→ September 10, 2019
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Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction‘s original French title, Doubles Vies (“Double Lives”), does a much better job of summarizing the story itself, which covers two couples — a publisher, an author, an actress, and a political consultant – who cope with aging and the changing circumstances of life by having lots of sex with people other than their partners. It’s a smart and witty film, punctuated by one of the funniest meta-jokes I’ve ever seen, that has a lot to say about the inevitability of change and our inept ways of handling it. It’s streaming on Hulu and available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

Juliette Binoche, who continues to churn out tremendous performances nearly 35 years into her career, is one of the stars of Non-Fiction, playing the television actress Selena, the star of a French police procedural called Collusion; she’s married to literary editor Alain (Guillaume Canet), who has a strained relationship with onetime star author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne), who is married to the political consultant Valérie (columnist and comedian Nora Hamzawi). Selena is having a lengthy affair with the frumpy and morose Léonard; Alain starts sleeping with his firm’s young new digital media director Laure (Christa Téret) at the first opportunity. Léonard’s last few novels haven’t sold well, and Alain thinks his newest is a dud, which Léonard takes about as well as you’d expect – but Valérie has no sympathy for him and doesn’t even seem to like him very much. Meanwhile, Alain’s professional world is facing the upheaval of e-books and audiobooks as well as the changing demographics of fiction readership, while Selena grapples with the choice of continuing on a show that has made her successful but is professionally unfulfilling.

These are first-world problems, to be sure, but they are also somewhat universal at this point. Although writer/director Oliver Assayas focused the script on the massive shifts in the publishing world – which braced for a paradigm change that would lead readers to eschew dead trees for e-books, only to see readers gravitate back to physical books – technology is leading to similar creative destructions in lots of industries, changing the entire structure of employment and the relationships workers have to their employers. What hits Alain just at work over the course of the film could stand in for any industry.

The serial infidelities in the movie are a bit harder to grasp on a metaphorical level, although they provide a good bit of the humor. Selena seems broken up by the possibility that Alain is having an affair, but we find out shortly afterwards that she’s having one too – and it’s been going on for years. There’s a comic tension throughout as you wait to see if any of the spouses might figure out what’s going on and in watching various characters squirm when they might be caught, but understanding why Alain, married to a gorgeous and successful actress who seems to appreciate art and literature, chases a much younger woman just because she’s there is at least more opaque. Is it a reaction to change by regressing into adolescent behaviors? Similarly, if Selena is a significant TV star, why is her longtime affair – one in which she appears to have no emotional investment – with the mopey Léonard, a rather stereotypical modernist author who says he rejects materialism and tries to hold himself aloof from criticism that he obviously can’t bring himself to ignore?

For plot and purpose, Non-Fiction works far better out of the bedroom. Even the lengthy discussions of art for art’s sake, with somewhat obvious complaints like how these young kids don’t read any more, work well as parallels to the natural human inclination to romanticize the past and rationalize the status quo when we’re faced with the discomfort of change. (To borrow and slightly alter a line from Spike Milligan: I don’t fear change. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.) These four people are all adrift and facing some kind of imminent upheaval at work, with the threat of the same at home, and mostly react in similar ways, driven to poor decisions by uncertainty and doubt … like most adults confronted with the potential for significant changes at work or at home.

Binoche is wonderful, as always, although her character is more unlikeable than many roles she’s had before; Selena is a bit full of herself, especially about her job, and thinks nothing of advocating for her paramour to her own husband. Canet has the larger role, as we see so much more of him at work, and the subplot around his publisher is more significant than that around Selena’s TV show or Valérie’s work for a leftist candidate (a rather neglected side story). Macaigne is fine as the aloof, self-absorbed author, but I found zero reason to think that Selena would want a long-term affair with him, and the relationship between Léonard and Valérie is almost as befuddling.

Non-Fiction may also have clicked for me more than it would for many viewers – I’m not that much younger than these characters, am divorced, and work in a similar field that is also going through a lengthy period of tectonic-type changes. So much of the dialogue, which is fast-moving despite the weight of what Assayas wants to say, is insightful about facing changes as you get older that I found most of the film’s non-adultery content resonated with me. And that metajoke near the end is just (chef’s kiss).

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→ August 10, 2019
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/10/19.

One ESPN+ post this week, a scouting blog entry on Luis Robert, Nick Madrigal, Deivi Garcia, Triston Casas, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the delightfully named card game Point Salad, which mocks the trend towards complicated scoring by giving you over a hundred different ways to earn points as you collect vegetable cards from the table.

My latest email newsletter edition went out on Tuesday, after I returned from Gen Con. You can sign up here for free to get more of my personal writing.

And now, the links … I assembled this on Thursday night before leaving for vacation, so it’s shorter than usual and anything that happened on Friday won’t be reflected here.

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→ August 7, 2019
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Climax.

Gaspar Noé has a strong reputation among critics for provocative movies that often skirt the line of good taste, and seems to revel in his ability to shock or even repulse audiences while similarly challenging them with his stories. This year’s Climax is probably his best-received film, even though it was made with just a loose outline, employed mostly non-actors, and took just a few weeks to film. It’s a nightmare come to life, one that is more revealing than horrifying, but also clearly crosses the line into poor taste.

Climax is based loosely on an actual story of a French dance troupe whose afterparty was spoiled because someone spiked their drinks with LSD, although in that case no serious harm came to any of the dancers. That is not true in Noé’s retelling here, as the party devolves into Lord of the Flies-level savagery because someone spiked the punch, made by the troupe’s den mother Emmanuelle, with LSD or a similar psychotropic drug. (The very end of the film makes it seem like it was LSD, although the dancers never know this.)

Things don’t fall apart until about halfway through the brisk 93-minute film; the first half includes an impressive, long modern dance number that incorporates numerous styles and presents more to the viewer than the eye can possibly follow. The party starts out well enough, but eventually the dancers who drank the punch start to feel unwell; no one speaks of hallucinations, but they become disoriented and paranoid, and start to revert to base instincts. As it becomes clear that the punch was tainted, they begin to band together to try to identify the culprit, blaming Emmanuelle, then blaming the two dancers who didn’t drink it, never considering that the person who spiked the punch may in fact have consumed it themselves. This devolution also sees them lose many of their inhibitions, giving in to violence and sex, and by the time the police arrive the next morning there are several dancers dead or grievously wounded, while others are simply damaged by what’s occurred.

The drugs really are beside the point in Climax, which explores the nature of fear and how quickly we come to distrust others when we think we’re in danger. Noé wrote an outline and some general directions but asked the actors, most of whom were professional dancers without acting experience, to simply act as they would if under the influence, showing them videos of people who’d taken LSD or other hallucinogens. There are two professionals in the cast, Sofia Boutella (Selva) and Souheila Yacoub (Lou), who do more heavy lifting than anyone else, the former as the de facto social leader of the group, the latter the one character with something resembling a storyline.

Noé’s hand is all over the film even though there wasn’t a proper script. There’s one continuous shot that runs over 40 minutes, shifting perspectives and angles, drifting to different characters, that helps convey the dancers’ disorientation to the viewers. He also moved the closing credits to the beginning of the movie, and the typical title card with cast listing to the middle, which felt more like a gimmick to me than an important change. (Plus Adam McKay did it better in Vice.) He made one truly regrettable decision, the part of the film that crosses the line into needless suffering; Emmanuelle’s son is at the party, and while I won’t spoil it, what that child is put through did not need to be in this movie at all. Noé could have accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish without that. Assuming the boy’s inclusion was an active decision by Noé, it was a blatant attempt to shock the audience for shock’s sake.

Several days after watching Climax, I can’t decide if I think the film is good. I would say I didn’t enjoy watching it, because it is so unpleasant (by design) to watch the dancers lose control of themselves and their situation, wandering around a dark building that looks like an abandoned school or mental institution. I also couldn’t stop watching it, and was past the halfway mark before I even thought about how much time might have passed, and it’s certainly had me thinking about it in the time since I watched. There is something essential about stories that remind us of the thin line between the way we live and utter anarchy, of the tiny genetic barrier that separates us from chimpanzees, of the social norms we take for granted that allow us to live our daily lives. When one brick is removed, the entire edifice could collapse. Noé is willing to stare into that abyss and show us what he sees.

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→ March 2, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

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→ February 21, 2019
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Euthanizer.

Continuing my trek through films submitted for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, I watched the Finnish entry, the dark, disturbing film Euthanizer, which seems to start out as a revenge-fantasy story and ends up in an even bleaker place by the time the film wraps up. It’s also quite short, under 90 minutes, and the script sticks the landings on most of its gymnastics, although a film this tight probably needs a more limited thematic focus. It’s streaming free for amazon prime subscribers.

Veijo is the euthanizer of the film – he euthanizes pets as a side job, charging less than the local vet, but seems only willing to take on such cases if the pet is being mistreated or is otherwise ill, emphasizing that he only does this to end suffering, not, say, to help someone get rid of an unwanted pet. He lectures owners who bring their pets to him for how they’ve mistreated them – cooping up a cat in a tiny apartment, ignoring signs of illness in a dog, buying a guinea pig as a pet without getting it a companion. Veijo’s father is in the hospital in the late stages of some kind of terminal disease, in a good bit of pain, but Veijo’s caring for the suffering of others doesn’t extend to his father for reasons we’ll learn near the story’s end.

Veijo’s strange, solitary existence, punctuated by facial expressions worthy of late-career Harrison Ford, is interrupted by two visitors: the nurse who’s taking care of his father and hears him discussing his side gig, and a local thief who falls in with a white supremacist group and wants his dog put down strictly for reasons of convenience. The nurse is obsessed with death, and seduces Veijo, which leads to the most bizarre sex scene of the year, but she sees in him a fellow traveler without understanding the reasons why he euthanizes select animals but not others. The white supremacist, who looks way too much like the bassist/actor Flea, is about to lose his job at a mechanic’s for stealing tires, which he then resells to his racist buddies while trying to get into their ‘gang,’ and spends much of the film screaming at his wife on his phone or raging against nothing at all while sitting in his car. There’s a third subplot with the local vet, who appears to be more motivated by money than by any love of animals, that doesn’t work as well and serves mostly as a plot device to send Veijo off the rails for good. Veijo runs afoul of the white supremacists (not hard to do), which begins a back-and-forth revenge pattern that is satisfying at the start but ends in utterly gruesome fashion that throws the meaning of everything that came before into question.

There’s a clear point here about how we either treat animals far worse than we treat other people, as if they’re not even sentient, or how we treat animals better than other people, although Euthanizer doesn’t do enough in either direction. The film also doesn’t give us enough about Veijo until the very end of the movie to explain why he is the way he is – both why he euthanizes pets to prevent further suffering and why he’s isolated himself from just about everyone else, at least until the nurse pries her way into his life. There’s certainly satisfaction in watching him dress down people who have abused or neglected their pets, and there’s even more in watching him go after the white supremacists – who are amusingly stupid and, fortunately, never do anything racist on screen in the movie, instead just talking about how tough they are – but the final scene falls short as an explanation of everything.

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→ February 20, 2019
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At Eternity’s Gate.

Willem Dafoe earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor this year for his turn as Vincent Van Gogh in the sort-of-biopic At Eternity’s Gate, which is a beautiful but sort of dreadful film that doesn’t give the viewer much of a sense of who Van Gogh was, while advancing a somewhat questionable hypothesis about his death. Dafoe is excellent, as he nearly always he is, but I have no idea what this movie was trying to accomplish.

Van Gogh was one of the most important painters in the western canon and an important bridge from impressionism to post-impressionism, a prolific painter during a short period of his life who struggled to make any money from his art while alive – we know of one painting he sold during his life, although there may have been others that were not recorded – but became immensely influential in death and whose paintings now sell for millions of dollars. At Eternity’s Gate has some wonderful sequences where we see Van Gogh at work, both in how the film reconstructs his painting or sketching – I have to assume someone stood in for Dafoe in these scenes, although the editing is seamless – and in how Dafoe depicts an artist in the flow state, oblivious to many things around him, including the discomfort of many of his subjects.

That’s about the end of what’s good in At Eternity’s Gate, which takes its title from one of the colloquial names of the painting most commonly known as Sorrowing Old Man, as the rest of the film is muddled in story and in technique. There are some positively bizarre, disorienting camera angles, often at 90 degrees to the ground, or POV shots of Van Gogh’s feet as he walks through a sunflower field, that only make the film harder to watch without adding any value. The film makes frequent use of extreme close-ups, to no apparent benefit. There are a lot of shots of Van Gogh running through fields – so while the landscape scenes are gorgeous, it’s often unclear what the purpose is. Even when there is a purpose here, such as showing Van Gogh’s confusion in tangible terms through camerawork and layered, hollow audio tracks, it also has the side effect of making the movie harder to watch.

And ultimately the film doesn’t tell us anything about Van Gogh that we didn’t already know, which is probably the greatest disappointment of all. The generally accepted cause of Van Gogh’s death is suicide by gun, but the script pushes the alternative and unlikely hypothesis that he was killed by some local boys in an accident, which feels like revising history and whitewashes Van Gogh’s history of mental illness (itself the subject of ongoing debate). Oscar Isaac appears as Paul Gauguin, another post-Impressionist artist who was similarly underappreciated during his lifetime, and the film depicts their troubled friendship, where Van Gogh appears to adore Gauguin. He does indeed eventually cut off his own ear in some sort of gesture towards his friend, although that story, which also should be part of the bigger picture of Van Gogh’s mental infirmity, also becomes muddled in the retelling here. Isaac is also generally quite good, but he does a bit of Poe Dameron here and overacts a modest part, with points added back on for his Parisian accent.

There’s no reason to watch At Eternity’s Gate unless you’re an Oscars completist; I don’t think this film does Van Gogh justice or tells us anything new about the man, his life, or his works. Dafoe is great – I thought he should have won the Best Supporting Actor award last year for The Florida Project – but even a top-tier actor can only do so much with inferior material.

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→ February 14, 2019
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What Will People Say.

What Will People Say, the second feature film written and directed by Iram Haq, was Norway’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and is heavily based on events from Haq’s own adolescence. She’s Norwegian, of Pakistani descent, and when she was a young teenager, her father kidnapped her and returned her to Pakistan to live for a year and a half because her parents feared that she was becoming too westernized. The grim and often brutal script follows its protagonist, here aged 16, through the same sequence of events, exploring the ways both Islam and her south Asian culture are wielded to control and break young women, in a story that would be hard to accept if it weren’t true. The movie is streaming free for amazon prime subscribers.

Nisha, played by first-timer Maria Mozhdah, acts like a regular teenager, rebelling against restrictive parents, hanging out with friends, with a budding relationship with a white boy. When he sneaks into her room one night, her father discovers them and proceeds to beat the boy and hit Maria, which leads to the involvement of child protective services. Maria’s mother tricks her into coming home, after which her father (Adil Hussain) and brother kidnap her and fly her to Islamabad, where he leaves her with her aunt and grandmother so she can learn to be a Pakistani housewife and mother, and, they hope, to cure her of these wicked western ways she’s learned in Norway. While there, she and her cousin fall for each other, only to be caught and humiliated by the local police, after which her father comes to retrieve her and start a new cycle of abuse and restriction that leads to the arrangement of a marriage without her consent.

What Will People Say, taking a phrase that Haq says is used in south Asian cultures to control women, is almost unrelenting once the downward spiral begins with her father’s violent reaction to finding a boy in her room. (He accuses her of having had sex with the boy, which isn’t true, but he repeats it in front of the social worker and demands that she marry the boy to save their honor.) Nisha endures some physical abuse and far more psychological abuse, but still shows strength of spirit and an ability to adapt to her situation, at least building a real affection for some of her cousins once it’s clear that she won’t be able to escape back to Norway, and eventually finding some strength to fight back against her domineering, self-loathing auntie – which makes it all the harder to stomach when she’s caught, shamed (for nothing), brought back to Norway, kept in near-total isolation, and ends up lying to social workers that everything’s fine.

Mozhdah is outstanding as Nisha, put through a gauntlet of torments and particularly asked to show outright fear, the sort of fear that incorporates terror and the loss of hope, especially as Nisha realizes her family members are working against her – especially her father, with whom she had a close relationship and thus in whom she’d placed great trust. (Haq has said she reconciled with her father as he was dying of cancer; on his deathbed, he told her to make this film, “to show how evil people can get when they are scared.”) Hussain, who played the main character’s father in The Life of Pi, is often terrifying in his role as Nisha’s father, where he’s asked to show contempt for the child he’s supposed to love and whose best interests he believes he has at heart.

Hussain’s performance ends up the key to making What Will People Say work in the end, when Nisha does escape, ostensibly for good, and her father shows a small sign that he finally understands her perspective – that he and her mother don’t actually share a vision of Nisha’s future, and that his actions now lead to a path where she would end up losing most of her freedom. It’s a tiny glimmer of optimism in a story that has beaten Nisha down, literally and figuratively, for most of its 105 minutes, one that would be hard to accept were it not so heavily based in reality. Haq’s script indicts so many forces, from south Asian cultures to Islam itself to the Norwegian authorities who ignored the evidence right in front of them, that it feels like a story written out of anger. Haq has said she’s not angry any more. What Will People Say transfers that anger to us.

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→ February 13, 2019
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High Flying Bird.

Steven Soderbergh’s newest film, High Flying Birds debuted in select theaters as well as on Netflix on February 12th, which means everyone can watch it now just as it’s getting reviewed – and it’s good, flawed but good, and likely of interest to most of you here since you’re probably a sports fan of some sort if you’re reading this in the first place. It’s also notable because for at least the second time Soderbergh has filmed a feature entirely on iPhones, which is sort of a mixed bag for the viewing experience. The movie really stands on two pedestals: the righteous indignation of its plot, with the screenplay by Tarell Alvin McCraney (who wrote the play that became the film Moonlight) and a standout performance from the always-compelling Andre Holland.

Holland plays Ray, an agent who represents multiple NBA players, including recent #1 draft pick Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg). The NBA is in a lockout as the movie opens, right before what I presume is Labor Day, which means players aren’t getting paid, which means Ray isn’t getting paid, which means his agency is crying poverty (with Zachary Quinto playing his one-dimensional boss). So Ray, with the help of his former assistant Sam (Zazie Beets), concocts a scheme, on the fly, to try to force owners to improve their offer to the players’ union, involving Erick and his teammate, the arrogant star Jamero Umber, playing an ‘impromptu’ pickup game at a charity event run by Ray’s friend and mentor Spencer (Bill Duke).

With MLB potentially heading for a work stoppage, and players taking to social media every day to talk about the deteriorating situation – revenues are rising, but player compensation isn’t, and obviously the best free agents are still unsigned – High Flying Bird feels incredibly timely even though it’s about another sport and incorporates a racial theme not as present in MLB. Slavery is mentioned multiple times – and its mere mention is worked into a successful running gag – while it’s no accident that the owners who appear on screen are all white, while every player, agent, or other representative is African-American. The script carefully avoids any discussion of dollars, focusing instead, as it should, on the distribution of the spoils; once you start bringing dollar amounts into any discussion of the salaries of professional athletes, you provoke the emotional bias that makes people say “$10 million to play a game?” and then I have to reach for the rum again.

There are many facets of Soderbergh’s direction and McCraney’s script that don’t work. Foremost among them is Soderbergh’s inclusion of snippets from interviews he conducted with three current NBA players – Karl-Anthony Towns, Donovan Mitchell, and Reggie Jackson, which means I was today days old when I learned there was an NBA player named Reggie Jackson – discussing life in the NBA, especially as a rookie. At the beginning, the answers help provide some context for what’s about to happen, but Soderbergh interrupts the film twice with more snippets in the final 20 minutes, which wrecks the tension and the flow of the narrative as he’s trying to wrap up both the global storyline and the set of storylines for Erick, Sam, and Ray. Many characters who play important roles in the plot are utterly one-dimensional, including Kyle Maclachlan’s bespectacled NBA owner (complete with trophy wife who speaks to her dog in nauseating baby talk). Sonja Sohn is well-cast as the NBA Players Association’s main rep, but the side story of her trying to start a family with her wife/partner doesn’t fit anywhere in the rest of the story.

And then there’s the editing and cinematography, which ultimately knock this film down from great to good for me. The picture quality is excellent, and most of the time you’d never think anything was filmed on something other than high-end equipment, but Soderbergh chooses some very strange angles, often filming people from an angle a little too high or low and distorting the viewer’s perspective. (Insert film angle optimization joke here.) There are also some very abrupt edits where scenes seem to change before a character has finished a sentence, and while Ray and Spencer in particular work some long pauses into monologues, Soderbergh doesn’t let any moments at the ends of those soliloquies breathe.

Holland is always great – he had side roles in Moonlight and 42 – but this is the most substantial part I’ve seen him tackle, and he’s not just good but credible from the opening scene (which has Ray and Erick engage in some very clever banter, a pace I wish the film had tried to keep up in later scenes). Ray gets preachy with Erick a few times, which does give an ironic aspect to the sermon Jamero’s mother drops him, but Holland’s charisma and particularly his tight, highly modulated delivery makes him compelling where he might have been exhausting. Beets and Gregg are also solid in supporting roles, although I didn’t find the chemistry between them all that evident even though the two characters do get together. Duke is just a delight even though his character plays the same short melody over and over through the film.

High Flying Bird will leave you with zero doubt as to its take on the late-stage capitalism of professional sports: The athletes are still treated like chattel, by mostly white owners, and many fans don’t care or side with the owners because they think the players’ high salaries should be enough, rather than considering whether the players are getting their fair share of revenues, or, as the script points out, how many hands reach into a player’s paycheck before it reaches him. Meanwhile, MacLachlan and his wife are planning to jet to Australia for a long weekend on their private plane, and he manages to patronize the hell out of Sonja Sohn’s character (in a subtly homophobic way) and isn’t much better to Ray. There are clear good guys and bad guys here, and unlike most coverage of labor issues in American sports, McCraney’s take is at least directionally correct. It’s a film worth seeing and discussing, and if the book that Scott carries around all film in a sealed envelope, revealed at the very end, gets a little bump in sales as a result, so much the better.

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→ 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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→ February 8, 2019
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Of Fathers and Sons.

This year’s slate of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature might have had the biggest surprise of all in its omission of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the rare documentary to cross over into popular success, earning over $22 million at the U.S. box office, putting it 12th all time in the category on BoxOfficeMojo. (The categorization there is itself debatable; three films in the top 11 are concert films, another is a Dinesh D’Souza propaganda piece, and two are Michael Moore propaganda pieces.)

One of the five films that did make the Oscar cut this year was the little-known Of Fathers and Sons, an Arabic-language film by the Syrian-Kurdish director Talal Derki, who was previously honored for his film Return to Homs. For Of Fathers and Sons, Derki spent over two years with a jihadist family in Syria, watching the Islamist father radicalize his sons and speak of the inevitability of a world war that leaves his particular brand of fundamentalist Sunni Islam triumphant across the world, in fulfillment of prophecy. It is harrowing and defeating, yet deeply personal, even intimate, as we watch two of the sons in particular react differently to their father’s exhortations.

Abu Osama is the father, apparently one of the founders of al-Qaida in Syria, and Derki spent those two years watching Abu Osama and his eight sons, most all of whom are named after jihadists, including his eldest, Osama Osama, and another son, Ayman Osama, named for current al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The documentary has no narration, other than Derki occasionally posing questions to Abu Osama, and the only narrative arc is a natural one – the father’s indoctrination of his sons into the rhetoric and mania of a holy war against the enemies of their very specific branch of Salafi jihadist Islam (which includes pretty much everybody else, although Americans, Jews, and Shi’ites all get their turn as targets of derision). This process is set against domestic scenes, including more ordinary interactions between father and sons, as well as scenes of the boys by themselves, mostly just being boys, a strange reminder that jihadists are made, not born, and that even the father, who comes across as inhuman almost every time he speaks to the camera or to other adults, has a human side when it comes to his family. Eventually, however, the time comes for Osama to head off to training camp to become an al-Qaida fighter, while Ayman balks at the brutality of the training, and Abu Osama suffers an injury that shifts the story without deterring him from raising an army of jihadist children.

The marvel of Of Fathers and Sons is its access, apparently unfettered where the males are concerned, but with virtually no women or girls appearing on camera – the only women of any age on screen are shown at a distance in public spaces, such as outside the local school. Abu’s niece is outside at one point, never shown, when we hear the boys yelling at her that she shouldn’t be outside without her burqa, and Abu then jokes about punishing her or worse. Then we find out she’s two.

And that’s where Of Fathers and Sons becomes very uncomfortable to watch, which cuts both ways. Derki has ceded his voice to maintain access (and, perhaps, stay alive?) among men who would gladly commit murder for the sake of their very narrow beliefs. Abu has a sniper’s hideout near his house, and at one point, he and Derki are in it, when Abu seems someone on a motorbike and shoots him, gloating that the man fell off but asking someone off-camera for another gun so he can kill the man, which he doesn’t appear to do. Does Derki have any moral responsibility to say something there? Could he, without compromising his life and those of whatever crew he had? Less strident but just as disturbing is the sequence where he shows Osama, who is about 12 but whose age Abu doesn’t even know, how to shoot a pistol; with all of the kids looking younger than their stated ages, probably due to their diets, seeing a child who isn’t old enough to shave holding a pistol and shooting with an adult’s confidence while talking about God’s will and, eventually, training to fight with al-Qaida is even more disturbing to watch than the on-screen slaughter of a sheep towards the end of the movie.

I know it might sound contrarian to say this, but I’m completely fine with this getting a nomination over Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Of Fathers and Sons has something important to say, and Derki lets the subjects say it for him. His direction feels totally hands-off, which means there are some scenes in here that might be superfluous, but do serve to fill out the picture of Abu Osama and his sons as a family who still have some bonds in common with any other family, but who live in a war zone, in dangerous conditions, and preach hate as a regular way of life. It is a story without hope, at least not for these boys, but perhaps a warning to the rest of us if we want to prevent the next generation from growing up to be jihadists too.

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