Dave's journal, week 52

Year one.

(Photograph of a bent trumpet played by Dizzy Gillespie, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Could I write a weekly diary? Could I do it in the most low-key way possible, making no effort to build the audience with spicy takes? Could I even learn something from doing it?

Yes, turns out, Self-tracking is good, with no downside, except the regret you feel for not starting earlier. That’s not the fault of the tracking system — it’s your fault! Posting too much on social media? Also a choice. Moving my life and pop culture thoughts further away from my work (all here) was a good decision. Being an amateur is fine, if you know that’s what you are, and I know that’s what I am when I watch a movie or visit a museum or read a book.

Tracking all of that made me think about how I actually spent time, another essential task that I’d refused to do, for years. On Friday, my wife and I jumped into a cab between errands, and the car radio was playing the Blind Melon hit “No Rain.” This is not a song I think much about it. It made “the bee girl” famous for looking normal and awkward in a music video, and it became an easy joke for soundtrack engineers if they wanted to say “this is a scene set in the 1990s, with white people.” But I heard this lyric very clearly:

And all I can do is read a book to stay awake
And it rips my life away, but it's a great escape

Books do sort of rip your life away, don’t they? Maybe Shannon Hoon, who died at 28 after overdosing on cocaine, isn’t a credible source for some people. But at my age, I do think about days I spent reading something interesting while ignoring a family member, or walks I said no to because I wanted to finish a chapter. There are upsides to this habit, but not as obvious, or useful to other people, as the upside of being strong enough to carry heavy furniture.

I feel similarly about movies, which I inhaled for four years in particular — from a post-breakup introverted period in 2018 to my first spring in Los Angeles in 2021. It’s easy to leave them on and get nothing out of them, a pure waste of time. For two years I lived near the theaters that actually play studios’ last-minute releases, the Oscar bait put out as close as possible to Academy voting. It was fun to catch up on these movies, but not worth it as a hobby.

I watched 70 films this year, as classified by Letterboxd, the social network for amateur critics (and a few professionals like Mike Flanagan, for whom who we’re grateful). Letterboxd doesn’t discriminate. Short films count, some TV miniseries count, future projects count. Stand-up specials count. Years ago I marked two feature-length YouTube documentaries as “seen,” and Letterboxd allowed this, but later deleted both documentaries. Can’t get too hung up on these websites. You can make lists, too.

Of the 70 — down nearly half from last year — one was a miniseries my wife chose (“The Crowded Room”), five were “Black Mirror” episodes, nine were stand-up specials, and two were documentaries. So I saw 42 new scripted movies, mostly live-action, about half as many as I did in my “moviegoer” period.

I’d gone along with the superhero boom, and this year I did my part in snuffing it out. Is “The Marvels” any good? Is “The Flash” carried along by Ezra Miller’s rough whimsy? Does the Momoa-Wilson comedy duo work in “Aquaman 2”? Don’t know! Skipped them. It was a triumphant year for my movie scold friends like Jesse Hawken, the end of a blockbuster era that catered to people exactly like me — a bad thing for society. (My blockbuster take for 15 years was “there will always be movies that cost a lot of money and entertain without challenging you, and CGI superheroes look more interesting to me than CGI exploding planes.”)

What will come after the superhero movie? I have no idea, but I’m ready for a move on from the hero-with-powers story, an outgrowth of science fiction that became the only kind of mass-market sci-fi. The long-term implications of what Box Brown calls “the He-Man effect” — toy and cartoon makers colonizing the childhood of everyone born after 1979, replacing our imaginations with IP — never worried me more than when I saw “Barbie.” But I worried less when I walked out of it. There were new and interesting things to do with stepped-on pop culture, and people were burning out on the lazy stuff.

Anyway. My top 10:

10. Poor Things

I was hooked from the first shot of Willem Dafoe belching out a bubble of digestive gas, 30 minutes before his reason for doing that got explained. Induces low-level queasiness for hours and comes out heartwarming.

9. John Wick: Chapter Four
8. Godzilla Minus One
7. You Hurt My Feelings

Very funny middle-class comedy about a mediocre memoirist (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) married to a mediocre therapist (Tobias Menzies) whose union is challenged after she over-hears him trashing her in-progress book to a friend.

6. May December
5. The Boy and the Heron

Tha God Miyazaki; he can even make parakeets threatening.

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. The Holdovers
2. Beau is Afraid

Really grew in my memory after the first watch, when I got a little restless during the rescue family sequence. View everything as psychological portraiture and you’ll have more fun. The city is a panic attack, the living play is rumination — great stuff, glad Aster is doing it.

1. Oppenheimer

The cradle-to-grave biopic typically gets scanned as “Oscar bait,” even though movies in this genre are often lousy and don’t win the Oscar. (The last one that did: “A Beautiful Mind.”) Done well, it evokes strong emotions and starts worthwhile arguments at the diner next to the theater.

I didn’t get around to seeing a few movies that friends told me I’d like: “American Fiction,” “Bottoms,” and “The Zone of Interest.” (Read the Amis book on our honeymoon.) Plenty of people got passionate about “Past Lives,” “Ferrari,” and “Asteroid City,” both great times at the ol’ cinema. Be passionate! It was a fine year with at least 30 hours of movie that I’d recommend to people.

Best sequel: “John Wick Chapter Four.”

Best shootout: Hard to pick just one; less hard when you remember the Arc De Triomphe part.

Best look: Jacob Elordi, the best thing in “Priscilla,” “Saltburn,” and I assume the two other movies he booked this year. (He also became a TAG Heuer brand ambassador; Maria Sharapova sold that watch for years, so I guess there’s a height limit.) Looming like Donald Sutherland, face like Montgomery Clift, tons of range. And he missed the superhero boom, so he won’t get sidetracked by that. The next step: Better movies.

Best villain archetype: The dandy fop. You know that marquis in “John Wick: Chapter Four” is evil because he wears bespoke three-piece suits and lords over palace feasts where nobody’s eating. You know that Dante in “Fast X” is crazy because he paints the toenails of corpses as he talks to them and yelps “here we go-o-o-o-o!” as he backflips into his car. Even Coach Rob, the everyman hero of “Lady Ballers,” signals his brief heel turn by wearing fitted clothes and dainty pink ties.

Best sleazebag: Cary Elwes, barging into “Blackberry” as as the smug Carl Yankowski, then selling out Tom Cruise/humanity as Denlinger in “MI:DR-P1.” He spends most of his screen time sitting — infuriating Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) at a diner meeting, trying to project authority over arms dealers who can (and do) just kill him.

Best line (meme-inspired): “I’m from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out!” In “Blackberry,” this is how co-CEO Balsillie ends the 2010 meeting where he’s denied ownership of an NHL team. His scheme to move an American team to Hamilton (a very nice place, check out the Art Gallery) has undone him; Balsillie threatens to buy the entire NHL, then utters the line. It’s ahistorical, originating in a 2014 video interview with a disturbed man who said unexpected things in defense of Ontario’s 24th largest city. Once heard, it is never forgotten.

Best line (toy-based): “All his clothes fit me,” uttered by Allan (Michael Cera) as he launched himself toward a group of Kens to create a distraction for Gloria and Sasha. This is a very funny thing to say before you start beating people up, especially if you’re Michael Cera — the tag at the bottom of a unwanted toy’s box, deployed 59 years later as a war cry.

Worst Line: This exchange in “Oppenheimer.”

STRAUSS: Who were the holdouts?

AIDE: There were three, led by the junior senator from Massachusetts — some guy trying to make a name for himself.

STRAUSS: What’s his name?

AIDE: Uhh… Kennedy. John F. Kennedy.

Jesus H. Christ. Look: I’m a defender of the Strauss hearing structure of “Oppenheimer.” It gives the story an extra lane to build momentum in, and this little exchange is meant to emphasize just how little Strauss is going to matter — how this mediocrity’s short-term victory over a genius would be reversed. But that point was made already! In the same scene! And the scene takes place when Kennedy was one of the most famous men in the Senate, fresh off his 1956 vice presidential run (at the convention, and he didn’t get it).

Worst Kiss: Lauren London and Jonah Hill in “You People.” This post-BLM race comedy gave us 2024’s worst wastes of talent — Eddie Murphy as a protective Fruit of Islam father, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a woke JAP mother, 70s Jewish cinema icons (Elliott Gould! Richard Benjamin! Hal Linden!) in minor roles. Nearly nothing worked, but nothing failed as badly as the climactic wedding scene, with a blurry, unconvincing kiss. Andrew Schulz, who has a minor role in the movie, claimed that this kiss was CGI, and between the hollowing-out of entertainment journalism and the fact that it really seems like CGI, no one investigated further.

Best Soundtrack: “Oppenheimer.” If I’m trying to sound more interesting I’ll add “Godzilla Minus One.”

Best Theme: “May December,” which uses a handful of Marcelo Zarvos and Michel Legrand motifs again and again and again — as intensely as “Oppenheimer,” but taking up even more of your attention, because Todd Haynes is doing a slow pull-in on Julianne Moore, not cross-cutting between explosions and screams. It evokes sleazy made-for-TV crime movies, like the one Natalie Portman is making, just perfectly.

Worst Kind of Guy: Tomas in “Passages,” who I hated every second he was onscreen. Job well done!

My plan for the coming year is to watch less stuff, overall. Go to new movies with friends, or don’t go; watch only Great Movies on trips where I have time with an iPad. Fall further out of sync with youth culture and midcult art, get really into Robert Bresson. I’ll keep writing about it.

Quickly, the rundown of the week:

The Best Thing I Watched: “Underground,” the 1995 Palm d’Or winner, which I’d never ever seen discussed outside a list of movie prizes. My experience with the big festival winners and Sight and Sound poll vote-getters is that they’re at least good, and a few are real miracles that wouldn’t be remembered if critics and curators didn’t work at it. “Underground” is nearly a miracle, a kaleidoscopic history of Yugoslavia told through two bumbling friends who are constantly at parties.

The Best Thing I Read: “The Space Merchants” by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, a 1952 sci-fi novel that takes the basic Heinlein plot — a dogged, intelligent hero making it past impossible obstacles — and sets it in a dark future where the planet’s resources have been drained and people must be sold hard on moving to the Venus colony.

I’ll return to the old format next week. Happy new year.