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A look at Guillermo de Toro's Pinocchio 2022 has unexpectedly been the year of Pinocchios, with three different filmed adaptations being released of Carlo Collodi’s 1880s children’s book, The Adventures of Pinocchio. There was a Russian animated version released in English with Pauly Shore voicing the titular Pinocchio, and SpongeBob Squarepants’ Tom Kenny as the voice of Geppetto; there was a potentially even more misguided version by Robert Zemeckis that combined a live-action Geppetto played by Tom Hanks acting against a computer-animated version of the 1940s Disney iteration of Pinocchio; and lastly, and most successfully in my view, Guillermo del Toro’s darker stop-motion animation take on the story, set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Funnily enough, Tom Kenny provides the voice of Mussolini here, and funnier still, if IMDB is to be believed, he’ll also be voicing Pinocchio in yet another version of the story set to be released next year. It’s just so many Pinocchios! The Tom Kenny of it all aside, it is curious, to say the least, to see the same story adapted four times in two years, but that barely scratches the surface of how many adaptations of this story exist. Honestly, however many adaptations you think there have been, the true number is probably quite a bit more than that, and all spread out over more than a hundred years. The seemingly definitive version of the story for my whole life has been Disney’s 1940s version, only the second feature-length film released by the studio, and the follow-up to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Pinocchio. It is so tied to the history of The Walt Disney Company that the film’s opening song, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” has long been something of a theme song and guiding ethos for the company. Long before the Disney film, though, there was a silent-era, live-action version from 1911 that is a fascinating artifact of film history, being one of Italy's first feature-length films. I’ve had no luck finding a definitive list of every adaptation of the story there has been over the years, seemingly due in part to how disparate the adaptations have been. There’s a 2015 Czech version, numerous TV movies including a 2008 version with Bob Hoskins as Geppetto, a 1967 version from Germany that mixed live-action with real puppetry, a Japanese animated series from 1976, and dozens more besides. There have also been countless films that have overtly riffed on elements of the Pinocchio story, like 2021’s Finch , 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron , and 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, to name a few. The unifying feature across almost all of the adaptations of the Pinocchio story is that there is a craftsman that makes a child, which then comes to life, and over the course of the story, that fabricated child develops a longing to become more real. In some ways, this is itself something of a riff on the same ideas of the Frankenstein story, and many other folk tales besides, but there has been something unique to the dynamics of the Pinocchio story in particular that has seemingly encouraged so many creators to attempt their own adaptation. It’s a story that lends itself to examinations of parents and children, what it is to be human, what it is to be good, the nature of lying, what it is to be real, and so much more besides. Looking at del Toro’s version, it’s interesting to see which bits of the story he chooses to tweak and highlight, what things he invents himself, and where he is drawing inspiration from the book versus paying some kind of homage to the original Disney film. I’m particularly interested in how overtly religious his treatment of the story is. When we meet him, Gepetto is not just a woodworker but is engaged in a long project of carving a crucifix for his local church, and it’s the accidental bombing of this church through which he will lose his son, Carlo; Gepetto is carving the world’s most famous dead son right before he loses his own. Gepetto will go on to plant the pinecone that Carlo was holding before he died, and from the tree that pinecone grows into, he will drunkenly carve another son, the wooden puppet that will become Pinocchio - a kind of resurrection of its own. It’s also something of a miracle that seemingly the only two things in the church that survived the bombing unscathed were Carlo’s pinecone and Geppetto’s crucifix. When it happens, Carlo’s death is especially painful because he doesn’t even know what’s coming when the building starts to shake. Excited, he asks, “What’s that sound, papa? Is it a plane?” Geppetto knows, though. And we’ve already been warned by this point of Carlo’s fate from the opening narration, so we suspect what’s about to happen, too. Carlo does briefly make it out of the church, but he runs back in to grab his perfect pinecone, having become attached to the idea that he could plant his own tree to one day make things from it just like his father. When the bomb hits, Carlo is holding his pinecone, staring up wonderingly into the eyes of Christ on the cross. Carlo’s perfect pinecone survives the blast, bouncing out the front door and down to the place in the ground where Gepetto had been knocked to by the blast. There is a random senselessness to Carlo’s death that is deeply unsettling. We learn that the town and church weren’t even the intended target of the bombing. There was no target at all. The planes were just dumping their bombs to make their planes lighter for the flight home. Our narrator for this early part of the story is Sebastian J Cricket, the stand-in for Jiminy Cricket from the Disney film, and the unnamed talking cricket of Collodi’s book. As in the other versions of the story, Sebastian will often function as something of a conscience for Pinocchio, accompanying him on some of his adventures, having taken up residence in a hollowed-out portion of the pine tree that became Pinocchio’s body. These themes of death and grieving play a big role in del Toro’s approach to the story. Both in big ways like the cruel death of Carlo, but also in smaller ways, like Gepetto’s first explanation of the significance of the pinecone to Carlo. Gepetto and Carlo have just cut down a pine tree for wood, to which Geppetto says, “When one life is lost, another must grow.” Life and death are an endless and inevitable cycle, but here Geppetto is placing the emphasis on the happier side of that cycle. Yes, everything ends, but from every end comes the beginning of something new. Almost unspoken is that when we meet Carlo and Geppetto, they’ve already experienced a significant loss. Mom is out of the picture, but the only reference we get to her is Carlo asking Geppetto to sing Mama’s song so that he can sleep. It’s tragically losing his son that shatters Geppetto, but the ground for that tragedy is seeded by the earlier loss of his wife, Carlo’s mother. The grief of that ending is also the beginning of something else, though. It’s this grief that leads Geppetto to plant Carlo’s pinecone, which is what grows into the tree that Geppetto cuts down to make Pinocchio, which is how he comes to have the second son who is with him most of the rest of his life. Where one life was lost, another grew. Pinocchio and Geppetto, as depicted by del Toro, are an interesting study in contrasts. In del Toro’s version of the story, Geppetto is far more complicated than the versions in the 1940s Disney film, or Collodi’s book. In the original Disney version of the story, Geppetto is simply a woodworker living on his own, who happens to carve a little boy puppet, and idly muses to himself how nice it would be if it were alive. He’s surprised when he wakes up to discover that Pinocchio is alive, but this Geppetto loves and accepts him immediately. The tension of the story is never really between the two of them. In the book, it’s a bit more complicated, as Collodi is trying to tell a story about the importance of obeying your parents, so, though Gepetto does love Pinocchio, much of the early drama of the story comes from what happens when Pinocchio doesn’t listen to Geppetto or do what he’s supposed to do. For del Toro, his Geppetto struggles mightily to accept Pinocchio. He is a grieving father and he is bewildered by his puppet coming to life, and he is appalled and offended that it calls itself his son. Geppetto is angry at the chaos Pinocchio causes in his life, and it’s in a moment of frustration that he calls Pinocchio a burden, which is the impetus for Pinocchio to leave home. Despite all that, it also says something of Geppetto’s character that he does take on the responsibility of parenting this child in need of raising, and that, despite the difficulties, he also comes to love Pinocchio as a son. His feelings for Pinocchio resonate more for the audience both because they are harder earned, and because they reflect a bit more accurately the messiness of the emotions that come with being a parent. Pinocchio is something else altogether. Despite some echoes here and there, he is decidedly not Carlo. Just as siblings can be wildly different, where Carlo was obedient, Pinocchio is willful; whereas Carlo was mild, Pinocchio is rambunctious. As we learn, Pinocchio may be alive due to a soul borrowed from Carlo, but he is wholly his own person. In every version of Pinocchio , there is a naïveté to him that is an engine for much of what happens in the story. In del Toro’s version of the character, that manifests as something of a Zen beginner’s mind. His Pinocchio is naive, but he runs towards everything with an openness and eagerness and a complete lack of preconceptions. Where Geppetto was a grieving old man grinding out the last of his days, Pinocchio came into his life as Life and Joy personified. Even, early on, when Pinocchio gets too close to the fireplace and his feet catch on fire, he squeals with joy, “Look at me! I’m on fire!” And when Geppetto extinguishes him, Pinocchio says “Papa, you’ve ruined the nice light on my feet.” When his feet are burned off, he accepts it without hesitation and moves on; and when Geppetto builds his new legs, he accepts that too, and is overjoyed. Over time, Pinocchio does grow more sophisticated about the world, better-understanding people and Geppetto, but largely maintains this joyful beginner's mind throughout. Throughout the film, Pinocchio has many adventures after leaving home. He joins the traveling carnival to send money back home to Geppetto, so as not to be the burden that Gepetto called him out of frustration. Because Pinocchio can’t exactly die, he gets briefly pulled into the Italian war effort, and as with many versions of the story, he ultimately winds up reuniting with Geppetto and Sebastian while trapped inside the belly of an enormous sea beast. From here we get an incredibly rich ending from del Toro that ties all of the themes of the film together, elevating it to something truly special. We get the action set piece of the finale as Geppetto, Pinocchio, and Sebastian escape from the belly of the sea beast. We also get the emotional rollercoaster of Pinocchio sacrificing himself to save Geppetto, Geppetto grieving the loss of another son, and Sebastian making a sacrifice of his own to bring Pinocchio back from the dead. We get a brief happy ending of the three of them together, having survived these adventures, but del Toro gives us a further coda to the story. Circling back to the idea that everything ends, del Toro also gives us the inevitable passing of Geppetto, after his well-lived life, and we also get a similar ending for Sebastian. Our final shot is of Pinocchio, leaving flowers on Geppetto’s grave, walking off into the distance, leaving the ending of the life he has known, to enter the beginning of another. There have been many Pinocchios, and many reconfigurations of the story, but this one may be the best. Guillermo del Toro owes a debt to Collodi’s book for providing the bones of this story, and he owes a debt to the original Disney film for how it synthesized and streamlines all the best ideas from Collodi’s book, but it would be hard to overstate just how much greater depth and pathos and humor he brings to this story. That itself helps underline the themes of endings and new beginnings he’s working with. We pass stories like Pinocchio down, each generation adding to it and reshaping it to the needs of that time. Maybe eventually someone will tell a version of this story that will carry it even further than del Toro has, but for now, we have this one, and I will treasure it. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Damian’s Favorite Films of 2022 Hello! Welcome to another year-end top ten film list! This was a fun year with some big wild swings, some of which you’ll find on the list you’re about to read. So, in that spirit, I decided to take a bit of a swing with how I put this list together. I’m pretty fond of structure. I like outlines and well-defined acts in stories, or when directors break their films into sections with title cards. I like a plainly stated thesis, with signposting along the way that lets the reader know exactly where we are and where we're going. These sorts of devices appeal to the part of my brain that wishes it could be so orderly. So, with that in mind, I've tackled my list for 2022 by breaking it into a series of double features. This is my top ten (plus two honorable mentions), and they are in the order I would list them, but they’re also grouped into pairs that should work well thematically if you wanted to curate a little movie night for yourself. Will this actually work? I have no idea, but as many of the films on this list will make clear, you only live once, so why not have some fun with it? Enjoy! Curation Honorable Mentions: The Menu & Sr. What I see The Menu and Sr. sharing is attention to the creative intentionality we can bring, or at least try to bring, to the things we make and do with our lives. The Menu shows a perversion of that creative drive by unhealthy inputs and feedback, while Sr. shows something like the best-case scenario of a creative life well lived. The Menu may have been the biggest inspiration for tackling my top ten list in the way that I have. Ralph Fiennes plays world-class Chef Slowic, a chef gone mad, curating the final menu of his long and illustrious career. Slowic explains to the small group of customers that have come to his private island restaurant, that he and his team have meticulously crafted an unforgettable menu for them, only later revealing that part of the plan for that menu includes no one inside the restaurant surviving the final dish. Anya Taylor-Joy is perfectly cast as Margot, the foil for Fiennes’s Slowic, and the sole innocent who was never supposed to be there. Ralph Fiennes is unreal, conveying both a believable mastery of his craft and cult-like control over his staff while embodying a scarily grounded total break with reality. The rest of the ensemble is wonderful as the trashy fodder that comprises the ingredients of this horrific dish. In The Menu , the film and the evening are paced by the menu for the night. Each new dish allows Fiennes an opportunity for exposition, to reveal a bit more to the customers and audience about where we are in the meal and where we’re going, dropping hints to the customers about their fate. But, while this was once what Chef Slowick lived for, there is now something empty in the kind of experience creation he is engaged in; he has been hollowed out, realizing he may have wasted his talents and time, catering to what he now sees as the very worst people. He mistakenly sees this last menu as something of a redemptive final statement that might justify and tie together his whole misspent life. In Sr., Robert Downey Jr. is making a documentary about his ailing father, the counterculture director Robert Downey, Sr. I’m fond of Downey Sr.’s films, and I can remember being a burgeoning film fan, haunting cult movie sections in my early twenties, trying to track down gems like Putney Swope and Greaser’s Palace . I went into this film expecting a simple retrospective on the rest of his work and life. And we do get that, but true to Downey Sr.’s creative and contrarian temperament, we also get something much more interesting. Downey Sr., even in his failing health, has no interest in being a passive subject for any film, and will only participate in his son’s project if he can shape the film being made, making and editing his own cut in parallel with his son’s documentary. The final product is a fascinating blending of the two. We do get a standard survey of his work, and talking head interviews with people he worked with, like Alan Arkin; but we also get a meditation on Downey Sr.’s inevitable passing, from him and his family, along with a look at the restless creative spirit of someone taking even their very last days to follow their inspiration to make something new. Longing #10) Three Thousand Years of Longing & #9) Cyrano What I see Three Thousand Years of Longing and Cyrano sharing is a look at lovelorn figures trapped in seemingly inescapable circumstances, largely resigned to their lot, but still nursing a deep desire to somehow transcend their situation through a connection with someone else. Three Thousand Years of Longing was the film on this list that I’ve seen most recently, and it may be the one most likely to be bolstered by recency bias. I had set it aside because I had heard it described as a “well-intended misfire” by director George Miller. It’s possible that having heard about those misgivings, though, I was properly prepared for what this quiet film really is rather than expecting some kind of supercharged follow-up to Miller’s previous film, Mad Max: Fury Road. The film stars Tilda Swinton as Alithea, a professor with a research interest in narrative stories and storytelling, who discovers an antique bottle in a market in Istanbul, which happens to contain a djinn, played by Idris Elba. The Djinn offers Alithea three wishes, but she is familiar with the common warning that runs through such stories: to be careful what you wish for, and she finds herself more interested in hearing the Djinn’s own story, rather than in making any wishes of her own. In one sense, the story is very contained, as the core plot is mostly just the Djinn telling his millennia-long story to Alithea in her hotel room. At the same time, we do get to see flashes of the story of how the Djinn had been bound to the human world for so long, and how he hoped, all the while, that someone would make the wish that would finally free him. We cut between the hotel room and the voluptuously depicted ancient settings where his tale takes place, while always keeping in sight that the important part of the story is the quiet connection beginning to form between Alithea and the Djinn in the present day. I have heard some criticism of the story’s final act and its conclusion, but it was specifically those choices that elevated the film from good to great for me. The ending isn’t grand or explosive, but rather something much simpler and more intimate. We’re told in the title that it’s a story about three thousand years of longing, and what we get in the end is seeing that longing finally satisfied. Cyrano is the first of two films on my list that are from 2022 that played extensively at festivals back in 2021 and qualified for last year’s Oscars. There are a few films like this every year that are held back as part of an awards strategy but wind up falling through the cracks. Peter Dinklage stars as the titular Cyrano in this musical reimagining of the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Edmond Rostand's 1897 play. Dinklage gives what ought to have been a best actor-nominated performance. He’s reprising the role that he originated on stage, in the adaptation penned by his wife, Erica Schmidt, with music provided by Aaron and Bryce Dessner from the band The National. Haley Bennet also reprises her role of Roxanne from that same stage production and is incandescent as she believably plays someone that you could imagine anyone falling in love with. Bennet’s husband, Joe Wright, makes it even more of a family affair, by signing on to handle the directing duties. I’ve long been a fan of Steve Martin’s 1987 version of this story, Roxanne , which he wrote as a light romantic comedy take on this story. This new version remedies the one reservation I have always had with Martin’s take, though, by returning to something more like the original ending of Rostand’s play. What all of the versions of the story have in common is that Cyrano (named C.D. Bales in the Martin version) is a widely respected figure in his community, admired for his poetic wit and feared for his fighting prowess. He’s cultivated these abilities to compensate for how ugly and isolating he finds his appearance to be. On the stage, and in the Martin version of the story, this defect is usually depicted with a comically oversized prosthetic nose. What Schmidt and Dinklage recognized is that some of the weight of the story is undermined by the audience’s awareness that, underneath that prosthetic nose, is still a handsome actor who gets to set aside his prosthetic when the curtain falls. By casting Dinklage as Cyrano, his height is something the audience never loses sight of. Where this inferiority complex comes into play is that Cyrano is in love with a woman he is close friends with, Roxanne, but he can never believe that anyone, especially Roxanne, could love him back, so he throws himself into his work and his poetry and his fights. He is stoically resigned to his lot, until one day he is given the misperception that Roxanne might have feelings for him. He is briefly elated, making it all the more painful and raw when he learns that it is actually a handsome, if somewhat dim, man named Christian, whom Roxanne has fallen for. The story becomes a complicated triangle where Cyrano, in order to have some way to express everything he feels for Roxanne, offers to write love letters to her on Christian’s behalf. Cyrano loves Roxanne, Christian loves Roxanne, and Roxanne loves who Cyrano makes her think Christian is. Martin, in telling the story as a romantic comedy, wraps everything up with a happy ending that superficially satisfies, but can’t help but leave you conflicted about the fundamental lie at the origin of Cyrano’s and Roxanne’s and Christian’s relationships. As Edmond tells the story, and as Schmidt and Dinklage repeat it, it’s rightfully a tragedy. Only on Cyrano’s deathbed does Roxanne realize what has happened, and only then does Cyrano confess. It’s a more appropriate conclusion to the story, as Cyrano’s deception isn’t rewarded with the happily ever after that Martin wants to give him, and we leave the two of them longing for the life they could have had with one another if Cyrano had simply swallowed his pride and been honest with Roxanne from the beginning. Family #8) Petite Maman & #7) Turning Red What I see Petite Maman and Turning Red sharing is an examination of the often rocky relationships between parents and children, particularly between mothers and daughters. In both films, through some unusual circumstances, the children are given an opportunity to understand their mothers as the children they once were. Petite Maman , like Cyrano, is another film released this year in the US, that qualified for the previous year’s Oscars. While the release of Cyrano was badly mishandled, Petite Maman simply suffered from being an international film that just finally came to the U.S. at an inopportune time to be widely seen and fully appreciated. In Petite Maman, a young girl, Nelly, accompanies her parents to clean out her mother’s childhood home after the passing of her grandmother. Nelly, too young to be of any real help, spends her time outside playing in the woods surrounding the house, the same woods her mother played in when she was a child. Out in the woods, Nelly befriends another young girl, Marion, who is in the process of building a tree fort. It’s this brief magical friendship that will end up having such a profound impact on Nelly’s understanding of, and relationship with, her mother. I’ll hold off saying any more, as this was a fairly underseen film and it would greatly benefit the viewing experience if you can go into it as unaware as possible of its twists and turns. Looked at in one sense, Turning Red was my favorite superhero film of 2022. It’s basically an X-Men origin story about a young girl who discovers that something in her genes gives her a special power that has only started to manifest now that she’s hit puberty. In this case, 13-year-old Meilin discovers that if she loses control of her emotions, she turns into a giant red panda. Just below the surface, the film is a metaphor about the experience of going through puberty, but a bit deeper still, and it’s even more about the relationship between parents and children. Meilin learns that this ability is a family secret that all of the female members of her family have to contend with. The fallout of this revelation brings to head the tension between Meilin and her mother, the tension that mirrors what any parent struggles with when trying to accept that their child is growing up. Ultimately, this will wind up strengthening the bond between Meilin and her mother, as it eventually brings home for Meilin the idea that her mother was once a young girl too, who went through the same experiences, and importantly, she remains at heart something of that same young girl to this day. What proves to be the biggest difference between their respective experiences, though, is that Meilin has the unconditional acceptance of her friends. It’s a wonderful film about navigating some of the messy life milestones we may all share but don’t discuss as often or readily as we should, and how much of a difference it makes to have and offer support to the people in our lives as we all try to make the best of things. ( For a full review of Turning Red, click here ). Regret #6) Good Luck to You, Leo Grande & #5) Everything Everywhere All at Once What Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and Everything Everywhere All at Once share is that they both tell stories about how it’s never too late to start your life and become the person you always wanted to be and that you should be prepared to help the people in your life do the same. ( For a full review of Leo Grande, click here ). In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande , Emma Thompson plays a recently widowed older woman who is struggling to come to terms with how impoverished her sex life was during her long marriage to her husband. Now, at her current age, it feels like it may already be too late to experience anything different. When we meet her, she is in a hotel room awaiting the arrival of the male sex worker she has hired; when that man arrives, she tells him her name is Nancy (which it is not), and he will give Nancy the professional name he works under, Leo Grande. While each of them pretends to be someone else, they will teach each other a bit about who they really are. This film is specifically about sex, particularly in terms of being honest with ourselves and our partners about our wants and needs. The larger theme, however, is about the regrets that come with age as we reflect on the accumulated years of things we never said and all the lives we never led. There is a version of this story that could be much slighter, just a rehashed carpe diem tale of someone older getting their groove back, and some of that is here, but this is a smaller film that takes seriously that, however young you might feel in the moment, we still need to make peace with the fact that all of our options and abilities will diminish over time. A fresh start that doesn’t take into account such inevitabilities is just putting our regrets into a box to re-experience at a later date. What Nancy finds over her series of encounters with Leo Grande isn’t simply a moment of youthful indiscretion, but actual peace with who she was, is, and will be. She’s able to find a way to enjoy what’s available to her in the moment, without being distracted by what might have been, or being scared of what might be looming over the horizon. In Everything Everywhere All at Once Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a married woman with one adult daughter, who finds herself barely keeping her head above water as the owner of a rundown family laundromat. When we meet Evelyn, her husband Waymond is about to serve her divorce papers, she’s in the middle of a contentious audit, and her relationship with her daughter, Joy, is frayed to the breaking point. Up to this moment, we’re being introduced to a woman who finds herself unhappy with the life she finds herself stuck in, but the film rescues her from that in the biggest way possible. Evelyn is pulled from her audit by a version of Waymond from another universe, thrusting Evelyn into a story that places her at the center of a crisis that concerns the future of all reality, a crisis whose resolution will ultimately depend on her being able to repair her relationships with her family. The miracle of this film is that it is an unabashedly over-the-top presentation of mind-bending events, that somehow still manages to stay rooted in utterly honest and relatable human relationships. Evelyn overcomes the limitations of the life she felt trapped in, but that only becomes possible by her first making things right with the people she is sharing that life with. Rebellion #4) Roald Dahl's Matilda: The Musical & #3) RRR What Matilda and RRR share is that they’re stories of truly exceptional individuals standing up to cartoonishly villainous oppression, while also doubling as larger stories about the mass movements of ordinary people engaged in collective actions that are needed to ever make real and lasting change happen. Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical is an adaptation of the award-winning West End and Broadway stage musical from 2010, which is itself an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1988 book. Matilda is a precocious genius of a young girl, born to neglectful parents who neither like nor want her. They only finally enroll her into school when forced to by the local authorities. Matilda has a contentious relationship with her parents but she is largely able to manage them by being so much smarter than either of them. Matilda is briefly excited by the prospect of going to school, thrilled to be able to enter a world of learning and books, but that happiness is brief as she discovers that her new school is actually a prison-like environment under the tyrannical rule of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. In a lot of ways, Matilda is a kid’s wish fulfillment story. The protagonist is the very smartest and bestest kid, who takes on cartoonish and uncomplicatedly evil villains, whom they will defeat in a grand fashion. In this case, Matilda will unite all of the kids around her to defeat Miss Trunchbull, gaining herself her first real friends, before also replacing her mean parents by going to live with her favorite teacher, Miss Honey. There is a great deal that is wonderful about this adaptation. Emma Thompson is having the time of her life chewing scenery as Miss Trunchbull; Lashana Lynch is absolutely lovely as Miss Honey, playing the idealized version of the teacher every kid would want; and Alisha Weir is a bit of a miracle as the young rebel genius, Matilda. Matthew Warchus’s direction captures the magical realism of Roald Dahl’s world while leaving enough grounding to still care about the emotional connections between the characters. What elevates this film to something truly special, though, is the music and lyrics from Tim Minchin. His sense of wordplay is just superb. He has an enviable ability to shift gears within songs to be raucous, joyful, menacing, or lovely as needed. They’re the perfect anthems for any revolution-minded children in your life. Somewhat oddly, the thing that kind of unlocked S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR for me was seeing the list of films he submitted on his ballot for BFI’s Sight and Sound list. Among the 10 films he listed as the “best of all time,” he included Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and Apocalypto, along with Disney’s The Lion King and Aladdin . These are certainly unique choices, particularly taken together, but I think this does illuminate something about Rajamouli’s aesthetic. There’s often visceral violence to some of the action scenes in RRR , but it’s also blended with an often cartoonish magical realism. This is a film that will display a British soldier clubbing a mother unconscious as her child is stolen from her, and will show another character catch an out-of-control motorcycle with his bare hands and start swinging it around over his head like it was made of just so much balsa wood. The story of RRR imagines that two real-life Indian revolutionary figures had met one another, and became friends, before beginning their fight against the British empire. I came to the film having been told that it had action sequences that had to be seen to be believed. It more than delivers on that promise, but what I was unprepared for was just how much movie it is. RRR is one of the most tonally diverse things I’ve ever seen. It’s an unbelievable action movie, it’s a high production value historical epic, it’s sometimes a romance, sometimes a heist picture, and more than a few times, it’s a full-scale musical with one of the best bromances I’ve ever seen depicted on film. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about RRR has been just how successful it has been in the United States. Where once you might be hard-pressed to find someone in the general public that could name even one Indian film, now you can readily find people that can identify the distinction between Bollywood and Tollywood films; and we can look forward to the song, “Naatu Naatu,” from the film, potentially being performed at the Academy Awards because it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Here’s hoping that this is just the beginning of a trend that will continue for years to come. Mortality #2) Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio & #1) White Noise What Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Noah Baumback’s White Noise have in common is a hopeful grappling with ideas of mortality. They’re both stories that take seriously the limited time we have on this Earth while making an argument for filling that time with all the joy and connection that we can. In del Toro’s reimaging of Pinocchio, he begins the film in a bleaker way than the story is usually told. His Geppetto is a grieving father, struggling to accept the death of his young son, Carlo. When this Geppetto drunkenly carves a wooden child puppet, he’s just trying to process his grief. He certainly never wishes that this puppet would come to life, and wouldn’t if he ever thought that was a possibility. He’s completely unprepared for when Pinocchio comes to life and is offended that Pinocchio calls himself Gepetto’s son. Pinocchio’s infectious joy for life does eventually bring Geppetto out of his grief, though, and they do come to love one another. After many adventures, Gepetto and Pinocchio, along with Sebastian J. Cricket, and Spazzatura the monkey, come to live happily together; but that isn’t where del Toro leaves us. A story that begins in loss also ends in loss, but now through a brighter lens. Geppetto is an old man when he carved Pinocchio, and their time together was always going to be short, and del Toro doesn’t hide that part of the story from us. Gepetto does eventually die, as does Sebastian J. Cricket, but while Carlo had been so cruelly taken from Gepetto without warning, Pinocchio gets to spend time with Geppetto and Sebastian preparing himself for their passing. We leave Pinocchio at the end of this particular story, walking off into the sunset to begin a new story. Everything may eventually end, but every ending is a beginning for something new. ( For a deeper dive into all things Pinocchio, click here ). White Noise is Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1986 novel of the same name. In it, DeLillo examines American ideas around Consumerism, Vacuous Academia, Misinformation, Pharmaceuticals posing as the solution to all of life’s problems, and the pervasive fear of death. The centerpiece of the film is an Airborne Toxic Event created by a runaway chemical reaction caused by an explosion when a truck containing flammable materials collides with a train carrying a toxic chemical compound called Nyodene D. The explosion creates a deadly dark cloud over the town that leads to an emergency evacuation. The film is told in three parts. Before the toxic event, we are introduced to college professor Jack (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their collective children from various marriages. Prior to the event, we see Jack and Babette as a loving couple with a happy family and life. In the background, they each have normal fears of mortality but they are able to joke with one another about which of them they hope dies first, as they discuss their respective fears of death versus their fears of being alone. The toxic event changes all of that. Coping with the fear of death through jokes and the like becomes impossible when a literal dark and deadly cloud is forming over your head. The middle section of the film is the family’s disaster movie journey to escape to safety. A different story might end with them having finally made it to their evacuation point, happy to be alive and looking towards an uncertain future. What White Noise does, though, is give us a long look at the mundane aftermath of such an experience. Jack, Babette, and their family are all fine. The cloud is dissipated and they can return to their town and lives, but now with that whole experience looming over their heads. Jack and Babette spiral out from this experience. What anxiety Babette previously had is now out of control. Jack had prolonged exposure to the cloud while they were evacuating which could possibly take years off his life. This next bit may be a spoiler, but a big part of my affection for this film comes from its ending. Through a series of circumstances, Jack and Babette find themselves towards the end of the film laying side by side in hospital beds, each with superficial gunshot wounds. Reaching across the empty space between them, they hold hands, once again talking to one another with something like the easy comfort they had with one another during the first act of the film. This is something like my favorite film ending trope: two people who have been through hell, and may have more to go through, yet, but are just happy to have someone to go through it with. With so little in this world to have faith in, they have faith in one another. What more could anyone ask for? Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Spoilers ahead for Oliver Hermanus’ Living There is a song by the Scottish band, Frightened Rabbit, called “ Head Rolls Off” ; and when that band’s lead singer, Scott Hutchison, passed away in 2018, his family started a charity organization, called Tiny Changes , that took its name and guiding ethos from part of that song. The organization's focus is youth mental wellness particularly geared toward suicide prevention, and the relevant part of the song goes: When it's all gone Something carries on And it's not morbid at all Just that nature's had enough of you When my blood stops Someone else's will thaw When my head rolls off Someone else's will turn And while I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to earth I mention all of this here because I couldn’t get this song out of my head when I left the theater after watching Living, the recent remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru . This adaptation is set in 1950s post-war London, from a screenplay by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter, Kazuo Ishiguro. In Living , Bill Nighy plays an older civil servant, named Rodney Williams, who is struggling to come to terms with having been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Prior to receiving his diagnosis, Mr. Williams was just a widower, living in his home with his son and daughter-in-law, going to a job each day where he was respected by his subordinates as a serious-minded, if perhaps overly fastidious, boss. Known for his reliability and punctuality, Mr. Williams becomes briefly unmoored by the news of his diagnosis, before ultimately finding something worth devoting himself to. In some sense, given his age and the loss of his wife, Mr. Williams was already just killing time with his life, unconsciously waiting to die when he was diagnosed; and part of the reason he winds up not sharing his diagnosis with his son and daughter-in-law is that he intuits from things overheard that they are largely waiting for him to die as well, already making plans based on the inheritance they expect to receive. He can only intuit this, though, as what underlies their relationship with one another is a polite lack of substantive communication. This is a family that can reliably gather together each night for dinner, exchanging pleasantries over passed dishes, while never viewing one another as someone that could be confided in with anything honest or hard. So, largely isolated, Mr. Williams goes through a number of stages trying to process his situation. He briefly entertains suicide before giving his sleeping pills to a man he meets named, Sutherland, a somewhat bohemian writer he overhears complaining of insomnia. While making the offer, Mr. Williams confides his diagnosis to Sutherland and admits that after deciding that suicide wasn’t for him, he had been taken by the idea that he might seize the day, and live out his remaining days with some gusto, before realizing that he had largely forgotten how to live. Sutherland takes some pity on Mr. Williams and brings him out for a drunken night on the town, and Mr. Williams finds some momentary joy in that new experience, but also some melancholy, and this proves not to be the answer that he needs. Mr. Williams next tries to find some life in the company of a young woman that had recently worked for him, Ms. Harris, who had just left his office for a new job at a restaurant nearby. Mr. Williams also confides his diagnosis in her, letting Ms. Harris know that there was nothing untoward he felt towards her, but that he hoped he might be able to learn something from her about the joy and energy with which she seems to go about her life. Mr. Williams and Ms. Harris are able to form some kind of bond over this, but this also isn’t quite the answer he needs for what ails him, either. What he needs to do is somehow find his own joy and purpose if there’s to be any hope of it being a lasting feeling. Mr. Williams does find something. In a sense, he throws himself into his work, but a facet of his work he had long forgotten. Picking up a thread from earlier in the film about a group of mothers who had visited his office in the hopes of getting the government to turn a bombed-out vacant lot into a community park, before being sent on their way, on an endless bureaucratic wild goose chase, bouncing from department to department, finding nobody willing to take responsibility as being who they needed to talk to in order to get the project started; And what Mr. Williams remembers is that it is within his authority in his job to actually help people like this, to shepherd along projects that can make some small lasting changes in people’s lives. Like a 1950s Leslie Knope, Mr. Williams decides to make it his purpose to make this park happen. The film makes a wild choice here, one that particularly benefits from seeing this film in a theater where you can’t readily check how much more time is left in the story. We get a sequence of a seemingly rejuvenated Mr. Williams, leading the men from the office out into the rain to see in person the lot that the mothers have been talking about. Despite the heavy rain, there is a happy brightness to this moment, but we make a fairly hard cut from Mr. Williams stepping out into the rain, to the church where his funeral service is taking place. In the moment, you can believe that this could be the end of the film, and ultimately his story was always going to be how his story had to end. It’s abrupt, but almost no matter what happens after Mr. Williams steps out into the rain, he’s better off than where we began his story. He could have been hit by a bus a moment later, but he still would have died possessing some purpose and joy. We do get quite a bit more than this though. Mr. Williams has died, but what we get for the rest of the film is a mix of flashbacks of people’s remembrances of his final days, along with the lessons they take of how they might apply Mr. Williams’s example to their own lives. We get to see the building of the park, and the children playing in it. We get to hear from mothers and other people in the community who had grown fond of Mr. Williams because of what he was doing. We get to hear the men from his office piecing together that Mr. Williams knew he was dying, that it had sparked this sudden change, and how that ought to guide them in how they run the department in his absence. We also get to see a burgeoning relationship between Ms. Harris and one of the young men from the office. Though Mr. Williams is now gone, we do get to see that something carries on. With the ending structured this way, it acknowledges, but decenters, Mr. Williams’s death; while emphasizing the important part about those final months, that he had found a joyful purpose, and that, as the song said, while he was alive he made tiny changes to Earth. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

** Warning: contains significant spoilers for White Noise ** Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise , was my favorite film of last year. More than that, I strongly suspect that it’s going to be a lasting all-time favorite film for me that I will happily return to repeatedly; But, something I’m discovering is that I seem to be somewhat by myself in that high opinion of the film. Now, I have no problem being the lonely voice trying to reclaim a maligned masterpiece , but I’m especially surprised that I need to play defender in this case, as I genuinely think White Noise is an obvious and straightforwardly great film. I remember when White Noise was first announced. It was thought to be a likely candidate to be in the mix for all manner of end of year awards, just on the strength of the book’s reputation and Baumbach’s recent success with Marriage Story. After people actually saw the film, though, none of that materialized. It ended up being largely absent from critics’ end of year top 10 lists; And, looking at review aggregator sites, it seems like it received a fairly lukewarm response from critics, and an almost hostile response from general audiences. Maybe part of the blame for its reception is that it’s a film about death; and not death in the usual heightened movie sense of something like a disaster movie or revenge film, but rather the disquieting and mundane sense of death as something ever looming in our everyday lives. Since this is exactly the kind of thing that people go to movies to escape thinking about, I could see how that might be alienating. To try and see where things might have gone wrong for the film, I went looking for some more specific complaints by skimming through the negative reviews of the film that I could find, and making myself a little word cloud of whatever terms appeared the most often. Based on that, the most common criticisms seemed to fall into a couple of different groups: first, that the film was seen as pretentious or vacuous, second that it felt detached and ungrounded; and third, that it seemed jumbled and haphazard. Harsh words, but, I can kind of see where each of those observations is coming from. I just happen to think each of those elements is largely intentional, and that they wind up contributing to my affection for the film. Structurally, White Noise is broken into three acts, along with a small opening prologue and a wonderful final coda that plays out during my favorite closing credits sequence since Inland Empire . The beginning is a short jaunty lecture being delivered to a college class by Don Cheadle’s professor character, Murray Siskind, discussing how he takes car crashes in films to be an example of secular optimism, showing the ever-expanding scope of what human beings can do with human things; and that underneath their seeming violence is a spirit of innocence and fun. Notably, this isn’t how the book opens, so the presumption from Baumbach is that he would like us to keep this in mind with everything we’re about to see, and we can decide for ourselves whether or not underneath the coming violence we’re about to witness, we will find that same spirit of innocence and fun. The first main section of the film introduces us to the Gladney family. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a professor of Hitler Studies, at The College on the Hill. He lives with his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who teaches an adult education course on movement. They each have been married 3 times before, and are raising an eclectic brood of children from those various marriages, along with a young son, Wilder, that is theirs. This first act is mostly a skewering of academia and consumerism, featuring fatuous conversations between Jack, his fellow professors, and his friends Murray; often in the aisles of the local A & P Supermarket. This section of the film culminates in a surreal and bravura scene of the two men simultaneously giving different lectures to the same class, on Elvis and Hitler respectively. I’m vocationally predisposed to enjoy the jabs at academia, and the absurd, yet credible, idea of a college having a world class Hitler studies department amuses me to no end, but what I love most about this whole opening section of the film is actually the Altman-esque way we get to see the Gladney family bounce off one another in their home, especially the playful relationship between husband and wife, Jack and Babette. Their children are all wonderfully cast, each with their own voice and personality, but the moment I come back to the most is just between Jack and Babette. It’s a conversation between the two of them in bed, where they’re half joking about how they each want to be the one of them to die first, hyperbolically talking about not being able to bear the thought of having to go on living without the other. This exchange especially resonates with me because I know that I have had this exact conversation, in precisely this tone, with my wife. It’s a playful exchange, and sincerely so because that’s the only way to talk about such things, but both of them also know that they are whistling past the graveyard too and that there is real anxiety underneath what they’re saying. Going back for a moment, the transition between the first and second act is that simultaneous lecture that Jack and Murray are giving. As Jack is building to a crescendo, we start to see his words intercut with a disaster unfolding at the same time on the other side of town. While they are lecturing on Elvis and Hitler, about what those two figures share in the obsession about their lives and deaths, a train carrying a massive amount of hazardous materials is in the midst of derailing and ultimately exploding, due to a collision with a car. This chemical explosion will create a life-threatening airborne toxic event that will lead to a large-scale evacuation of the region. Due to this car crash, Jack and Babette’s fear of death has now become manifest as a literal dark and poisonous cloud looming over their heads. It’s in this second act that the film makes its first big shift, turning into a peculiar kind of disaster film. The train crash is dramatic, but there is an initial detachment to how Jack and Babette handle it. While their oldest son, Heinrich, is watching the rising plume of smoke at the crash site with a pair of binoculars through their attic window, Jack is actively downplaying the severity of what’s happening. Partly this plays like a parent wanting to put a happy face on bad news, but it also reads like denial on Jack’s part that such a thing could happen in his bucolic college town. It’s not exactly blindness to what could be happening, but a willful reluctance on Jack and Babette’s part to fully reckon with the worsening news, and increasingly frequent sirens, until finally a car with a megaphone drives down their street ordering all homes to be evacuated immediately. The evacuation itself is odd in contrast to other disaster films. The family piles into the car, and backs over their garbage cans as they quickly pull into the street, like you may have seen in a dozen other movies before, only to immediately settle down into the slow and orderly crawl of cars heading out of town. Rather than being panicked or exhibiting some heroic steely resolve or performing any number of other possible cinematic emotions, what they’re doing is looking to the people in those other cars in order to try and calibrate how scared they're supposed to feel. In moments the film can truly look like a disaster movie, though. We get one shot of the black cloud at night during the evacuation, dramatically lit by helicopter spotlights and bursts of lightning; a shot that would be right at home in a Roland Emmerich movie, right down to the people slowly getting out of their cars to stare in wonder and awe up at the sky. But nothing more comes of that moment. Everyone just gets back in their cars and starts driving again. Next thing we know, we’re arriving at their assigned evacuation point at a Boy Scout camp, Camp Daffodil for a brief respite. By the very next morning, they suddenly have to evacuate again as the cloud is still coming towards them. There is an actually thrilling sequence where Jack decides to follow some survivalists who drive off into the woods rather than following the rest of the evacuees out of the campsite. There is a high-speed chase through the woods, a chase that briefly entails their family car getting caught and sent floating down a river, only to escape the river by floating close enough to the river bank to gain enough traction to escape. Back on solid ground, they tear through the woods and into a cornfield that ultimately just dumps them out onto the same they would have been evacuating on in the first place, with all the cars that are making their slow and orderly evacuation from camp. In some ways, the third act is the wildest swing of the film, and possibly what might have been most alienating to some viewers, because we get something of a third mini-movie. After 9 days, the cloud has been dispersed, and everyone can return to their homes, and now the question is how to go about one’s life having survived something like this. The very strangest thing about this part of the film is that this seemingly fantastical disaster actually happened in real life only weeks after the film’s release, near the same part of Ohio where White Noise was filmed, with some of the very same people who played extras in this evacuation sequence having to evacuate their own homes for the same reason. A train derailed carrying large amounts of vinyl chloride that vented into the atmosphere creating an airborne toxic event like in the film, and it was five days before anyone from within a mile of the crash site was allowed to return to their homes. Something we are starting to see there that resembles what happened in the film is the strangeness of the beginning stages of normalcy reasserting itself in the aftermath, but particularly that kind of disingenuous normalcy that is just pretending everything is fine, or the kind of normalcy that is simply choosing not to think about what has happened or is still happening all around you. What I appreciate about White Noise is the way it captures something of this transition from mundane daily worries, to total catastrophe, and how complicated the pull of normalcy is in any aftermath. Maybe we haven’t all had the experience of fleeing some disaster, but most of us know something of being blindsided by tragedy in some form. There’s a complicated mix between things around you returning to normal whether you’re ready for it or not, your own desire to return to normalcy however impossible that might be, and the inevitable emergence of some new normal. There is never any going backward, but the vacuum created by any disaster or tragedy will be soon filled with something whether we like it or not. In the third act of the film, Jack, Babette, and the family are trying to get their footing after the disaster. Jack returns to the familiar, preparing for a conference his college is hosting and his regular shopping at the A & P; while Babette, on the other hand, is struggling to find a new normal. We learn more about something teased about Babette in the first act of the film. She has been secretly taking an experimental drug called Dylar, which has been specifically designed to help with anxiety about death. It does this mostly by creating a profound forgetfulness. Babette has now become even more dependent on this drug in the aftermath of the disaster and has had to go to incredible lengths to continue getting it. In the bigger picture, between both Jack and Babette, what we’re seeing is some of the unsatisfying ways humans try to cope with mortality: work, consumerism, pharmaceuticals; and before the film is done, we’ll also take a look at violence and religion as coping mechanisms, too. Jack will finally learn from Babette about the medication she’s been taking, why she’s been taking it, and what she had to do in order to keep getting it; and Jack will become completely unmoored by this knowledge. Now the film turns into a revenge thriller as Jack is driven to find the man that’s been manipulating Babette. Again though, like with our mini disaster movie, this thriller will also be subverted. In seeking revenge, Jack is looking for one more coping mechanism that will give him the illusion of control. He will track down the man that’s been taking advantage of Babette, and Jack will shoot him with a tiny gun lent to him by Murray during the evacuation. Babette, having followed Jack, will find him just after his having placed the wiped-down gun in the man’s hand. While Jack is distracted, the actually not-yet-dead man will fire the final bullet in the gun, grazing both Jack and Babette. For some actual thrillers, this could be the ending. But, seeing Babette, and maybe realizing that his revenge hasn’t accomplished anything, for him, the man, or Babette, Jack decides he’s not really a killer and that they can’t just leave the shot man to die. Fortunately for Jack, the man has been taking even higher doses of the drug than what he’s been giving Babette, and he has already forgotten that it was Jack that shot him. Jack and Babette drag him to their car, and drive to get them all help at a nearby emergency room run by an order of nuns. Jack and Babette pound on the door, while Babette calls out “We’re shot!” Literally shot, but the phrasing lets us know that they’re emotionally shot as well, pounding on the door of a building with just the word emergency and a giant neon crucifix over it. If Jack and Babette were looking for some comfort in religion here, though, they’re out of luck; as the nun they speak with has lost her faith. She can’t offer them Heaven or angels or hope for anything after this life, and can only recommend that they find what comfort they can by believing in one another. While the nun is speaking to them, Jack and Babette reach between their beds and take one another’s hand. On the screen, the subtitled text beneath their held hands is just the words “We pray”. When the nun leaves, Jack and Babette talk, and we can see that they’ve emotionally come full circle to where we met them at the start of the film. We end on the family, making another trip out to the A & P, maybe heading once more into the breach of distracting consumerism, but at least going happily and together. And, in that moment at the end of a film where the music kicks in and the screen would otherwise go to black, the camera stays with the family as they head into the store, and we watch they, and everyone else in the store, dance to LCD Soundsystem’s “new body rhumba” for the duration of the closing credits. This is the innocence and fun we were promised at the outset of the film. White Noise is a messy film. It has a strangely chaotic and playful energy throughout, which is striking because of what the film is so overtly about. But, as with a film like Harold and Maude , that odd energy is what lets you linger on the subject without getting overwhelmed. That odd energy is what lets us look at a subject like human mortality and hold onto the idea that there is still room in the days remaining to us for innocence and fun. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film, Amélie , has some of the trappings of a romantic comedy but it's ultimately something quite a bit different. It is a film that is deeply concerned with the connections people make with one another, and, like a typical romantic comedy, it does let us revel in the joys of young love when our two dreamers, Amélie and Nino, finally do wind up together; but, the relationship they are about to embark upon is largely beside the point. What Amélie is really about is steeling up our courage to take the risks that are a necessary part of a life well-lived. This may seem like a bit of a digression, but the strongest association I have with Amélie , is with the earliest days of social media, specifically with early Facebook. When that platform first launched, it functioned more like a network of interconnected personal websites. One could think of their own page as a thing to be curated because early on, you actually had to go to someone’s page in order to interact with them. The setup of those early Facebook pages was fairly rigid, with a particular amount of space allocated for your relevant personal information, and then boxes where you could list your interests, your favorite books, tv shows, and movies. For people you already knew, seeing what interests someone opted to share on their page was a way to get to know them better; and for the people you wanted to get to know, seeing what they were into theoretically gave you some potential ice breakers. You might only see how someone wished they were, or how they wanted to be seen, but it still told you something. The first thing about this that reminds me of Amélie is the way that Jeunet introduces all of his characters. Using a technique he employed in his short film, Foutaises, Jeunet introduces many of the characters in Amélie by explicitly showing us very brief vignettes where we are both told and shown the things that they like and dislike. We meet Amélie’s father, Raphael Poulain, with a little montage where we learn that he doesn’t like peeing next to others or clingy wet swim trunks; and that he does like peeling large strips of wallpaper, lining up and shining his shoes, and emptying his toolbox, cleaning it out, and putting everything back inside. Amélie’s mother, Amandine, we learn, she dislikes puckered fingers in the bath or having her hands touched by strangers; but she does like figure skater’s costumes on tv, polishing the parquet, and emptying her handbag, cleaning it out, and putting everything back inside. Neither of these collections of quirks gives us that much deeper insight into either character, but the intimacy of these details still makes you feel like you know them and how they fit together. The second thing about Amélie that makes me think of those early days of Facebook has to do with those boxes where people would list their favorite things. Amélie is one of those films that I could see on someone’s list that let me know I had found one of my people. There’s something both validating and inviting about seeing your interests mirrored in someone else. It’s interesting how the very smallest thing can sometimes spark a sense of connection. Amélie and Nino see something of their own quirky dreamer natures reflected in one another, and, before they’ve ever spoken, they feel drawn to one another in a way that doesn’t entirely make sense to either one of them at the time. After Amélie leaves her first note to Nino on the back of a square of photo booth pictures, a half-asleep Nino has the following exchange with the faces in the pictures about why she did it: Man in photo: She’s in love Nino: I don’t even know her Man: You do Nino: Since when? Man: Since always. In your dreams The third way in which Amélie reminds me of Facebook is less tied to the early days of social media and feels like something a bit more true of today. Amélie doesn’t know how to relate to anyone without some kind of artificial framework. The motivating event for her in the story is finding the lost box of childhood treasures in the bathroom of her apartment and deciding to try and find the person they belonged to. But, she’s incapable of just being open and vulnerable with people about what she’s trying to do. Everything is a spectacle, or a stratagem, for Amélie to hide behind. Amélie can’t just return the childhood treasures to Dominique Bretodeau, she has to stage him finding them without explanation in a phone booth on his walk to the market; and even after he’s found it and is trying to find someone to share this astounding experience with, Amélie plays dumb. She smiles at his story, knowing that her plan to astonish him worked, but she can’t bring herself to say one word to this person aching to share his experience with anyone. She can’t just have a conversation with her father about how he should travel (as he and his late wife had wanted) but instead, sets up an elaborate prank sending his garden gnome around the world to shake him out of his rut. She can’t just tell Nino that she’s found his photo album and wants to return it to him, or that she likes him, instead, she has to set up an elaborate ploy to lure him away from his bike so she could have him see her return it to his bike from too far away for him to catch up with her before she makes her escape. Even when Nino follows her scavenger hunt to her work, just like she planned, and is standing right in front of her, asking if she is the girl in the picture, which she obviously is, Amélie still can’t bring herself to take the risk of just saying ‘yes’ and seeing what he would do next. The resolution of Amelie’s character arc isn’t merely that she ends up with Nino, but that she finds the courage to take the risk of making herself vulnerable to someone else. For Jeunet, it’s important that we gather that it’s the risk, not the reward, that’s the point. His aim is to deliver a satisfying ending to the story he’s telling, while also highlighting the virtue of failure and the different ways that relationships, even the best ones, can go wrong. A regular at the restaurant where Amélie works is the failed writer, Hipolito. He says at one point: “I love the word ‘fail’. Failure is human destiny. Failure teaches us that life is but a draft, a long rehearsal for a show that will never play.” Amélie’s mother and father were a good match for one another, but in the present day of the story, her father is a grieving widow. The older couple Amélie talks to while trying to track down Dominique Bretodeau, are happily enough married, though the husband is beginning to go senile. The concierge at Amélie’s apartment building was happily married until her embezzling husband ran off with his secretary. And, throughout the film, in the background of the story is the recent death of Lady Di, herself the archetype of a storybook relationship gone wrong. The primary example of a relationship’s potential to fail is when Amélie plays matchmaker. We are first introduced to Gina and Joseph when we see where Amélie works. Gina works with Amélie. Joseph is a regular at the restaurant. The two of them had some kind of relationship in the past that Joseph can’t let go of. He sits in the restaurant every day, jealously watching Gina’s every move, making comments into a tape recorder whenever she interacts with another male customer. Amélie surreptitiously redirects Joseph’s attention from Gina to Georgette, the miserable hypochondriac who runs the cigarette counter, convincing each other that the other secretly likes them. And, for a time, Amélie’s stratagem works. Joseph and Georgette are happy and infatuated with one another, figuratively and literally climaxing with a not-so-secret liaison in the cafe’s restroom. Joseph’s jealousy is relentless though, and he starts subjecting Georgette to the same treatment as Gina, and he even returns to making the same comments about Gina. Amélie’s efforts at matchmaking are a failure, but neither Joseph nor Georgette come away from the experience empty-handed. Regardless of how things turned out, the only time in the film that we see either of them happy is those few days of infatuation. Better a day of happiness than none at all. To circle back to that earlier digression, the fourth way that Amélie makes me think of Facebook is the way that the message of this movie stands in contrast to the riskless safety of social media - the curated broadcast of life that passively waits for others to engage with it. Part of how Amélie became so isolated is that growing up being homeschooled by just her distant father, she never learned the risks and rewards inherently tied to intimacy and vulnerability. She took refuge in her dreams, and although that shared experience is the beginning of the connection between her and Nino, the thing she needed to learn was how to stand in front of someone else, in the real world, without curation or stratagems, and let herself be open and vulnerable to whatever might happen. In this way, the ending of the film is broader than just Amélie and Nino winding up together. We see our failed writer, Hipolito, walking along the street and coming across something he had written, that had been spray-painted onto the side of a building. We see Dominique Bretodeau, having been so shaken by the appearance of his lost childhood treasures, that he has sought out and reconnected with his estranged daughter and grandson. And we also see Amélie’s father loading his luggage into a cab, as he finally embarks on his long overdue trip. Only then do we close on Amélie and Nino joyously riding his bike together through the picturesque streets of France. We don’t know what will ultimately come of any of these adventures, but we can see on the faces of all concerned that they were all worth the risk however they may turn out. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

One of the better films of 2020 was the documentary Howard , about the role that one-time Beacon resident Howard Ashman played in helping save Disney animation in the late 80s and early 90s. Though Ashman only worked for Disney for a few years before his untimely passing in 1991, he, along with his songwriting partner Alan Menken, were instrumental in the success of three of Disney’s most beloved animated films: The Little Mermaid , Beauty & the Beast , and Aladdin. My main quibble with the documentary was that, because it was primarily concerned with his relationship with Disney, it didn’t give much attention to what I think is actually the best, or at least most representative, of Howard’s projects, his musical adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. Little Shop of Horrors , the 1986 film, is based on the off-off Broadway musical that Howard Ashman co-wrote, directed, and produced at the theater he co-founded. The stage production is itself a musical adaptation of the 1960 Roger Corman B-movie of the same name. Until very recently, all I had known of the Corman film was that (1) it was filmed notoriously cheaply and quickly, with the two days of principal filming all taking place on leftover sets from Corman’s previous film, in a brief window before they were to be torn down. (2) It boasts a brief and unusual appearance by a very young Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient. And (3) since Corman didn’t anticipate much long-term value to the film, he didn’t bother with copywriting it, so its public domain status has led to its omnipresence in discount DVD bins for years. My biggest discovery on finally watching the original film was that it’s actually really good. Not ironically good, or good despite its limitations, but a genuinely engaging and funny horror-comedy that holds up so well that it’s easy to see what inspired Ashman to want to adapt it. The basic story of Little Shop of Horrors is pretty much the same in both the original film and in the stage adaptation. Seymour Krelborn works at a Skid Row flower shop called Mushnik’s, where a strange and unusual plant with a taste for human blood happens to come into his possession, and tragedy ensues. The musical does a bit more than the original to establish Skid Row as a place of desperate and hopeless lives on the margins. In the song, “Skid Row”, The whole ensemble sings: Gee, it sure would be swell to get outta here Bid the gutter farewell and get outta here I'd move heaven and hell to get outa Skid I'd do I-dunno-what to get outta Skid, But a hell of a lot to get outta Skid, People tell me there's not a way outta Skid But believe me I gotta get outta Skid Row! This quickly establishes not only that Skid Row is a place that people might be willing to do anything to escape, but that they might also be justified in what they have to do to escape and survive since no just society ought to have a place like Skid Row in the first place. When Seymour discovers that his small sickly plant needs blood to survive, he makes a fateful decision that may be the one truly selfless choice he makes: he pricks his fingers and feeds the plant drops of his own blood. The plant does thrive, and as it grows, it begins to have a transformative effect on the flower shop. Its strangeness begins to draw customers into the store to get a closer look at it, which dramatically boosts store sales. Seymour’s role in the growing success of the store raises his esteem in the eyes of his boss, Mr. Mushnik, and in the eyes of the co-worker he likes, Audrey. Over time, the plant grows so large that Seymour can’t sustain it on his own blood alone any longer. The loss of the plant would be a pretty significant blow because of how much his life has already been improved by it, but he doesn’t know what to do. It’s at this point that the plant reveals that it can speak. In the musical, not only can the plant speak, but it can bargain. The plant takes credit for the turnaround in Seymour’s life and tells him that it’s just the start. If Seymour can keep tracking down blood to keep the plant fed and growing, the plant will make all of Seymour’s dreams come true. This is the moral turning point of the story. In the musical, Ashman wrote the song “Feed Me”, where the plant offers its Faustian bargain to Seymour: How'd ya like to be a big wheel? Dining out, for every meal I'm the plant can make it all real You're gonna get it Your mileage may vary, but I also get a kick about the amount of overlap between this song and one of the songs Howard wrote for Aladdin , “Friend Like Me”, where another supernatural creature offers to make all of the protagonist’s dreams come true. Though, in Seymour’s case here, the offer comes with truly terrible strings attached. Seymour is resistant to the plant’s entreaties. He knows it’s wrong. He’s briefly tempted in the abstract, but he knows he couldn’t murder anyone. In both the original film and Howard’s adaptation, a body count nevertheless begins to accumulate. They differ importantly in the how, though. In the original it’s largely happenstance that leads people to die. Seymour accidentally causes a man to be hit by a train; he accidentally kills a sadistic dentist; he murders a prostitute, but only after being hypnotized by the plant; and he ultimately loses his own life trying to kill the plant. The key point of departure between the original and the adaptation is that Howard greatly streamlined the deaths in the story to highlight that Seymour, whatever his initial intentions, is responsible for how things get out of hand. The sadistic dentist in the Corman film is just a customer of the flower shop. In Howard’s adaptation, the dentist is Audrey’s abusive boyfriend, which makes him more palatable for the audience as plant food. After the song “Feed Me”, Seymour goes to see the dentist, armed with a pistol and with every intention of killing him: If you want a rationale It isn't very hard to see No, No, No... Stop and think it over, pal The guy sure looks like plant food to me! The guy sure looks like plant food to me! The guy sure looks like plant food to me...! He's so nasty treatin' her rough! Smackin' her around, and always talkin' so tough! You need blood and he's got more than enough! I need blood and he's got more than enough! But the dentist accidentally kills himself before Seymour gets a chance to act. Seymour has ample opportunity to intervene, but chooses to let the dentist die. Seymour is briefly rewarded for his crime. With the dentist out of the way, Audrey and Seymour declare their affections for one another in the song “Suddenly, Seymour”, but Seymour discovers shortly after that Mushnick saw him chopping up the dentist’s body at the flower shop. Mushnick attempts to blackmail Seymour. If Seymour leaves town, and lets Mushnick keep the plant, he won’t be turned into the police. Seymour could leave town, or he could let himself be arrested for the crime he did commit, but he opts instead to coax Mushnick to get close enough to the plant that he gets eaten. It’s at this point that we get the critical point of departure between the original 1960 film, Howard’s stage adaptation, and the version of the 1986 film that was released. Frank Oz was chosen to direct the 1986 film adaptation of Howard’s stage show, from a screenplay that Howard wrote. Oz was a perfect match in a lot of ways. Coming from an already long career working with Jim Henson, having recently taken the leap to co-direct The Dark Crystal with Jim, before directing his first solo film in The Muppets Take Manhattan in 1984 . Oz was perfectly suited to handle the puppeteering involved in Little Shop of Horrors , along with the set design required, navigating the complicated tone of the story, and dealing with the challenges of weaving songs into a narrative. Most importantly, Oz was in agreement about what the story was trying to say, right down to the bleak ending where Seymour loses Audrey to the plant before himself being eaten, and then building upon that ending by adding what would have been an impossible to stage sequence where we get to see the plants start to take over the world. That ending was written and filmed, with the final plant rampage sequence costing $5 million of the film's total budget of $25 million. Oz and Howard fought to keep the ending in the film, but, despite how well it had always played on stage, test screenings of the film with the original ending went so poorly that if a new happier ending weren’t shot, the film was never going to be released. I don’t begrudge the film it’s happy ending, because that’s the film I fell in love with, and for a long time that was the only version I had ever known. Also, the happy ending does play better despite its structural shortcomings. Seymour pulls Audrey out of the plant’s mouth in time for her to survive. Seymour now electrocutes and destroys the plant with a live electrical wire - though it’s never been clear to me how he managed to do this without electrocuting himself, too. And then Audrey and Seymour escape to marry and settle down in a quaint tract home, though one which we discover has a tiny baby plant smiling in the front yard right before the credits roll. It’s an emotionally satisfying ending because we’ve so bonded with Audrey and Seymour that we do want to see them live happily ever after and can talk ourselves into believing they deserve it because of the adversity they’ve had to overcome in their lives on Skid Row. That said, I’m glad we have the original ending, too. Seymour is complicit in the death of two people, and it’s weird that he gets to live happily ever after. Also, the scenes of the plant rampage are noteworthy because they’re not happening on Skid Row. It’s the cityfolk and suburbanites that stand by and allow the misery Skid Row to exist in the first place that are under attack. It’s this total package, even including the two endings, that makes Little Shop of Horrors my favorite project Howard Ashman was associated with. His lyrics are always extraordinary, the very idea of adapting the original Little Shop of Horrors as a musical is such a big swing of an idea that it’s a marvel that it works at all, the fact that he can take such a silly premise and still have so much worthwhile to say with it is that much more impressive still. You can keep your Little Mermaid, your Beauty & the Beast, and your Aladdin; Little Shop of Horrors is better than them all and the one that I’m most looking forward to sharing with my kids one day. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

As much as we may enjoy an underdog tale of smart and scrappy upstarts taking on the rich kids, the sad lesson of Moneyball is that the rich kids may beat the smart kids anyway, and then copy all of the smart kids’ best ideas. The wonder of Moneyball is that it delivers on all of the human drama of a typical sports movie - even giving you a nail-biting game-winning walk-off home run - while actually telling a story mostly about the unfeeling market forces chugging away underneath that drama. Moneyball is both a fairly bleak film about the unsettling dynamics of a world where people are reduced numbers and numbers are king, and it is also one where the stories of the people living in that world are still affecting despite that fact. Micheal Lewis’s 2003 book, "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," was written about the 2002 season of the major league baseball team, the Oakland A’s. Lewis didn’t know how the season was going to turn out when he started the book but was drawn to the topic because of the anomalous track record of the team in prior seasons. Just the year before, in 2001, the team had the second-lowest payroll in the game, less than a third that of the team with the highest payroll, while also managing to win the second-most games. It seemed like the team had found some secret that other teams hadn’t picked up on yet, and Lewis wanted a front-row seat to their follow-up to see if he could find out what they were doing differently. Lewis was, in some ways, an ideal person to take on this project. First, because he wasn’t a baseball writer or someone otherwise connected to the game. Coming from a background working on Wall Street, and later a second career as a journalist writing on business, finance, and economics, Lewis didn’t approach baseball with any more prejudice or preconceptions than the average fan. What Lewis would discover was that a growing organizing principle of the Oakland A’s was to challenge the existing orthodoxies inside baseball in order to take advantage of the market inefficiencies they found - something Lewis was highly qualified to understand and explain to others. Second, a hallmark of Lewis’s work is that, no matter how technical the subject he is trying to convey, he has a peerless ability to ground that information in the stories of the people personally involved. The film centers on the General Manager of the A’s: Billy Beane. The book expands the world a bit beyond that, but Beane is largely the central figure there as well. Beane, played in the film by Brad Pitt, personifies the tension at play in the story. Before becoming the GM of the A’s, he had a disappointing career as a major league ballplayer. His career was particularly disappointing because, coming out of high school, the consensus view of the team scouts that saw him play was that he was something like the most promising young player in the country - a can’t-miss prospect that would go on to miss. In the book, Lewis takes more time than the movie does to outline that what killed Billy Beane’s career is that he could never make peace with the unavoidable struggle and failure involved in developing into a professional player. What the scouts saw in Billy was a strong, fast, tall, graceful, handsome, athlete, in the very mold of what a baseball player should look like. What Billy discovered too late was that his anger and fear of failure, fueled by his struggles on the field, stopped him from getting out of his own way enough to turn his ability in to results. What it turns out makes Beane the perfect person to challenge baseball’s conventional wisdom was how wrong that wisdom ended up being about him. What’s driving Beane is a desire not just for his team to win games, but to win the World Series, and to do that in spite of the comparatively meager resources available to his team. And it’s not just that he’s driven to win, but specifically, to win with the cards he’s been dealt. In the 2002 season, the newest challenge for him to contend with was that three of his best players were leaving for more lucrative contracts with richer teams and that they would need to be replaced. Beane can’t buy the best players the way other teams can, so if he is going to field a winning team, he’s going to need to find value where no one else is looking. Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill, is a renamed version of the actual A’s Assistant GM, Paul DePodesta. Brand is an economics major from Yale who is fluent in the different approaches to player evaluation that Beane needs. Instead of leaning into traditional scouting - that is subjectively evaluating the players by watching them play - Brand was part of a growing movement that leaned heavily into primarily evaluating players by analyzing the numbers - hits, walks, strikeouts, etc. - that they’ve produced in games. As informative as traditional scouting might be, trying to evaluate a player’s abilities by sight is unavoidably susceptible to bias. By eliminating everything about the player that can’t be reduced to a measurable number, Brand and Beane are able to identify the players that other teams haven’t noticed yet, making it possible to sign those players to contracts for less than what they should actually be worth. For the story, this is where things start to get really interesting. On one hand, this is the tale of a numbers-based approach to running a baseball team that’s exclusively looking to maximize runs as a means to win games. On the other hand, this is also the human story of an intense, recently divorced GM, in Beane, who is driven to win because of how much he hates losing and failure; an Assistant GM in Brand who feels like an outsider trying to prove that his way is better than the old ways; and a team of somewhat misfit toys being given opportunities to prove themselves that no other teams would be willing to offer. The analytic approach that Beane and Brand are espousing doesn’t treat individual events on a baseball field, individual games, or even individual players as especially important in the long run of a season. What matters is the total number of runs the team scores over what their opponents score, and how that impacts their total number of wins at year's end. Beane can’t actually embody that principle, though. He still cares so much about the moment-to-moment successes, or even more about not failing, that he can’t even bring himself to watch his team’s games. However numbers-oriented the approach, the numbers will always need to be interpreted by people, to make decisions about people. The misfit toys that Beane and Brand find are Scott Hatteberg, David Justice, and Jeremy Giambi. Jeremy Giambi is the younger brother of the best player the A’s lost, Jason Giambi, who is largely overlooked by other teams because he is a very slow runner, a poor fielder, and has a reputation for partying. David Justice is a former great player, now overlooked by other teams largely for the sin of reaching the advanced age of 36. Scott Hatteberg was a catcher who suffered nerve damage in his throwing arm that prevented him from playing that position anymore. Where other teams saw a catcher that couldn’t play anymore, Brand and Beane saw a great hitter they could try to hide on the field at first base, where he hopefully wouldn’t be called upon to throw enough to hurt the team. These three players almost feel like caricatures of the kinds of players you would invent for a sports movie. That’s part of what helps ground this as a feel-good story. You genuinely feel good about watching these overlooked and undervalued players succeed. But, those good feelings aren’t quite everything they seem. These are the three players we’re following at the outset, but Jeremy Giambi gets traded to another team early in the season because he isn’t gelling with the team plan. Narratively, you expect him to finish the year with the team, and it feels abrupt that he was introduced into the story only to be unceremoniously traded, but he helps represent the point that the players are largely just widgets to plug in or dispose of as circumstances demand. With David Justice, we see a conversation between him and Beane where Beane bluntly lays out for him that what Beane wants to do is squeeze out every last bit of value out of the end of Justice’s career, and in exchange for that what Justice gets is to keep being paid to play a little bit longer. In the film, it plays as a scene where Justice is mature enough to understand that as the deal. In the book, though, that conversation happens, but it doesn’t include Justice at all. It’s something that DePodesta says to Lewis, bluntly laying out how the team sees its players, but also saying how you could never actually tell the players that. Hatteberg in some ways makes for a more traditional hero for the story, in that we get to see him as the inverse of Beane: presented with challenges that really should end his career, he is able to overcome that adversity to find success anyway. He learns to make himself into a capable first baseman against long odds and his own fear of failure. And he plays the key role in the seemingly feel-good sports movie happy ending, except that winds up not being the end of the story at all. The third act of the film is about the team’s history-making twenty-game winning streak, focused on the nail-biting twentieth game. The team goes up by 11 runs early. We watch Beane start to let his guard down and actually enjoy what is looking to be a historic moment. We watch him struggle to keep it together as the opposing team comes back and ties the game up. We watch Scott Hatteberg come to the plate and hit a game-winning walk-off home run. We’re elated. But, as soon as it’s over, Beane says to Brand: it’s just another game. And it is. It’s a storybook moment, but it’s the season that counts, proof that their methods work. And, in the end, the Oakland A’s do go on to make the playoffs but get knocked out by another team in the first round. Only one team gets to win the last game of the season, and once again, it won’t be them. After the season, Beane takes a meeting with the owner of the Boston Red Sox, where he is offered more money than any GM in baseball history to come to work his magic on their team, to lead a team front office that is already being built to employ those methods whether he comes over or not. Interestingly, Beane turned down the money, opting to remain in Oakland, so he could stay close to his teenage daughter. This doesn’t come up in Michal Lewis’s book. The interactions between Billy, his ex-wife, and daughter feel like the sort of truth-bending for the sake of a good story that Aaron Sorkin might have added to his draft of the screenplay, but it’s true. Beane has said in interviews since that he stayed in Oakland for his daughter and has never regretted it since. The Red Sox, on the other hand, using Oakland’s methods, and combining them with the league’s second-highest payroll, would go on without him to win the first of three World Series titles in 2007. Part of what makes Moneyball interesting to me is that it feels strange, yet right, that the ending is as upbeat as it is. Yes, Beane’s team loses in the playoffs. They don’t even make it to the World Series and they still haven’t in all the years since. Beane turns down the big contract that would have given him his best shot to build a team that could win the World Series. But, we don’t really care because he seems happy, driving along listening to the song his daughter recorded for him. He’s happy where he is, trying to win with what he has, and getting to watch his daughter grow up. The baseball in this film winds up just being the setting for a different and more personal story being told; one where, despite it all, the important things about life can’t be reduced down to mere numbers. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th & 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Something I have found helpful to remember is that there are important differences between loneliness and solitude. While these two feelings can overlap in a person in a given moment, it’s generally one or the other that is primarily felt at a time. Both feelings are characterized by either being alone or standing apart from others, but an important distinction is that, while loneliness is generally undesirable and painful, solitude is typically welcome and sought after. One might choose solitude to be able to think without distraction or to be able to enjoy something like a walk or a book with complete focus, or simply, for a break from everything that comes from being around others. Solitude, in moderation, is generally healthy and needed. What distinguishes loneliness from solitude is that loneliness is not something that one generally chooses. It requires others, specifically a feeling of unwelcome separation from others, to make feelings of loneliness salient; and it often, though not always, takes love and acceptance from others for feelings of loneliness to dissipate. I raise these larger, hopefully universal, points about the interplay of feelings of love, loneliness, and solitude as entry to challenge a particular bit of conventional wisdom about Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence - specifically that the ending of the film in some way ruins or undermines the story. When A.I. was released twenty years ago, and in the intervening years, it has been criticized for an ending that has been called too long, too saccharine or too much of a departure from the story that preceded it. In my view, it’s actually the ending, exactly as it is, that makes the film among the very best storytelling that Steven Spielberg has ever done. A.I. is genuinely my favorite Spielberg film. It’s the film of his that I’ve seen the most and by far the one that I’ve thought the most about. I don’t have a bad word to say about his many other widely acknowledged classics, but A.I. has always felt specifically tailored for me. I remember looking forward to it coming out as this impossible-seeming quasi-collaboration between Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick had been developing the project for decades prior to his death. And it mattered that Spielberg had something like Kubrick’s imprimatur for continuing the project, since they had long discussed it during Kubrick’s life, and had even toyed with the idea of Spielberg directing the film while Kubrick produced. At that time, knowing what the film would require, and even now knowing how the film ultimately turned out, it makes sense that Kubrick would see it as a project well within Spielberg’s wheelhouse because of the demands of both the cutting-edge special effects the project required, as well as the very demanding performance that would need to be coaxed out of the young child actor at the center of the story. Though some were, and remain, disappointed to have not seen this project come to fruition under Kubrick’s direction, I don’t actually believe he could have delivered on it as effectively as Spielberg did. Had Kubrick not died, he had hoped to go into production on A.I. right after completing his final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut - itself an interesting meditation on the interplay between love and isolation in our relationships. Conveniently, Spielberg was perfectly positioned to take over the project, but the expectations for this collaboration may have grown higher than any film could actually deliver on. This, in some sense, contributed to the frequent criticism that the film’s ending received: a misperception that Spielberg tacked on a saccharine and incongruous happy ending. This criticism is demonstrably wrong on two important points. First, the beginning and end of the film are extremely faithful to what Kubrick had plotted and storyboarded; second, and much more importantly, I think anyone characterizing the ending of the film as saccharine has misunderstood the story being told. In the opening narration and first scene of the film, we learn that, due to catastrophic climate change, necessary population limits have led to restrictions on how many children couples are allowed to have. We first meet Prof. Hobby (our analog to Gepetto in this loose adaptation of Pinnochio) - who is an expert in robotics and artificial intelligence - giving a lecture to fellow researchers at the company Cybertronics. Prof. Hobby pitches his plan for the company to create a mecha child that can be programmed to feel genuine love. As a point of contrast in this lecture, he introduces a current model of lover mecha which, though spectacularly life-like, is merely executing programs to gratify people’s physical needs. Prof. Hobby is looking to demonstrate the difference between what current technology could allow at the time - largely mechanistic programmed responses - versus what he was looking to create: genuine conscious emotions. Noted, but not belabored here, is that Prof. Hobby still sees these as analogous unidirectional services. As the lover mecha services physical needs, so the mecha child will service emotional needs. The moral problem of this project is explicitly called out in a question posed to Prof. Hobby during the presentation: “If we could create a mecha child capable of genuine love, what obligation, if any, would we have towards that child? What obligation does any parent have to their child? What is a child permitted to do when those obligations go unmet?” The whole of the film ends up being an exploration of these sorts of questions. We are introduced to David, our protagonist, as a finished prototype of Prof. Hobby’s intended design, being given for testing to the family of one of Cybertronics’s employees. The family in question was chosen specifically because of a personal tragedy that made them especially suitable. The husband and wife, Henry and Monica, had a young child, Martin, who was being kept in some kind of suspended animation due to a medical condition that the science of the day does not yet have a way to address. The strain of the situation is clear in the couple as they are caught in limbo, indefinitely grieving for a child that is neither alive nor dead. Henry brings David home for Monica in the hopes that it will help with her grief, with the understanding that he can always bring David back to the company, up to the point that either of them initiates the programming that would activate and permanently imprint David’s love for them. From that point, once the mecha child has been imprinted, if the family changes their mind, or presumably if the imprinted members of the family die, then the mecha must be returned to Cybertronics to be destroyed. This policy highlights the disposable manner in which these mecha are regarded. As a plot device, the story requires that imprinted mecha can’t just be deprogrammed, but it indirectly says something about how the company views the mecha; their only solution to this problem is to destroy them. On one hand, Cybertronics, and Prof. Hobby, know that for these mecha to experience genuine love, they need to have the kind of conscious mind required for something like real emotion. So much so that their policy sees it as a necessary mercy that these mecha be destroyed if the object of their imprinted love changes their mind. However, if by analogy you swapped a pet for the child mecha in this scenario, it should become obvious how monstrous this policy actually is. And how terrible it is that this is the best they can think to do. David’s time with Henry and Monica is short-lived. Monica does warm to David as his kindness and innocence lure her out of her grief. She even decides to execute the program that leads David to imprint on her. Henry likes David just fine but is mostly just happy to see his wife happy again. For a spell, they live together in domestic bliss. Circumstances change when their son, Martin, has an unexpected recovery, gradually turning David into an outgrown accessory that no longer fits into their family. Monica, unable to bring herself to return David to the Cybertronics for destruction, instead abandons him in the woods and drives off in a truly heartbreaking scene. Monica may have taken an action that allows her to clear her conscience in the moment, believing herself to be acting out of love, but if we return to the analogy of imagining David the way we would if someone abandoned a pet in the woods rather than taking it to be destroyed, what Monica does here is quite monstrous. David’s love for his mother is hardwired and unshakeable, though, so he will never be able to see it that way. Like any other child who doesn’t get to choose their parents, David doesn’t get to choose who he imprints on, and he needs to learn to go on with his life within these fixed constraints. It’s the imprinting that makes all the difference in how David feels being abandoned. Had he not yet been imprinted, he would feel solitary, perhaps even lonely, but it’s being denied an outlet for the love he’s been imprinted to feel that pains him being abandoned this way. In a state of solitude, he might still have had a different adventure, needing to figure out how to make his way in the world, but it’s the painfully lonely feeling of being discarded that drives him for the rest of the story. If Monica loves her real child, Martin, then for David it makes sense that if he can become a real boy like Martin, like in Pinocchio , then Monica will love him, too. David is simple and pure in this desire, but the audience is already ahead of him, knowing that this can’t possibly work out. The story takes an important detour here to allow us to see different guises of human loneliness. We’re introduced to a lover mecha named Gigolo Joe. We first meet Joe servicing a lonely female client, seeking mecha companionship for the first time. After this tryst, we follow him to another client, whom he discovers has been murdered by her husband. They are a broken couple: a wife who sought outside companionship, and a husband who felt so betrayed that he would rather see her dead than happy. Though not as emotionally sophisticated a mecha as David, Joe has enough sense of self-preservation to recognize that he will need to go on the lam to avoid being blamed and destroyed for this murder. It’s in his attempted escape that he meets David and they stumble upon the “Flesh Fair.” The Flesh Fair is something like a monster truck rally where people who hate robots can see them be violently destroyed. Now, as distasteful as an angry mob maybe, it’s not straightforward to see why it might be best seen through a prism of loneliness. However, Hannah Arendt (noted political theorist and philosopher) has had some interesting things to say about the things the corrosive nature of loneliness can push people to do: the idea that the need for belonging and inclusion can drive people to subsume themselves within a hateful mob because it feels better than the loneliness of not being a part of anything at all. This may be a stretch, and very possibly something not at all what Spielberg intended, but thanks to recent history, I have difficulty not seeing any angry mob through a prism of the things loneliness can motivate us to do just to belong. Joe and David escape the Flesh Fair. For as much as the crowd hates mecha, David is too real for them, too much like a real boy for them to see him as otherwise, so the crowd turns on the event organizers, allowing David and Joe a chance to escape in the chaos. There is some irony in David being saved by a crowd that would otherwise gleefully destroy him for what he is because they actually see him as what he is trying to become. Ultimately, Joe and David will make their way in an amphibicopter to the Manhattan offices of Cybertronics, in a skyscraper half-submerged by the risen water levels. Here they will find Prof. Hobby, and, David hopes, also The Blue Fairy he read about in Pinocchio that can turn him into a real boy. It’s here at Cybertronics where we see David’s sense of self shattered. Even before he meets Prof. Hobby, he encounters another David mecha - simpler in the ways that our David was before he had been imprinted. In this David mecha, our David sees an unexpected rival for Monica’s affection that he is in the midst of destroying in a fit of jealous fear and anger when Prof. Hobby finds him. Despite the destruction, Prof. Hobby is thrilled by David’s appearance. Not only for having located this missing mecha, but because our David has become proof of concept for what his project was aiming at - David has grown beyond his programming to feel, and think, and dream for himself. In expressing his excitement to David, however, Prof. Hobby says the thing that pushes David to unravel. David says that he thought he was special, that he was one of a kind. Prof. Hobby replies that his son, who David is designed to resemble, was one of a kind, while David is the first of a kind. Prof. Hobby leaves David for a moment to bring the rest of his team in to meet David. While he’s by himself, David walks into the next room where he sees dozens of David mecha hanging from the wall. In a striking effect, he looks through the eyeholes of a David mecha, his own face lit blue by the glowing circuitry, and sees through the office window the statue from the Cybertronics logo that clearly was the first inspiration for what had grown into his dream of the Blue Fairy. He sees box after box of David and Darlene mecha ready for shipment, and it’s too much for him. He walks outside and sits on the ledge of the Cybertronics offices before letting himself fall off the ledge and into the ocean. Here is as likely a spot as anywhere the common antagonistic view may have preferred the movie to end, where people may have mistakenly thought Kubrick would have ended the movie, and it’s only Spielberg’s meddling that gives us the final act that follows. I’m of a different view. When Prof. Hobby leaves David alone in the office, it’s important that this is the last real human we will encounter in the story. Gigolo Joe, back in the helicopter, sees David fall and rescues him from the water before Joe himself is apprehended. While in the water, David sees what he is sure is the place where The Blue Fairy lives, and he takes the amphibicopter there. The Blue Fairy is a statue in the Pinocchio section of a storybook park in Coney Island. David lands the copter directly in front of the statue of The Blue Fairy, but the copter becomes pinned under a collapsing Ferris wheel David had disturbed during his descent. In what could be the second possible ending to the film, we could easily leave David here, endlessly repeating a prayer to The Blue Fairy to make him a real boy, while the amphibicopter’s lights die and the ocean slowly freezes around him. We are given a further coda to the story, though. 2000 years later, David is discovered in the ice by the far advanced mecha of the future that has long outlived and evolved beyond the humans that they were initially been built to serve. It’s these evolved mecha that revive David, allowing him to finally get out of the amphibicopter to touch The Blue Fairy, which promptly shatters to pieces in his hands. The evolved mecha are interested in David as an ancient mecha from the time when humans were still alive, but, as becomes clear, as they access his memories and are able to download and share his experiences amongst one another, they also empathize with him. This is truly the first time in the story that anyone has truly been able to empathize with David. The crowd at the Flesh Fair came close, but their outrage at how he was treated was rooted in them believing he was actually a human child. These evolved mecha share a lineage with David, and like him, can think, and feel, and dream for themselves. It’s from empathy for him that they attempt to give David something like what has been driving him all along. They give him a living dream where for one day they are able to recreate a replica of Monica, sort of briefly pulling her through time thanks to a lock of her hair. For just one day David would get to experience his mother’s love for him. And he does. They have a perfect day together, and as she fades as the day ends, he puts her to bed, she tells him that she loves him and always has. And with that seemingly perfect moment, David goes to sleep by her side, shutting himself down for both the first and last time. It’s this final section of the ending that many found so hard to swallow because it felt like a tacked-on happy ending, but I don’t think that really appreciates just how little David actually achieves of what he was striving for. Prof. Hobby doesn’t help him, instead of focusing on wanting to study what David’s become. The Blue Fairy doesn’t make him a real boy, that dream literally crumbles in his hands. When The Blue Fairy appears to him in his perfect daydream, she is actually voiced by one of the evolved Mecha, who explicitly tells David that she cannot make him a real boy. David doesn’t really get Monica back in any meaningful sense. He gets a simulation of her, that, no matter how literally you want to take the evolved mecha’s explanation that they’ve pulled Monica through time to live this day with him, it is still the Monica that in her own timeline will abandon David as soon as he becomes inconvenient. David does get this one perfect happy day, but when it’s over he lets himself die because this is the best he can ever hope for. There is some happiness to this ending, but saccharine it most certainly is not. Each of the three sections of the ending serves a function. David is at his loneliest and most hopeless when he is let down by Prof. Hobby. He rallies when he sees The Blue Fairy, but he has to sit in his solitary prayer for two millennia. His prayer is finally answered, but not by The Blue Fairy, which crumbles to pieces in his hands. He gets to have his magical happy day with Monica, he gets to hear her tell him that she loves him and always has, but this is still the Monica that will go on to abandon him in her future. The most genuine love, empathy, and compassion that David is given are actually from the evolved mecha who brings Monica back for him, who we also realize are narrating David’s story. As a real parent should, it’s the evolved mecha who care for David without condition, and without asking anything from him in return. For me, the ending of A.I. Is a happy one, in that David is finally loved and accepted exactly as he is, but the ending is also complex and bittersweet in that it’s not really by Monica that he is accepted, but rather by the evolved mecha, the real Blue Fairies who finally grant his wish. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Picture late-career Tim Curry, spotlit and standing in the center of a darkened Broadway stage. Imagine him singing mournfully of personal loneliness in the face of great responsibility, but in a way that conveys how that loneliness also reflects something deeper and universal about the loneliness of the human condition. His voice is rich and, despite the schmaltziness of the tune, you can’t help but feel somewhat moved by it. Now, picture him doing all this while dressed as Arthur, King of the Britons, and being mockingly accompanied in the song by his ever-present servant, Patsy, whom Arthur obtusely fails to recognize as a potential candidate to answer the central want of his song. The song in question is “I’m All Alone”, from Spamalot, the musical adaptation of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Curry’s handling of the song is impressive because of how well he is able to convey both the humor and pathos of the song. Arthur does feel genuinely melancholy in this moment, which Curry delivers completely straight, even in the face of an uproarious audience and Patsy’s interjections. And still, Curry’s performance does come across as funny, but he gets there in character, without needing to wink at the audience to sell the laughs. There is something I think under-appreciated about the kind of work Curry is doing here that is part of what draws me to write about him. An unfortunate hallmark of his long career is that he has frequently been the brightest spot of some otherwise very unsuccessful projects, and I think this may have obscured just how talented he has been. There could be a temptation - particularly given the number of commercial failures he has been in that has gone on to develop a rabid following - to label him as a cult film actor. To do so would not only miss how good he was in those cultish films but would also fail to account for how impressive and versatile he has been in his career. On stage, Curry’s breakout, and most well-known role, came as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the original London stage production of The Rocky Horror Show. But, he was also a three-time Tony nominee. First, for the role of Mozart in the original Broadway run of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in 1981. Again for the musical My Favorite Year in 1993. And finally for Spamalot in 2005. In terms of acting credits, the overwhelming majority of Curry’s work has actually come from voice acting. This change in direction began in earnest after the twin flops of Clue and Legend in 1985. Aside from being a recurring presence in many of the cartoons of my childhood like Tiny Toon Adventures, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, Captain Planet, Gargoyles, or Freakazoid! , he won an Emmy for his work as Captain Hook in Peter and the Pirates and was nominated for a Grammy as the narrator of The Bad Beginning , the first book in the series, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. A mere cult film actor, Curry is not. That Curry would find such success in voice work makes sense to me given how expressive and multi-faceted his performances could often be. Some of what Curry was doing as Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror , could be missed because of how big that character and film are, but he is really doing something nuanced throughout. Notably, in his last song of the film, “I’m Going Home”, Curry makes a believable shift from the limitless bravado he’s embodied for much of the film, to an almost maudlin vulnerability. And, while he’s sincerely conveying the homesickness in the song that the story demands, he is also delivering a knowingly Judy Garland-esque performance for a phantasmic audience it seems only he can see. It really should be too much and is in a way, but it completely works because of how well Curry sells it. Similarly, another quirk of Rocky Horror that relies entirely on Curry to succeed is that, by all rights, Frank-N-Furter should be the unambiguous villain of the tale, but he is the character that we’re mourning at the end of the film. Over the course of the story, we see him trap two stranded motorists, later sexual assaulting each of them, remove half the brain from one person to turn another into a living sex toy, before murdering that unwilling donor and feeding the remains to his dinner guests. This is a monstrous character as written, that has also been hailed for decades as a symbol of self-expression and tolerance for difference. That is just bonkers and is wholly a credit to Curry’s performance. The loveable or irresistible villain may be the most common theme of the characters Curry has played. There is something impish and mischievous he brings to his roles that makes it hard to treat the characters he plays as actually evil. Ridley Scott had a seemingly impossible wishlist when he was looking to cast the role of Darkness in his 1985 film, Legend. He needed someone who could convincingly play something like the Devil. He needed an actor that could simultaneously project menace, sexuality, power, and give a theatrically operatic performance, all while wearing stilts, and being covered head to toe in makeup and prosthetics. Scott had seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and based on how brave and compelling he thought Tim Curry’s performance in that film was, Scott knew that Curry was just about the only actor who could pull off a role like Darkness. Scott turned out to be right. Curry is extraordinary in the role, and easily the best and most memorable part of an otherwise mixed film. It’s impressive that Curry was able to do as much with the role as he did because of the limitations he had to contend with. In terms of the costume, some of the heavy lifting of the role was done by just how impressive he looked, but in terms of performance, his mobility and sight were so limited by that makeup and prosthetics that about the only tool left for him to work with was his voice. In the same spirit of Darkness, Curry’s performance as Pennywise the Clown is the most memorable part of the 1990’s TV mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s It . It’s interesting to compare his performance against that of Bill Skarsgård in the same role for the 2017/2019 film adaptations of that story. This is something it’s hard to see past my own possible bias based on how old I was when I first saw it, but coming almost 30 years earlier, it’s Curry’s performance that I still find far more chilling. The biggest difference between the two seems to be that, though Skarsgård plays a compelling monster, particularly heightened by more modern costuming and effects, Curry’s performance hinges on him commuting to largely playing Pennywise like an actual schlocky clown and letting the horror build off of that. That choice gives him more range in that he’s actually able to bring humor that heightens the tensest scenes. It would go a bit far to say that one finds themselves rooting for Curry’s Pennywise, but it is true that he’s just about the only part of that 90’s adaptation that made an impression. An almost perfect inverse to Curry’s performance as Pennywise is his portrayal of Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island . What’s most impressive about this role is that Curry manages to make Silver just as believable as a dangerous cutthroat as he is as a surrogate father figure to the young boy protagonist, Jim Hawkins. In those moments where it makes sense to play the scene for tension, Curry does; When the scene calls for warmth he plays that just as sincerely; And, when the scene requires him to sing alongside his muppet costars, he takes to it with gusto. In the case of the song “A Professional Pirate”, he needs to do all three in quick succession and he lands it perfectly. It’s a performance that would almost come off too manic to be coherent, but Curry seems to recognize how much wider a palette he can paint within the Muppet universe. All of this brings us to the role that I think may best capture what I’m trying to highlight with Tim Curry. The degree to which Clue works as a film hinges on a dizzying and multifaceted performance from him that needs to work for three different endings to the story. The endings break down into the two in which Curry, as Wadsworth the Butler, solves the case, and the final ending in which Curry, as Mr. Boddy, is the villain. Now, we’re talking about a broad, farcical comedy, so suspension of disbelief does some of the heavy lifting, easing the way towards being able to accept Curry as either the hero or the villain of the story, but it matters that there is something compelling about Curry’s villainous turn in the final ending that doesn’t leave the audience feeling cheated, or like the ending hasn’t been earned. Curry’s performance throughout the film is impressive, particularly the break-neck pace at which he is solving the murders in the final act, but it would be all for naught if he had lost the audience for any of the three endings. He pulls it off, though. He’s convincing as the hero. And, even more importantly, while revealing himself to be the villain, he overcomes the fact that this final ending does not make a whole lot of sense in relation to the rest of the film. There is something so welcome about Curry’s heel turn, that the viewer just goes with it, even welcomes it. I think there is something a bit magical about that, and, like so many of his roles, I don’t know that there is anyone else that could have pulled it off. Thankfully, Tim Curry is still with us for his 75th year, but an unfortunate stroke in 2012 has largely deprived us of his presence onscreen. His last acting role came that same year in a previously filmed performance of Eric Idle’s What About Dick? After that, a few voice performances that he had recorded before his stroke trickled out over the next few years. Rarely appearing in public at all, it seemed likely that this would have been the end of Curry’s career. Fortunately, and unexpectedly, he managed to find the perfect bookend to his career with a pair of returns to the story that started it all. With the help of some judicious editing, he was able to play the Criminologist in the 2016 TV Adaptation, The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again. And, in 2020, with a great deal of help from his fellow cast members, he was able to return to the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter as part of a live-streamed performance to raise money for the Wisconsin Democratic Party ahead of the 2020 elections. The limitations of his speech are apparent in both, but each of these performances is still worth seeking out if only to see the infectious light to the man that still shines through. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself recently premiered on Hulu. It is a filmed version of his stage show of the same name, which ran off-Broadway for 552 performances between 2016 and 2018. Ostensibly a magic show, its aspirations are much greater than that. As DelGaudio challenges the idea of himself as a magician, his show is structured around a much larger question about personal identity, and both the boxes we put ourselves in, as well as the boxes we let others put us in. Some things are usually lost in the filming of a live performance. Unavoidable is the loss of the immediacy and intimacy of the experience. Last year’s David Byrne’s American Utopia did an admirable job of replacing that loss in immediacy with a visual experience better than any live audience member could have had. For a one-man show like Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself, similar flourishes are employed, but the nature of the show is so deeply rooted in it being a momentary and in-person experience that it adds a peculiar gloss to everything you see. Since DelGaudio, and director Frank Oz, couldn’t replicate the real experience of seeing a performance of the show for yourself, they steer into that challenge by layering multiple performances throughout, in key moments of the show. If a volunteer is called up to the stage, you won’t just see one person’s experience of that moment, but rather five, or ten, or more, lending a little bit of a live and spontaneous vibrancy to that moment. You may not be in the room, but you’ll find your empathy triggered often by seeing the experiences and reactions of the people in the room. As we said, at first glance, In & Of Itself is a magic show. It’s on the basis of that premise, and his notoriety as an award-winning magician, that DelGaudio got people to buy tickets and come see his show. The structure of the show is broken into six sections, one for every chamber in a revolver, and each section is built around magic. The magic itself manages to be both wonderful and wholly incidental, though. Rather than the stories that DelGaudio tells merely justifying the tricks he goes on to perform, the stories are the heart of the show with the magic built around them to illuminate his themes. To delve too far into the content of the show would do a real disservice to anyone reading this that hasn’t watched it yet. But, I think there is some value in going into even your first viewing being aware of the discussion it’s trying to have around personal identity. The tag line to the stage show was “Identity is an Illusion”. What better way to defend that point than with illusions? It spoils nothing to say that one of the first images of the show is the wall of white cards in the lobby of the theater. As attendees entered, they were directed to pick a card from the wall. The cards were in two halves. The top half that said “I AM” and a bottom half that said something like “A Nurse”, or “An Optimist”, or “A Freewheeler”. The wall had many more options than there were seats in the theater, so even if the people arriving later had fewer choices, they still had options to pick from if they wanted to take the exercise seriously. In that early shot, you see people scrutinizing the wall, reading the options, seemingly wanting to pick something good, something that felt right and true to something in them. Not everyone’s experience of this exercise can be the same, but there is something deep to this choice. It means something to say to yourself and others that this is who I am; It means something that other people's choices will have an effect on who you get to say you are; It means something that your options are many, but not limitless, and that they will dwindle as time goes by. It also means something that when you enter the theater, the usher takes your card, tears it like any ordinary ticket, keeps the identity that you’ve chosen, and gives you back a card that only says “I AM”. For me, this whole exercise, from beginning to end, functions like an overture that gives you everything you need to understand the movements and themes of what you're about to see. It’s also worth noting something about the journey that DelGaudio goes through over the course of the show, too. Considering that one goes into a magic show expecting something light, and fun, and wonderous, it’s striking that DelGaudio gives the audience something more personal and challenging. He’s not merely going to talk about personal Identity as an abstract social construct, but rather use stories from his own life, stories he readily admits to not necessarily being proud of, to illustrate his points. The show wants to challenge how people see themselves, and he’s willing to make himself surprisingly vulnerable in service of that end. To say anything more, I think, would detract from the experience. It’s a genuinely impressive work that, much like people, amounts to something much greater than the sum of its parts. I strongly recommend checking it out. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Were we to reboot 2020 and try again, I would have some notes. That aside, this year was a pretty great year in film for me. Each of the first five entries on my list was the best I had seen up to that point in the year, and that experience of watching a high bar get set and then cleared, over and over again, was pretty thrilling. This was also a very good year for me in terms of being blindsided by the quality of some low-expectation projects, and first-time directors. I eagerly await the return to some sort of normalcy in terms of movie-going and movie-product but am grateful that this was anything but a lost year in terms of content. Honorable Mention: Saint Frances - Written by and starring Kelly O’Sullivan, the film relates the story of a woman starting a new job as a first-time nanny while recovering from an abortion, for a couple that is struggling with how hard the jump from one to two children can be for every facet of their life. Kelly O’Sullivan is great in the lead, but Ramona Edith Williams as six-year-old Frances makes the film work. One of the more compelling portrayals of child-rearing I’ve seen. This was the last film cut from my top ten list, and that says something about these kinds of lists, in that it was competing for the top of the list for a while in the weeks after I saw it. Sometimes things drop just because there isn’t time to rewatch everything. Depending on when I made the list, this spot could have just as easily gone to Mank, Boys State, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, or even for an interesting moment, the surprising Bill & Ted Face the Music. #10. Buffaloed - This is the most surprising film on this list for me. In a lot of ways, it is just a light, fun comedy, but I love the bright and optimistic get-rich-quick energy that Zoey Deutch brings to her scammer-turned-debt-collector, Peg. I also like that it finds a light way to engage with how odious unregulated debt collection is, while ultimately placing it in a context of problems with the finance industry writ large. #9. Spontaneous - This odd film manages to simultaneously capture the roiling literally about-to-burst feeling of being a teenager, the perpetual low-level fear of school shootings, and the terror of living through a mysterious epidemic, but with jokes. I may be a good two decades removed from being the target demographic for this film, but it worked for me in a big way, all the way through. #8. Yes, God Yes - In terms of demographic, I am the dead center of the bullseye for this film: a religious school kid, that went through puberty at the AOL-stage of the internet era. Natalia Dyer perfectly captures that combination of the curiosity, ignorance, and embarrassment, of growing up, particularly in an environment that won’t take seriously the difference between how kids naturally are, and the boxes misguided adults will try to push them into. #7. One Night in Miami... - One would think this movie shouldn’t work because of how unlikely it would be to simultaneously cast actors who could convincingly portray Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali. Not only do they pull it off here, but for all the chatter happening around the multiple actor award nominations that might come from a film like Trial of the Chicago 7, this is a film where it would be a sin if at least two of these four didn’t come away with nominations. I would be deeply surprised if Leslie Odom Jr. didn’t win for his performance as Sam Cooke. With all the deserved attention for the acting in this film, hopefully, it won’t get lost just how great a job Regina King does adapting this from the stage to the screen. Much of the film is four men talking in a room, but she takes the time to make sure we never lose a sense of the larger world and the lives this night is a part of. #6. The Assistant - When I think back to watching The Americans, most of my clearest memories are of Julia Garner’s small supporting role as Kimmy. I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is that she does, but she manages to be utterly compelling without being at all showy. That matches what the film itself is trying to do because there is a more showy and sensational version of this story that could be told, but it is as effective as it is because of how natural and mundane it treats what’s going on. #5. The Vast of Night - This is the film on my list I can most readily summon the feeling I had while watching it. There is just a gripping, eerie vibe to this Twilight Zone/The Outer Limits pastiche that lingers long after it’s over. The pacing is something special, setting a rapid-fire opening walk-and-talk, that accentuates when the film does throttle things down to the anxious near-stillness of some of the conversations. Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz are great as the leads, but it really is the feeling of building, breathless tension that makes this film succeed. #4. Palm Springs - This was the first film I fell in love with this year. I went in having only seen the poster, so the premise was a surprise to me. I was happy there, thinking I was just going to get a solid one-note riff on Groundhog’s Day , but it manages to keep growing all the way through. It’s a little formulaic in terms of the structure of its story beats, but the content of those story points more than make up for it. Andy Samberg and J.K. Simmons are great, but the key to how much this film succeeds is how great Cristin Milioti is. #3. Sound of Metal - There are a number of things going for this film before you even get to its story. Riz Ahmed’s performance is unreal and well deserving of all the praise that it has received. For a film so deeply enmeshed in the idea of sound in our lives, it delivers one of the best sound designs I’ve ever heard in a film, impressive for what it does technically and for how it regularly underlines and highlights Ahmed’s performance without being distracting. The story itself is wonderful, always choosing the less conventional path, while never feeling forced, and still managing to culminate in an ending that perfectly bookends with how the film began. #2. David Byrne’s American Utopia - It might be tempting to dismiss this as merely a concert film, but it is so much more. This is already the film from this year that I've rewatched the most times, and the one I expect to rewatch to most for years to come. It works on a number of levels. It helps that the songs are great, but it’s the execution of the choreography that makes everything hit as hard as it does. It doesn’t hurt that Spike Lee’s direction is the perfect complement to the staging, capturing everything from something more than just the best seat in the house point of view. I also happen to love the narrative line that Byrne draws through the piece, as well as the big chances he takes in trusting the audience to follow him through his story and embrace the more adventurous pieces he and his band perform. #1. Promising Young Woman - I cannot sufficiently praise the experience of watching this movie. While there may have been some jockeying for placement between the other films on my list, as soon as the credits rolled on this film I knew it was far and away the best that I had seen this year, and probably one of the better films I’ve ever seen. I was lucky to get to go in with a blank slate and got to experience each twist without ever being ahead of the story. The script is easily the smartest of the year and executed flawlessly. Carey Mulligan gives one of the very best performances I saw this year, surrounded by a pitch-perfect supporting cast. Our coronavirus year may have stepped a bit on the discourse this film might have been a part of had it been released at this same time last year, but its explorations of issues surrounding himpathy and misogyny will likely lend it an unfortunately timeless quality. Notable films outside my top 10: Bad Education, Babyteeth, Banana Split, Boys State, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Class Action Park, Enola Holmes, Extra Ordinary, First Cow, Howard, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mangrove, Mank, On the Rocks, Other Music, The Prom, Shithouse, Soul, Trial of the Chicago 7, VHYES, The Willoughbys, Zappa Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

2021 will be a noteworthy year for David Lynch. Building on his success with the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks, he is scheduled to start production on a new limited series for Netflix this coming May. Not much is known about the project at present, but based on preliminary accounts, it looks to be a thirteen-episode series that will be titled Unrecorded Night. Also of note, not that Lynch is someone especially well known for backward-looking (though feel free to insert your own joke about backward talking), he is marking four significant milestones this year: the 35th anniversary of Blue Velvet , the 20th anniversary of Mulholland Drive, and the 15th anniversaries of both Lynch’s last film to date, Inland Empire , as well as his first book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. I’m particularly interested in looking at these four older works of Lynch’s together because of how I think they help reconcile the two radically different, and seemingly incompatible, sides that I see to his work and personality. Taken together, the three films call to mind many of the elements that people tend to associate with Lynch’s work: dark and comic surrealism, violence, sexuality, mystery, and dreams. At the same time, the David Lynch that wrote Catching the Big Fish seems to be coming at the world from a wildly different point of view. Dedicated to “his holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” Catching the Big Fish was born from Lynch’s, at that time, the 33-year practice of Transcendental Meditation, and the 2005 formation of his non-profit, The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. The book is part biography and part discussion of the life of an artist, but most revelatory to me, in relation to his work, is the discussion of the view of reality that Lynch has come to through his meditation practice. Now, don’t worry if you’re concerned that this is going to be some lengthy discussion of meditation or new age mysticism. It’s only as a background to one particular idea I want to get at that I raise the subject at all. As Lynch describes it: he believes that through practices like Transcendental Meditation, a person can dive deep within themselves to access a blissful and unified field of consciousness that all life participates in and emerges from. Beyond apparent reality, there is a shared, joyful unity of consciousness. So, with that in mind, how does the person that believes this, also come to write a character like Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth, or depict the nightmarish ordeal that Laura Dern’s characters undergo in Inland Empire ? Lynch’s life is running on two parallel paths: one path where his foundation is exploring ways to foster bliss and peace for everyone throughout the world, and the other path where his art seems to largely depict the world antithetical to that idea. Navigating this tension has led me to recast how I think about what Lynch is trying to say with his films. Looking past more work-for-hire projects like The Elephant Man or The Straight Story, for as shocking it may have been at the time, Blue Velvet may be the most straight-forward of Lynch’s films. It’s largely a noir mystery, that explores a dark, hidden world of crime and sexuality in an otherwise hyper-idyllic suburban Americana setting. Here, we’re still mostly set in the day-to-day world, but one that is more layered than first appearances indicate. The film's opening sequence begins with an iconic, cheery shot of a white picket fence, with full-bloom roses in the foreground, and a perfect blue sky in the background. The sequence builds to a man watering his lawn and then collapsing to the ground because of a stroke. The camera pushes from the man into the grass he’s laying on, then into the gnashing bustle of insects just underground - making fairly explicit the metaphor of a hidden world beneath suburban life that the film is concerned with. Our leads are Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sandy (Laura Dern), two kids who have taken it upon themselves to investigate a local woman in trouble, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Dorothy’s husband and son are being held hostage by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who is using them as leverage to force Dorothy to perform sexually for him. The choice of the name ‘Dorothy’ is no accident, as themes from The Wizard of Oz pop up frequently in Lynch’s work. Our Dorothy also finds herself unexpectedly in a strange, new world; one that she wants to find a way out of, so that she can be reunited with her family. The world that Lynch depicts in Blue Velvet is concerned with something more than just the dark underbelly of suburbia. Midway through the film, Sandy tells Jeffrey about a dream she had that is more than just a dream: In the dream, there was our world. And the world was dark because there weren’t any robins. And the robins represented love. And for the longest time there was just this darkness and all of the sudden, thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. So I guess it means, there is trouble til the robins come. This dream factors into the conclusion of the film. Dorothy has been saved, Frank has been killed, and Jeffrey and Sandy are home. The lighting of the film has returned to the idyllic lighting of the opening, before the pan down into the dirt, as if some kind of order has now been restored. The last we see of Jeffrey and Sandy, a robin has landed on the kitchen window sill with a bug in its mouth. From there, we shift to the final shot of the film where a finally free and happy Dorthy Vallens is reunited with her son. The dream coming true, the darkness of the world being vanquished by love with the return of the Robin, shows a permeability for Lynch between the actual world and the world of dreams. On rewatching Blue Velvet , I’m regularly surprised by how close to a traditional happy ending the film has, given how grisly the events of its final act are. I don’t think of this as some kind of Hollywood cop-out on Lynch’s part to get the film made, but an actual manifestation of his philosophy. Beneath the artifice and masks, the actual world is a genuinely dark place that can suck you in if you're not careful. But, if we push through the darkness, we can find light and love on the other side. Looking at Mulholland Drive would initially seem to undermine the case that I’m making with Blue Velvet , but it’s noteworthy that the way Mulholland Drive is structured, I think you’re just seeing something like the same point being made in reverse. We begin with an opening shot of the first-person perspective of a face falling into a pillow, and we discover that the first half of the movie is the happier dream of the troubled real-world person we will go on to meet in the film's second half. We begin in light and move to darkness, but that change comes because we are returning to the actual world from the world of dreams. Each half of Mulholland Drive is about a woman in trouble, but who the troubled woman is changes between the first and second half. In the first half of the film, Betty (Naomi Watts) is a fresh-faced actress finding her first success in Hollywood, while becoming entangled in a mystery surrounding an amnesiac car crash victim, going by the name Rita (Laura Harring). In this first half, everything is lit with a cheery brightness, as everything in Betty’s life seems to be breaking her way. As Betty’s world begins to destabilize, we fall out of the dream and into the actual world. Throughout, we can now see the real-world pieces from which the dream was constructed. Naomi Watts is now playing a woman named Diane Selwyn, the woman who dreamed the first half of the movie and is now a spurned lover who pays to have the woman who left her murdered, before ultimately also taking her own life. We don’t linger on Diane’s death, though. The image we see after Diane takes her life is the glimmering translucent faces of Betty and Rita from just before the dream unraveled. In this film, we move from the lightness of the dream to the darkness of the real world, but when Diane’s earthly life has ended, what we are still left with is what has survived: Betty and Rita’s love. Now Inland Empire is a little different again in that it’s hard to pin down any reality in the film at all. The bookends of the film are a woman in crisis, sitting alone and crying in a hotel room after a sexual encounter, and three hours of film later, Laura Dern, whose identity has shifted repeatedly across the intervening story, arriving in that hotel room, and freeing that troubled woman so that she can reunite with her family. To try to explain what happens in Inland Empire is well beyond the scope of this article, but the big picture view of the story is Laura Dern, in a number of guises, trying to navigate a dreamlike world that appears to have been fragmented by infidelity and misogyny. That may just be how I see it. This is not a film that lends itself to a single objective interpretation. Your mileage may vary. Like Blue Velvet , Inland Empire is also the story of a troubled woman, in unfortunate circumstances, rescued and reunited with her family. But here the story is centered on women, with most of the cast women, and what men there are in the story, largely serving as menacing, manipulative, or passive obstacles. This film is also an even fuller expression of the idea of passing through the ordeal of the real world, and a troubled dreamworld, to reach bliss and happiness. Our un-named troubled woman is reunited with her family, like Dorothy Valens, but Laura Dern’s reward is something else. While the credits roll, we see the final form of Laura Dern’s character in an extended sequence at something like a party in some ambiguous place, with many of the female characters from the story, laughing, dancing, and singing in a free and rambunctious way while the lights strobe. We don’t have any great sense of where we are or why, but what we do have is a vibe of joy and celebration. Similar to with Inland Empire , I’m not arguing for any of this as some objectively correct interpretation of Lynch’s work. That would be a pointless exercise, most especially for someone like Lynch, but for me, this is now a framework that I can’t help but lean on when I’m looking at his work. No matter how dark the material is with which he engages, I can’t help but look for the cracks underneath everything that hints at the light below. Lynch is a realist about the ugliness of the world and a surrealist about how malleable our experience of the world can be, but I also now can’t help but see him as something of an optimist, as well. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.