at some point, and Everett lands in a perfect spot, avoiding the sentimental conclusion (which would be so unlike him) while also choosing not to give Monk some horrific Tony Last-style resolution. I imagine the end won’t satisfy everyone, but this is probably the best path out of the story Everett could have written.

Is this Everett’s best novel of the five I’ve read? I’ve been pondering that since I finished the book on Friday. Every one of those books has been so different than the others that comparisons seem foolish; James somehow seems like the strongest work because of the restrictions that come with writing within another person’s work, while Erasure is more precise in its construction, and has the benefit of humor.

As for the film, I’ll review that next.

Next up: T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, already nominated for this year’s Nebula Award.

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→ March 26, 2025
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Adolescence.

For three episodes, the new Netflix series Adolescence delivers some of the best television content I’ve ever seen, both in writing and in performances. Each episode is recorded as one continuous shot, and walks us through a different hour (roughly) in a different day across the case of a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a female classmate. That fourth episode, however, makes some curious editorial choices, shifting the focus to characters who probably don’t belong at the center of this kind of story, and even some strong acting can’t totally salvage the conclusion.

The first episode opens with two police officers, DI Bascombe (Ashley “Asher D” Walters) and DS Frank (Faye Marsay), as they prepare to storm a suburban house to arrest a suspect, 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper, in his first film role). We follow them in the police van to the station, through processing and the initial interrogation, and it’s only near the very end of the episode that we learn any details about the crime and why the police think he did it. The second episode, taking place two days later, focuses on the two cops and their investigation, particularly DI Bascombe’s interest in learning a motive. Because much of the theme of the series is the social difficulties that teenagers face as a result of social media, this turns out to be a significant episode for our understanding of Jamie’s potential motives and what his life was like before the murder.

The third episode is the big one, the one that’s going to win all the awards for writing and for its two actors, as nearly the entire hour takes place in a room at the juvenile detention center where Jamie is being held as he awaits trial. Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) is an independent psychologist hired by his attorneys to provide a report on his state of mind and understanding of everything that’s happening; it’s not their first such appointment, so they can jump right into the conversation, and it becomes heated and intense as Jamey displays an inability to regulate his emotions that we haven’t seen previously. It’s a tour de force performance from Cooper, as the one-shot gimmick requires him to shapeshifter from petulant teenager into a demon who can’t contain his rage and frustration in a matter of seconds. It ends on an extremely powerful note, maybe the defining moment of the series.

That fourth episode, though, is a letdown, even though series co-creator Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie, delivers a strong performance as this episode’s protagonist. The camera is on him, his wife, and their daughter for the entire hour, focusing on the aftereffects of Jamie’s arrest, which of course has upended their lives and made them pariahs in the neighborhood. There’s even a horrifying and too-accurate scene where a big-box hardware store employee recognizes Eddie and reveals that he thinks Jamie is innocent, citing a bunch of the counterfactual nonsense you might encounter in the Qanon-adjacent corners of the internet. It’s such a reflection of the world in which a third of the United States seems to be living, one totally disconnected from reality, willing to ignore the obvious facts in favor of lunatic conspiracy theories.

This episode makes a choice to center Jamie’s family, which continues a theme of the entire series, which is that the family of the victim, Katie, doesn’t exist. We never see Katie’s parents, or any grieving family members. The closest we get is her friend. This even echoes comments from DS Frank in episode 2 about how a murder like this tends to cast the spotlight on the killer, not the victim, only to have the victim and her family erased from the series, especially the last half. The entire focus in the final hour of Adolescence is on how hard this has all been on Jamie’s parents and his sister. And this has been done before: it’s the entire theme of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsey’s excellent but almost unwatchable adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel about the mother of a boy who murders a bunch of his classmates at high school. That film is an incisive portrait of a woman tormented by guilt over her parenting, whether her decisions somehow led her son to commit this atrocity, whether she did enough to try to stop him when it was clear that something about him was off – and why her husband wouldn’t listen. Adolescence doesn’t grapple with its perpetrator’s parents at anywhere near the same depth, which is an acceptable choice if the script also chose to acknowledge that there is another family dealing with an even greater grief. Graham and his co-writer Jack Thorne chose instead to focus only on Jamie’s family, and that undercuts so much of what the series aimed to accomplish. There’s way too much good in the first three-quarters of the series for this particular choice to undo it; I just kept waiting for them to show Katie’s family, somehow, and the failure to do so took something away from the series for me.

(Apropos of nothing, I could have sworn Jemma Redgrave appeared in the initial scene of the raid on Jamie’s house, but she’s not credited anywhere. I’m curious if anyone else thought they spotted her.)

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