→ February 10, 2019
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Eighth Grade.

Comedian Bo Burnham made his screenwriting debut with 2018’s Eighth Grade, a cute coming-of-age story with newbie Elsie Fisher in the lead role of Kayla. It will compete with itself between making you laugh and making you want to crawl out of your own skin, because I’m guessing just about everyone who sees this will relate to something that happens to Kayla as we follow her through the last few weeks of eighth grade and see her navigate social anxieties and prepare for high school. The film is free now on amazon prime.

Kayla is a shy, awkward teenager – watch how Fisher walks, as if she’s trying to make herself smaller – who posts ‘advice’ vlogs that, as we see, no one watches, but also worries that she’s giving advice she doesn’t even take herself. Nothing extraordinary happens to her for most of the film; she gets invited to a pool party, wins the dubious honor of being named quietest in her class, spends a lot of time on Instagram and Snapchat (as we’re told, nobody uses Facebook any more), has a crush, hears about sex, and eventually has a day where she shadows a perky, outgoing high school senior named Olivia (Emily Robinson, who has fantastic hair). We get a school-shooting drill, impossibly uncool teachers and school administrators – really, a principal tries to dab, and I’ve never been so embarrassed to be over the age of 20 – and, eventually, one bad thing happens that triggers the big scene you might have caught in the trailer where Kayla and her dad (Josh Hamilton) have an emotional conversation around a fire pit.

Eighth Grade is by far at its best when Kayla is on the screen and at the center of whatever’s happening. She gives a description of anxiety, without naming it as such, that’s about as good a depiction of the physical aspects of the disorder that I have heard anywhere in fiction. Fisher’s bright eyes and blond hair would seem to make her a standout, but she plays Kayla as so unsure and vulnerable that she ends up seeming younger than her classmates and that much more sympathetic. And Eighth Grade should be viewed through her lens from start to finish; even the worst thing that happens to her works better because she’s always at the focus of the narrative and the camera. There’s a joke around a banana that is such picture-perfect physical comedy that I can only assume Fisher actually hates the fruit in real life – or else she deserved a Best Actress nod for that scene alone.

Where Burnham lost me and cost himself some momentum is when he went for cheap laughs, like making the adults not just uncool but sort of assertively uncool, like the dabbing principal or the teacher in the sex education video who says “it’s gonna be lit!” To a teenager, parents and adults are just generally not cool, but Burnham goes twice as far as he needs to go so he can hammer that point home. A few of the gags hit, but more miss or just seem out of place because they take the focus away from Kayla’s journey – and her story is the heart of the film in every sense of the term.

Other than Fisher’s performance, the biggest reason Eighth Grade works, even with its inconsistencies, is that Burnham has managed to hit so many universal emotions and experiences with just a handful of anecdotes over the course of about 90 minutes. While there’s nothing here that specifically happened to me as a kid, the sensations and emotions were entirely familiar – none more so than that sense that you’re the one person in the room everyone is looking at, the one person everyone else has identified as the oddball. A few of the anecdotes are rooted in modernity; all the kids are constantly on their phones, talking to each other through DMs, snaps, and instagram comments. You can generalize almost everything in this film that Kayla experiences to match something you remember feeling as a kid. And I got to feel this film on two levels, since I’m also the father of a girl just a year younger than Kayla is, so eighth grade for us is just around the corner. (I’ve already forbidden her from using Snapchat though.) So while the script is inconsistent and has some gags that don’t land, the story is so authentic to the experience of growing up as a suburban teenager that the film eventually works and resonates without resorting to cheap manipulation or big twists.

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→ January 28, 2019
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FYRE.

My prospects ranking package began its rollout this morning for ESPN+ subscribers with the list of 15 guys who just missed the top 100.

—

By now there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen FYRE, the Netflix documentary on the ill-fated music festival to be held in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017 that turned out to be a giant con run by its founder Billy McFarland and musician Ja Rule. (There is a competing Hulu documentary on the festival that I have not seen.) Netflix chose to release this briefly in theaters, which will qualify it for awards consideration in the next cycle, and for sheer entertainment value it’s among the top documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I love a good con in fiction, but this con happened in real life, and the most amazing theme of FYRE is how so many people working on the festival saw the con happening in real time and did nothing to stop it. Fyre itself was originally an app that would allow people to book celebrities for events, streamlining a process that was opaque even to people with the money to do this but not the access. At some point, McFarland – and we’ll get to him in a moment – had the idea to create a music festival to promote the app, and then plowed ahead with the concept, despite lacking any experience in running festivals, and then hired a bunch of people he knew to try to run the event, half of whom didn’t know what they were doing and half knew what they were doing but couldn’t execute given the constraints of time, money, and location. Many of these folks appear on camera and voice their concerns that it was never going to work, but as far as I can tell, none of them actually quit the organization – one was fired for raising these issues – or did much beyond say that they thought the plans were in trouble.

McFarland appears here only in footage from the planning meetings, because it turns out they pretty much filmed everything as they were trying to make this festival happen, but isn’t interviewed directly; he does answer questions in the Hulu documentary, the producers of which paid him to do so. What FYRE does give us, however, is a sense of just what a grifter McFarland really is: he’d previously come up with Magnises, a members-only club with a credit card-like passport that would give members access to exclusive events, an actual club to visit in Manhattan, and discounts on hard-to-get tickets to concerts and shows. While it delivered on some of its promises, eventually the company started overpromising and underdelivering, or just not delivering at all, leading to a surge in complaints and cancellations just as McFarland was bragging about massive membership growth – and also turning his attention to Fyre.

His ability to get Magnises off the ground and even build some kind of customer base set up the Fyre fiasco in two ways: It became clear that he was very good at getting publicity, and he started a pattern of trying to separate wealthy or high-income millennials from their money. The Fyre Festival wasn’t just poorly run, but poorly funded, and the company took money from would-be concert goers for things that didn’t exist, like housing on or near the beach, and eventually came up with the idea of wristbands that attendees would use to pay for “extra” events like jetskiing but that was just a scam to get working capital so the concert wouldn’t go under before it started.

Of course, the most entertaining parts of Fyre come down to the depths of the scam, and how McFarland appears to be so privileged that he can’t understand the word ‘no.’ I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen the film, but the Evian water story has quickly become a meme, with good reason. People did get to what was supposed to be the concert site, only to find it wasn’t ready for anybody, with just some hurricane tents propped up on the beach and inadequate supplies or housing for the people who did show up, with the concert cancelled just hours before the event was supposed to begin, and no plans to get all these people back home after they were flown to the site on a chartered plane. McFarland appears to have tried to just keep a half-step ahead of the people while stealing their money, and I think the most shocking part (other than the Evian bit) is that he is eventually arrested over this scam, gets out on bail, and immediately sets out to begin another grift, this one even more blatant than the previous ones.

Nobody feels sorry for the well-heeled Fyre Festival customers who were willing to fly to the Bahamas for what was essentially billed as a luxury version of Coachella and kept handing over cash without doing much to see if the people taking their money were reliable. I can’t say I felt a lot of sympathy for them either, but that schadenfreude was not a major part of FYRE‘s message to me. I can’t get over how many people worked on this project, knew it was a dumpster fire on a flatbed rail car that was slowly going off the tracks into a ravine, and stuck around – even when they weren’t getting paid. One person, never identified, did leak details to a site that called Fyre Festival a scam and probably contributed to its downfall (or at least to the rise of skeptical media coverage of it), but everyone we see here except for the one who was fired kept working here until the event was cancelled. (The guy who was fired – the one real voice of reason here – is the same guy who brags that he learned to fly by playing Flight Simulator.)

This event never gets off the ground were it not for a clever social media campaign that made heavy use of ‘influencers,’ notably those on Instagram, who were promised compensation if they would simply talk about the festival and post its image of a blank orange square. (I don’t know why either.) The documentary skirts the subject too much for my liking, because ultimately, influencer culture is itself a fraud. Yes, if you have a large social media following, you can direct people to buy certain products and services, just by nature of the volume of eyeballs on your content. That absolves the influencer of any responsibility for what they appear to recommend, which was later codified by the FTC into guidelines requiring influencers to disclose “material connections” to brands they recommend, and to do so in a way that will be clear to most users. I have a large Twitter following and modest audiences on Facebook and Instagram (the latter of which I’m using more, mostly just for fun or silly posts), and so I am offered a lot of stuff in the hopes that I’ll recommend it – sometimes things just show up at the house. I have a simple policy: I won’t recommend anything I don’t like or use myself. I have told publishers not to send items. I declined a gift card to a restaurant chain (no, not Olive Garden) because there was a quid pro quo attached to it. Granted, I am not an “influencer” using it as my primary source of income – but maybe that’s not the most ethical way to make a living, either.

As for the Hulu version, I’ll probably watch it because I have a couple of close friends who’ve urged me to do so, even just so we can discuss it, although the consensus seems to be that FYRE is better. And it is wonderfully bonkers at so many points. Ja Rule has a quote near the end that is a jawdropper. The Evian story and McFarland’s third scam, while out on bail, are both are-you-fucking-serious moments. The Lord of the Flies (Lord of the Fyres?) scenes on the beach and later at the airport are both enough to make you screw up your faces in disbelief, although those beach scenes made me a little uncomfortable as these well-off young adults complained over conditions that probably a billion people in the world experience as their normal. It’s shocking in so many ways, none more so than the grifter Billy himself, who must be some sort of sociopath for the ease with which he lies to people and to cameras while gleefully helping himself to others’ cash.

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→ January 24, 2019
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Cold War.

Pawel Pawlikowski won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015 for his movie Ida, and returned this year with the critically acclaimed Cold War, distributed by amazon studios, which just earned three Oscar nominations this week for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, and, in one of the biggest surprises of the nominations, Best Director. The taut 85-minute, black-and-white drama sets a doomed romance against the backdrop of the Cold War itself, with its two main characters moving back and forth across the Iron Curtain as the political climate tears them apart and their animal magnetism pulls them back together.

Based heavily on the story of Pawlikowski’s own parents, who were musicians in Poland after World War II and split up multiple times before Pawe? was born, Cold War stars Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Wiktor, who first meet when Wiktor helps put together a music ensemble to play and honor traditional Polish folk music under the Communist government. Zula has singing talent but lies about her background and experience to con her way into the group, and Wiktor feels an immediate attraction to her that she recognizes and exploits to secure her place at the makeshift academy. This eventually explodes into a passionate affair that leads Wiktor to plan for their defection while their company tours Berlin, only to have Zula choose to stay behind at the last moment, setting in motion a series of meetings and partings over the next fifteen years between Paris, Yugoslavia, and Warsaw, with Zula becoming a jazz singer, Wiktor ending up a political prisoner, and the two absorbing increasing costs to leave each other and come together again.

The pain of parting may be nothing to the joy of meeting again, but Zula and Wiktor are unable to maintain that joy for very long, and begin to tear each other apart – especially Wiktor, who seems to often treat Zula like a prize to be won, or an object to be possessed, as opposed to an independent woman with her own agency. Kulig and Kot have absurd on-screen chemistry that allows Pawlikowski to show virtually nothing while making the desperate passion between the two characters palpable: There’s one love scene where the camera and the actors pause, and we only see Zula’s face, and in the span of under ten seconds the viewer can feel the intensity of this relationship while still understanding that it can never end well.

The decision to shoot the film in black and white appears to have resonated with Academy voters, as both this and Roma landed cinematography nods; Pawlikowski said that color didn’t work when they tried it, as he wanted to replicate the gray bleakness of Poland in the aftermath of the war and the communist takeover. It gives the Polish scenes that depressing air, although it works against the portions of the movie in the nightclubs and salons and ateliers of Paris, where the sense of life is muted … or perhaps that was Pawlikowski’s point, that Zula and Wiktor, as products of the war and the communist regime, can’t fully appreciate or embrace the artistic and personal freedom of the west after their experiences?

Kulig smolders as Zula, moving deftly from ingenue to partner to free spirit to an independent woman who can be petulant and indignant as Wiktor begins to treat her worse the more they’re together. Kot, looking like a slightly older, more rakish Michael Fassbender, drifts more abruptly from dark remove to desperation, as Wiktor’s ability to take Zula for granted once she’s there is completely mystifying, while his single-minded focus on finding her when they’re apart is palpable and easier to understand.

Cold War is short – it’s less than half the length of fellow nominee Never Look Away, which clocks in at 188 minutes – and it zips along once Zula enters the picture, sometimes a little too quickly for some of the tension between the two characters to develop naturally. The film’s ending is problematic, although the last line and shot are both beautiful, in a way I can’t discuss without a huge spoiler; I’ll just say I don’t think it’s adequately set up by the 80 minutes that come before. That puts it behind my big 3 of foreign films from 2018 (Burning, Roma, Shoplifters), but the first 95% of this movie is so good and such a gripping depiction of the familiar story of star-crossed lovers that it’s still a success and worth seeking out.

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→ January 20, 2019
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The Guilty.

The Danish film The Guilty earned one of the nine spots on the shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with an English-language remake coming at some point with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role. That Oscar category is loaded enough this year that I’d be surprised if it landed one of the five nominations, but The Guilty is a tremendous thriller, one that grabs you by the throat early on and never lets go, while also providing an insightful character study into the only significant person to appear on screen. It’s available to rent right now on amazon or Vudu for $7.

Asger Holm is a police officer who’s been accused of an unspecified violation on the job, the details of which appear much later in the story, and demoted to desk duty where he takes 112 (the Danish equivalent of 911) calls and doesn’t seem to take the job very seriously. After a few relatively minor calls, including one from a man who was robbed by a sex worker and doesn’t want to admit that that’s what happened, Asger takes a call from a woman, Iben, who manages to communicate that she’s been kidnapped by someone she knows and is being taken somewhere outside of Copenhagen in a moving car. She pretends she’s talking to her daughter, Mathilde, who is now home alone with her baby brother Oliver, while Asger navigates a conversation to try to get details on where Iben is – and then later gets a call from Mathilde as well. The film never leaves the call center and Asger is in every shot, just moving between two rooms, as he tries to figure out who took Iben and where she’s going, raging against his powerlessness in the situation while eventually confronting his own misdeeds that put him on desk duty in the first place.

The Guilty clocks in at just 85 minutes, and there’s no fat on this story: there’s the main plotline around Iben’s kidnapping and the subplot around Asger’s demotion and a court hearing the following day that will determine his fate and that involves his partner Rashid. The Iben thread twists and turns multiple times, with the tension ratcheted up by dropped calls, her kidnapper asking to speak to her daughter, and eventually Asger getting the kidnapper on the phone. Asger’s own frustrations, both over this case and over his career and personal life as well, boil over into his calls, especially as he feels like the dispatchers he calls aren’t taking the incident seriously enough – and again, he finds himself powerless to do what he’d ordinarily do if he were out in the field, but has been emasculated by his suspension from that role and can only work through others. Eventually, he makes a mistake, as any human would, and has to face the consequences in real-time as the kidnapping is still in progress.

Asger’s character is the only one of any significance to the viewer – Iben is there, on the phone, but we only see of her what Asger hears, and while he learns more about her as the story progresses, it remains superficial throughout. He seems unsympathetic at the start, sneering through his headset at the people who call for help because they’re stupid or did something while drunk, but his interest in Iben, and willingness to break rules and potentially endanger his own career for her shows depth to his character and makes him more sympathetic … but there are still layers beneath that one that will add to our understanding. He’s the hero, but a flawed one, and is flawed in a realistic, human way that informs his words and actions to form a coherent, three-dimensional rendering. Without that depiction, and the strong, restrained performance by Jakob Cedergren, the film simply would not work.

The Guilty has been highly acclaimed in Europe, earning Bodil Prize (the Danish Oscars) nominations for best film, best director, and best actor for Cedergren. I’m guessing, having seen three of the other eight nominees and read reviews and background information on the others, that this film won’t make the final five; Roma and Burning feel like locks, Cold War and Shoplifters bring incredible reviews and accolades from elsewhere, Capernaum is highly topical, and Never Look Away comes from the director of the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others. Of the four shortlisted films I’ve seen, though, it’s the easiest to recommend by far, because it’s the most straightforward and the most purely entertaining: this is a smart, concise thriller that sets out one goal and puts everything in its script towards achieving it. Because it’s so lean, the narrative never flags, and director/co-writer Gustav Möller instead conveys Asger’s frustration by only letting us see Asger and through the use of long pauses in most of the phone conversations. The story here is solid, boosted by a couple of twists, but it’s the way Möller tells the story and Cedergren portrays it that makes The Guilty such a great watch, even if you can sort of figure out where this is headed. I wouldn’t put it above the three other foreign films I’ve seen from the shortlist, but it’s easily the most accessible of the four, and does so without sacrificing its integrity or insulting the viewer’s intelligence to do so.

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→ January 18, 2019
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An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts bears a blatant stylistic similarity to the writing of N.K. Jemisin in her Broken Earth trilogy, from prose to characterization to both writers use of old-time religions in futuristic settings. And both writers put young women right at the heart of their respective stories, with Solomon giving us Aster, a young adult on a ‘generation ship’ that has, over centuries of drifting in space to an unknown and possibly nonexistent destination, devolved into a caste system by ship deck that incorporates skin color into its stratification, resulting in something that looks a good bit like American slavery.

Aster is a self-made scientist and doctor’s helper, often working with the Surgeon General, Theo, as well as tending plants in her botanarium, even though she’s a low-decker on the ship Matilda. That vessel has been in space at least 300 years, and thoughts of its Golden Land destination are more remote and have become tied up in a sort of doomsday religion that most of the ship practices – or, perhaps, that the upper-deck castes use to control those on the lower decks. Aster is neurodivergent, although Solomon never identifies her difference in any specific way, and for reasons that are only somewhat revealed by the end of the book, she’s marked for especially cruel treatment by the Lieutenant, a sadistic leader who is poised to take control if the Sovereign in charge dies. (You can guess whether that comes to pass.) Lune, Aster’s mother, took her own life the day Aster was born, but left behind cryptic clues in a series of notebooks that Aster and her bunk mate Giselle start to decipher when they realize its code may contain clues about the ship, as well as a potential way off of it.

There is, as we say on Twitter, a lot to unpack here, as Solomon has written a tight 350-page novel that incorporates race, religion, class, sex/gender, sexual harassment and assault, how people (mostly men) use and retain power, and a healthy dose of science fiction. There are women in the upper castes, but every authority figure we see is male. Women and girls on lower decks have darker skin, and are also used, to put it bluntly, for breeding, so the ship will have an ongoing supply of workers. Officials and guards have the tacit authority to rape or abuse women as they please, and it’s implied they do so with boys as well. One scene where Aster mouths off (with justification) to an upper-class twit woman lays bare the societal strictures that hold the barriers between upper and lower decks in place, backed by the force of the guard.

Unlike so many science fiction authors, good and bad, Solomon doesn’t spend a ton of time building the world in An Unkindness of Ghosts, giving the readers just what they need to understand what’s happening in the story, or where the characters might be in the architecture of the ship, but nothing extraneous. (Somehow there is meat on the ship, quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how that one would work unless it’s supposed to be lab-grown.) The result is that the characters are extraordinarily well-developed for the genre – Aster, Theo, even Giselle and the caretaker known as Ainy or Melusine, whose importance grows as the book progresses. Solomon also defies many plot conventions by, again to be blunt, having smart characters still make stupid mistakes, especially Aster, who often acts without foresight because of her youth or how her brain works. She’s the hero, without question, but she’s flawed in a different way than your typical flawed hero. She’s flawed because she was born that way, and her successes come both in spite of that and often because of it, because she makes the best out of who she is, and can thus do things neurotypical people probably couldn’t. All of this, and other aspects of her character including some unspoken history of abuse and her unusual connection to Theo, make her one of the most interesting protagonists I’ve come across in a long time.

Solomon can get caught up in some clumsy prose, another similarity to Jemisin’s writing, such as when they start trying to describe the physics of space travel in their universe, especially the discovery Lune made that changes everything for Aster and her comrades, or in the description of Baby, the ship’s main power source. Yet they also display facility with creating language, giving each deck its own dialect, much the way slaves in different parts of the South would blend their native tongues with English and create new patois, such as the Gulla dialect still spoken today off the coast of South Carolina. The culture and economy of Matilda feel impossibly rich for a book this short; even when I wasn’t gripped by the plot, I was enveloped in Solomon’s world. The book starts slow, but stay with it; the last hundred pages are a barnburner and the ending is satisfying without becoming sentimental or obvious.

Next up: Still reading Camus’ The Plague.

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→ January 17, 2019
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Milkman.

Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize when her third novel, Milkman, took the honor in 2018. It’s an experimental novel, atypical for Booker winners, that reads like a more accessible Faulkner, and combines a story of the Troubles with the staunchly feminist narrative of its 18-year-old narrator for a result that is unlike anything I’ve read before.

Characters in Milkman go without names, including the narrator, a young woman who walks around with her head in a book and is literally and figuratively oblivious to the internecine warfare occurring around her, as well as the titular milkman – well, both milkmen. The milkman of the title isn’t actually a milkman, but rides around in a white van as if he were one. He’s in his 40s, associated with a local paramilitary group, and stalks the narrator while ensuring that everyone in their tightknit, gossip-ridden community knows that she is his, to the point where others, including her own mother, assume that she’s indeed having an affair with this dangerous, older man. There’s also a real milkman, whose role becomes apparent as the novel progresses; ‘maybe boyfriend,’ whom the narrator has been seeing for a year, who’s obsessed with cars, and whose life may be endangered by not-really Milkman; Tablets girl, who runs around poisoning people, including her own sister and eventually the narrator, but everyone seems to just take it as part of life; the boy the narrator calls Somebody McSomebody, who also tries to threaten the narrator into becoming his girl, which ends rather poorly for him in one of the novel’s few scenes of actual violence; and far more.

Burns layers a story of personal terror inside a story of the societal terror that affected Northern Ireland for decades. The narrator’s life is turned upside down by this unwanted attention from a man she barely even knows, but whose reputation in the community is enough to scare her and to convince everyone else she’s submitted to him willingly (even though she never submits to him at all). When the Milkman stalks her, he also inducts her, against her will, into a theater of the absurd that mirrors reality from that time and place, where violence split Catholics and Protestants, where any official authority was seen as essentially Ours or Theirs, where an act that shouldn’t merit a second thought, like going to the hospital, would be fraught with political and social implications. She’s suddenly seen to have taken sides, and even finds herself the unwitting beneficiary of the fear others have of the paramilitaries, which further underlines for her how potent the impact of this one man’s attentions towards her are.

Burns also surrounds her narrator with families who’ve been hurt by the violence in the community, directly or indirectly, including the one mother who, by the end of the novel, seems to have lost her husband and every one of her children to direct violence, related accidents, or suicide. The narrator’s father is dead when the novel opens, while her mother is a tragicomic figure who is convinced her daughter is a sinner, who believes every rumor she hears about her daughter (some from ‘first brother-in-law,’ who is both a gossip-monger and a creep), and who goes into hysterics over every bit of innuendo, which the narrator never wants to even acknowledge because it merely prolongs the agony.

Milkman is still quite funny and even hopeful in parts among the litter of tragedies and the ever-present specter of the stalker, although we do learn at the start of the novel that he’ll die before it’s over. The narrator’s third brother-in-law, while a peculiar man himself, takes on a protector role over his young sister-in-law, as does Real Milkman, whose interest in her is a side effect of his romantic interest in her mother. There are also signs of intelligent life amidst the gossips and harridans, including the “issue women,” a group of seven residents who embrace feminism when one hears of it in town and starts up a local women’s group in the backyard shed of one of the members (because her husband wouldn’t allow it in the house).

Of course, this is all set against the ever-present backdrop of the Troubles and you don’t need to know much at all about that conflict to appreciate Burns’ depiction of the effects of the sectarian violence on this particular neighborhood. Burns draws and redraws the picture of this time and place with swirling, inventive prose, in paragraphs that go on for days, often putting unlikely vocabulary in the mouths of her characters – esoteric or archaic words, or even words she’s just made up – to provide further much to the narrative. It’s not as difficult as Faulkner or Proust, but shows the influence of those early 20th century writers at the same time, both in a technical aspect and in how Burns uses her experimental sentence structure and vocabulary to contribute the reader’s sense of unease.

I’ve only read a few of the contenders for this year’s Booker but can at least understand why this novel won. It also feels like the third straight year where the prize has gone to a novel that does something different, as opposed to the prize’s history of going to literary works that still adhere to the traditional form and intentions of the novel. I could imagine this novel seeming abstruse to readers outside of the UK, given its setting during the Troubles, but that’s merely the backdrop for a rich, textured story that is as relevant today (with its #MeToo similarities) as it would be to a reader of that time and place.

Next up: A little light reading, Albert Camus’ The Plague.

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→ January 11, 2019
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All the Birds in the Sky.

Charlie Jane Anders was a founding editor of io9, the Gawker subsite dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, so it’s no surprise that her debut novel All The Birds in the Sky combines those genres and works in many tropes common in those areas, especially coming-of-age novels from the fantasy realm. Despite a slow ramp-up that doesn’t hint at the novel’s greater ambitions, the story builds to a bold climax that recalls many pioneering novels in these fields without ever coming off as derivative or unoriginal.

Anders’ gambit in All the Birds in the Sky is to create two synchronous, intertwined stories, one of which draws from straight fantasy and one from realistic, hard science fiction, with one character at the head of each, and contrast the complicated personal relationship between the two of them with the growing and apparently inevitable conflict that will occur between their two forces. Set in the near future where climate change and runaway capitalism have led to catastrophic weather patterns and rapid societal breakdown, the novel keeps raising the stakes between its two protagonists and pushes them into difficult, sometimes dangerous choices that only might help save the world.

Patricia and Lawrence are those two central characters, both misfits in their junior high school, albeit for different reasons. Patricia lives with her overbearing, judgmental parents, and a too-perfect older sister whose bullying of Patricia borders on the sociopathic. Lawrence lives on the other side of town, with warmer parents who don’t quite understand him, both of whom gave up ambitions of bigger careers to settle into working-class malaise. Patricia discovers one day that she can talk to animals, if only briefly, and ends up following a chatty bird to a giant tree in the middle of their forest where the birds are holding their Parliament (which is not restricted to owls). Lawrence is a gifted hacker who scavenges parts and builds a supercomputer in his closet, giving it a machine-learning algorithm that allows it to grow by talking to real people online, one of whom is Patricia. Of course, both kids are badly bullied – to such a cruel extent that reading the first few chapters was painful – which pushes them together but later pulls them apart, something exacerbated by a guidance counselor who isn’t what he seems to be, and is acting on a vision of the future where the two lead opposite sides of a global conflict between science and magic that threatens to end the planet as we know it.

The prologue was tough sledding, but once Anders gets her characters out of school, thanks to a dramatic flourish where Patricia rescues Lawrence from misery and possible death at a military academy of dubious merit, the pace picks up and the nonrealistic elements, both magic and fictional science, contribute more to the development of both the story and the two characters. Both Patricia and Lawrence are flawed, due to immaturity and the challenges of each of their upbringings, and then are pushed into situations, Patricia by her classmates at magic school and Lawrence by colleagues at a Boring Company-like startup, for which they aren’t well-prepared. Anders’ greatest achievement in the novel is showing those characters’ growth even through failures, one of which would be particularly traumatic, so that they are better prepared when the climax of the story arrives and the decisions they must make have the largest consequences yet.

All the Birds in the Sky will remind you of many great novels in these genres without ever drawing too heavily on any one source. The entire tenor of the book brought the great Magicians trilogy to mind, including the emphasis on the flaws in the two characters and how events in our youth can have long-lasting effects on our personalities and life choices well into adulthood. The influence of the major YA fantasy series like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia is evident in the background, but never overt, and any similarities are muted by the presence of the parallel sci-fi strand around Lawrence. He’s something out of a Heinlein novel, but better, more well-rounded and a lot more aware of the existence of women as actual people than anything Heinlein ever dreamed up.

I expected the ultimate battle between science and magic in this novel to play out differently, perhaps as some sort of faith/reason allegory, but it doesn’t, and that’s just how Anders rolls – so much of this novel sets you up in a comfortable, familiar way, and then resolves matters in a way that defies expectations without cheap surprises. All the Birds in the Sky won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2017, beating The Obelisk Gate (a result that was flipped for the Hugo), and I certainly agree with that result. It’s a fun, smart, compelling read, appropriate for young and full-grown adults alike.

Next up: Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts.

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→ January 2, 2019
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Custody.

Custody (Jusqu’à la garde, on amazon and iTunes) is a full-length sequel to the Oscar-nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything, both written and directed by Xavier Legrand and starring the same actors in three of the four main roles. This film, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and the Louis Delluc Prize last year, follows the same family from the custody hearing that opens the film through the father’s attempts to control his estranged wife through their twelve-year-old son, building in intensity through its refusal to acquiesce to the commercial impulse toward big, dramatic moments.

The opening scene has Miriam (Léa Drucker) and Antoine (Denis Ménochet), with their lawyers, in a session where each side argues for their desired custody arrangements, which form the only real disagreement between them. Miriam accuses Antoine of abusing her, and has repeatedly changed phone numbers and often hidden her location to protect herself from him. Their daughter, Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux), is about to turn 18, and wants nothing to do with her father. Julien (Thomas Gioria), their son, also wants no contact with his father, but the judge who hears their arguments grants Antoine the visitation rights he wants – apparently dismissing Miriam’s claims of abuse for lack of ‘proof’ – which gives the father the wedge he needs to insinuate himself into Miriam’s life.

The film is spare, just 93 minutes, and even at that length there is little action and a very simple plot, reminiscent in several ways of 2017’s Loveless. Antoine is manipulative and controlling, and his interest in Julien seems limited to using the boy as a way to maintain contact with Miriam and to remain aware of her whereabouts and actions. Gioria is especially strong as a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t want contact with his father, but also fears him and has the innate respect children have for authority figures, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re also the victims of those same adults. Some of Custody‘s strongest scenes involve Julien and Antoine doing very little, often barely speaking to each other, or Antoine demanding something only to have Julien try his hardest to avoid answering, and they’re excruciating because Legrand lets these interactions play out in something very close to real time. When Antoine demands that Julien show him their new apartment, Legrand puts us in the car the whole time as Julien tries to direct his father, left, right, straight ahead, for twice as long as you’d expect, giving more time for the anticipation of an eventual explosion to build up.

You don’t need to see the prior film to follow Custody, although it will color your view of the characters in the first few scenes; without that prologue, you can more easily see the judge’s point of view that she must figure out “which of (the parents) is the bigger liar.” It doesn’t take much time to see Antoine’s character come through – first the need to control his wife and children, then his temper and his manipulative nature, and eventually the violence – and at that point anyone watching will realize how badly the judge screwed up, and, in what I assume is Legrand’s point, how poorly the French custody process serves abuse victims if there isn’t an actual crime on record already.

Ménochet also delivers a tremendous performance here even before Antoine’s violent side starts to surface – I’d argue that the performance is better until then, because once it becomes physical, there’s less for the actor to do with the role. Legrand didn’t write this character as a sympathetic one, but also avoided completely dehumanizing the man, so that the scenes with Antoine and Julien can still work as drama – you can understand the son still seeing this man as his father, someone who says he loves him, and an authority figure, rather than just a monster. An adult would see through Antoine, but his own child will always have that inner conflict, and giving the father enough depth gives the audience Julien’s lenses to see him.

Custody has one of the best conclusions of any film I’ve seen from 2018, although it could trigger anyone sensitive to scenes of domestic violence. Given what has come before, it might be the only authentic climax to the story, and then Legrand had his choice of resolutions from that inflection point. By choosing to tell this story slowly, showing detail where most films would speed up to the next moment of action, Legrand has made a film that feels distinctly non-commercial, but that also should evoke more genuine emotions in the audience until that final scene – and by that point, the direction and the acting have earned a big payoff. It’s one of the best films of the year, probably borderline top ten for me right now, and deserves a wider audience here than it’s gotten.

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→ January 1, 2019
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If Beale Street Could Talk.

If Beale Street Could Talk feels like a film that is very of the moment, for its theme and its source material. James Baldwin is himself having a renaissance after the acclaimed documentary I Am Not Your Negro appeared in 2016 and contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly alluded to Baldwin’s works, such as Fire. Even though the novel on which Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight, was written over 40 years ago, it revolves around a very current theme of racial injustice and police misconduct towards African-American men. It succeeds without sermonizing by wrapping those huge themes in a very sweet, straightforward love story between two young black people played by rising stars.

Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James of Homecoming) and Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne, making her film debut) are childhood friends who’ve fallen in love in 1970s New York City, but whose relationship faces many obstacles, including the most obvious one – a society that views them as second-class citizens because they’re black. As the film opens, we learn that Tish, just 19, is pregnant, and that Fonny is behind bars, accused of a rape that he didn’t commit, put there by a vengeful white cop. Jenkins alternates scenes of the present day, where Tish and her family work to try to clear Fonny’s name, with long, languid scenes of their nascent romance, mostly from Tish’s point of view as she also learns more about who Fonny has become as an adult and the challenges a young black man faces, even in a multicultural place like New York.

The story hits a wall when Tish’s mom, played by Regina King, travels to Puerto Rico to try to convince the victim to revoke her identification of Fonnie as the rapist. The scenes that follow are important to the plot, but the lyrical mood Jenkins has set hits an abrupt stop the moment she steps on the island, and it takes the rest of the movie, until the concluding scene, to get that atmosphere back. There’s also an utterly corny scene where Dave Franco, dressed as an observant Jew named Levy, delivers a monologue to Fonnie and Tish to explain why he might be the one landlord in the whole city willing to rent an apartment to a young black couple. The soliloquy is hackneyed, right down to the whole “I don’t care what color you are, black, white, purple” line that could be borrowed from any of a thousand films where a white character tries to explain how he doesn’t see color.

King has been listed as a shoo-in for a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Beale Street, but I don’t think she’s in this film enough to have that sort of impact. She’d slip in under the Judi Dench Exemption, I suppose, but King isn’t the Queen, and her character is actually not that well-developed. There’s nothing missing from King’s performance, but the script just doesn’t demand enough of her. James and Layne are both outstanding, and Bryan Tyree Henry, who is having a year himself, is strong again, this time as a friend of Fonny’s who was just paroled after serving two years for a crime he didn’t commit, but to which he pled guilty rather than face a more serious charge for marijuana possession. (This remains a major reason African-American men are incarcerated today, but first appeared as a weapon of the state, often with the support of leaders of black communities, in the 1960s and 1970s. Locking Up Our Own, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, documents this trend and its effects on the African-American population.)

Jenkins made several smart decisions that power Beale Street past its flaws and made it one of my top ten movies of 2018, including the choice to retain some of Baldwin’s original prose, often having Tish use it as narration; and the way he maintains much of that glowing atmosphere even into some of the scenes around Fonny’s incarceration and the efforts to clear him. Keeping that mood into early conversations that Tish and Fonny have through glass while he’s in prison makes the scene where he loses control of himself more visceral, and the early scene that you’ve likely seen in the trailer, where the two families come into conflict because Fonny’s mother blames Tish for leading her son into sin, starts out with the same atmosphere only to dissolve as the rancor in the room overtakes it. Between this and Moonlight, Jenkins has made his style very clear – he’s in no rush, often letting scenes breathe longer than any other contemporary director I can name, and when he does take the wheel, such as for close-up shots of specific characters’ faces, you’ll be aware of the transition.

If Beale Street Could Talk seems destined to earn a slew of nominations at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony and lose just about all of them; its best chance, aside from King as Best Supporting Actress, might be in Best Adapted Screenplay, where it will be up against A Star is Born and BlacKkKlansman, although I’d vote for this over both of those. If any film has a chance to upset A Star is Born for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, this would be it. It is a wonderful film, so kind to its two main characters but with a story that will make you seethe by its end, worth seeking out if Annapurna gives it a wider release beyond just the 65 screens it was on this past weekend.

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→ December 31, 2018
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Top ten movies of 2018.

I’ve seen everything I think would likely make this top ten list other than several foreign titles, including Cold War and Capernaum, although I’ll still continue watching 2018 releases for a few more months as they hit theaters or streaming. I’ve seen 40 movies that count as 2018 theatrical releases, not counting the HBO movie The Tale, which would have made my top ten but isn’t eligible for awards because it went straight to television after the network purchased it at Sundance.

With those caveats in place, here’s my top ten as of this morning, and it still could change as I continue to see more 2018 films this winter. Links on the films’ titles go to my reviews.

10. The Endless. A thriller, or perhaps a psychological horror movie, that garnered positive reviews with a modest release, The Endless follows two brothers who, having escaped a cult where they grew up, revisit the compound to try to find some closure, only to discover that a mysterious presence has kept their old cultmates from aging and seems to prevent anyone from leaving.

9. First Man. Considered something of a box-office flop, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land goes in a completely different direction, telling the quiet, almost painfully restrained story of Neil Armstrong, from the death of his young daughter to cancer to his landing on the moon. Ryan Gosling and Clare Foy are excellent as the two leads, although the emphasis on accuracy in depicting space flight made some scenes very hard for me to watch.

8. Isle of Dogs. This should win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, although I fear the silly Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse will win (I admit Spider-ham is pretty funny, though) instead. Wes Anderson’s second animated film, his first from an original story, is brilliant, emotional in the right ways, often funny, and extremely well-voiced by a cast of Wes usuals along with the welcome addition of Bryan Cranston.

7. The Favourite. Yorgis Lanthimos’ follow-up to the The Lobster is a bawdy, lowbrow comedy in nice clothes, and it’s hilarious, thanks to the combined efforts of Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz, all three of whom deserve awards consideration. The story itself isn’t new – it’s a power struggle combined with a bizarre love triangle – but the dialogue sparkles and the three stars, aided by a strong supporting turn from Nicholas Hoult, all slay in their respective roles.

6. If Beale Street Could Talk. A lovely, languid adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, Beale Street stars Stephan James (of Homecoming) and Kiki Layne as young lovers who find they’re expecting just as he’s headed to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

5. You Were Never Really Here. A taut modern noir thriller, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a damaged private eye who rescues kidnapped girls and ends up caught in a case that threatens his safety and his sanity. Lynne Ramsay’s latest film, her first feature since 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, clocks in at a spare 90 minutes, leaving no slack in the tension.

4. Beast. Driven by a star turn by relative newcomer Jessie Buckley, Beast follows a young woman in her late 20s who falls for the local outcast, who is himself a potential suspect in the murders of three other teenaged girls in their small town. The contrast between the idyllic setting and the darkness throughout the plot further drives the viewer’s sense of unease at every turn.

3. Shoplifters. My top three films are all foreign films, which is purely coincidental, and all made the Academy Award’s shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Oscars. Japan’s entry is a simple, intimate portrait of a makeshift family of grifters who take in a neglected four-year-old girl they find playing outside in the cold in their tenement. Director/writer Hirokazu Kore-eda took hold the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film, which has a huge heart and explores the essentially human need for the connections and security of family through a group of well-rounded characters.

2. Roma. Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project for Netflix lived up to the lofty expectations set for it. Based on his own childhood in Mexico City, including the life of his nanny/housekeeper Cleo, Roma is told from her perspective, as she gets pregnant by a man who abandons her and sees the marriage of her employers crumble, all amidst the tumult of protest-torn Mexico in the early 1970s. The story can be a shade slow, and Cleo is the only real character of depth, but the cinematography is the best of the year – maybe in several years – and the film seems set to win awards for its sound as well.

1. Burning. Adapted from a scant Haruki Murakami story called “Barn Burning,” this Korean-language film creates an air of uncertainty from the start, and its three main characters remain unknowable to the dramatic conclusion. Lee Jong-su meets a girl, Shin Hae-mi, who says she knew him in grade school, and after a few days he’s clearly in love with her, only to have her go to Africa on a trip and ask him to watch her cat for her. When she comes back, she’s with a suave, wealthy guy, Ben, who might be her new boyfriend, and Jong-su can’t figure out what to do – or what exactly Ben does for his strange hobby. It’s a hypnotic slow burner anchored by one of the year’s best performances from Steven Yeun as Ben.

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