is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Last fall my eleven year-old daughter Thúy got the idea to solicit favorite recipes from family members and collect them into a family cookbook that she would gift at Christmas. She’s always been interested in cooking, and has great appreciation for the variety of food that she’s eaten throughout her young life from all over: Vietnam, France, Texas, Illinois and a random selection of cuisine enthusiasms that we’ve picked up as New Yorkers.
I was struck by the wide-eyed curiosity of the idea, and quickly offered to help her turn it into reality. Partly this was because I’m always eager to encourage her enterprising spirit, but I also saw the chance to put my design skills to use making something concrete and relevant to my family—and to Thúy, particularly.
Once she had all of the recipes collected and the copy ready (with invaluable editorial assistance from my wife), Thúy and I sat down with InDesign and basically designed it together. I handled the mechanical work of typesetting and layout, but she selected the various typefaces and effectively art directed the look and feel of the thing. Along the way I showed her the fundamentals of book design: chapter headers and sub-headers, page folios and how to make a table of contents. It was a blast talking about these fairly esoteric topics with my eleven year-old daughter and to have it come alive for her, demystifying the act of what it takes to create a “real” book.
For the cover, Thúy used a black Sharpie marker to draw a host of foods, ingredients and kitchen utensils on paper. We scanned those into Illustrator, converted them to paths, added color and then composed them together with the display type. The design is, stylistically, probably something that I never would have arrived at on my own. But I do adore it and of course it was a joy to discover the composition with her, as collaborators.
From the start, the whole book was designed to match the standard printing sizes over at Lulu, where you can print on-demand for relatively cheap. Our book was 6 x 9-inches, twenty-eight pages in length, with black and white interiors and a color hardcover with a matte finish. The printing cost for each came to about US$9 each. That’s a very reasonable price point for Christmas gifts, but Lulu was so inundated for the holidays that we had to pay for express shipping in order to get the copies out in time, raising the per unit cost to just under $15. Lesson learned for next year, when we plan to update the cookbook with new recipes and possibly color photos.
The whole project was well worth the effort and cost though, not just for the obvious sentimental value to our family, but also for the experience of having created an utterly unique gift that, well, you can’t order on Amazon. But for me it was even more meaningful because it allowed me to do what I love with someone I love. When we got the book in the mail from Lulu and held it in our hands, that was a good day to be a designer.
Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” which I finally got to see last month via on-demand streaming after its somewhat tortured, mid-pandemic theatrical release, did not make a lot of “best of” lists at the end of last year. I’m only guessing here but that was possibly due to the fact that as a film it’s so narratively intricate as to inspire—or necessitate—the making of charts like this one that I came across on Reddit:
The film’s ostentatious complexity seems to confuse audiences, not just in their attempts to follow along with the plot as it unfolds on screen, but also in the mental framework through which they try to understand just what kind of movie “Tenet” is. Even people who enjoy purposefully obscure cinematic storytelling tend to believe that a movie that looks and feels like a blockbuster (which “Tenet” does and, with a reported production cost of US$200 million, does so in spades) should also work like a blockbuster. These film fans also tend to believe that a movie that works like an art film should look and feel like an art film too. Frustratingly for many, “Tenet” flouts both ideas: it’s a movie that looks and feels like a blockbuster and yet works like an art film.
The traditional guideposts of popcorn flicks are all there in “Tenet”: staggering action set pieces, espionage on a fantastical scale, copious amounts of gunplay and explosions, a villain hellbent on destroying the world, and a beautiful, vaguely dimensional femme fatale at the heart of it all. The movie’s obvious template is the James Bond series, though its execution is considerably more impressive than anything that franchise has turned out for decades.
What’s confounding though is that “Tenet” offers up these wares but perversely denies its audience the opportunity to grab hold of them. Its plot is not just structurally complex but the advancement of the narrative is also awash in vague, nearly incomprehensible exposition, delivered with Nolan’s characteristic disinterest in intelligible dialogue. Watching it—and listening to it—you get the feeling of a plot but it’s nearly impossible to grasp the details as they flit by at a torrential, garbled pace.
Confounding audiences with directorial conceits is nothing new, but the army of art house directors who specialize in this modality don’t make movies that look or feel like “Tenet” at all. A film by David Lynch, Claire Denis or Terence Malick will insist on a certain distance from conventional storytelling, but they almost invariably frame those choices in comfortably recognizable cinematic constraints: you know you’re watching an art film because of the moodiness of the milieu, the painterliness of the cinematography, the spareness of the script or the idiosyncrasies of the performance. In each of these aspects “Tenet” is as stylistically opinionated as any art house film, but it’s starker and higher pitched and volumetrically brighter and much more explosive. There’s more guns, car crashes and things that go ka-boom! Hollywood stuff, basically.
All of which is why I find “Tenet” so absolutely thrilling. Here is a film that’s playing on another level. It hijacks exorbitant financing from a major studio and deploys it in service of a true auteurist vision. And it’s willing to make a demand on its audience that virtually no other film even attempts. As Nolan has repeatedly done in his career, “Tenet” takes our well-worn familiarity with genre filmmaking and pulls it inside out, slashes it to pieces, and reassembles it into something new and unfamiliar, and then asks us to enjoy it for its sheer sensation. Why settle for watching yet another hyperbolic spy actioner (I’m a huge fan of hyperbolic spy actioners, by the way) when you can use the genre to launch yourself into an experience of a kind you’ve never seen before?
“Experience” is the key term there—not “watch.” In a now famous (or infamous) line from the script, one of Nolan’s characters implores the film’s protagonist (archly unnamed and referred to only as “The protagonist”): “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” That specific feeling you should be feeling is the thrill of disorientation, the upending of your assumptions. This is the most expensive art film ever made.
I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t explain everything that happens in “Tenet,” and having seen it twice now I’m not even convinced that a hundred percent of its plot withstands close scrutiny. But that hardly seems to matter. Watching “Tenet,” what I appreciate is the extremely gifted moviemaking, the incredibly charming performances, the sublimely pristine cinematography, and the deftness with which Nolan has assembled them all into an intricate composition. It feels very close to the inexplicable logic of the best modern art; imagine a Bond film reconstituted as a Robert Rauschenberg canvas and you start to get some idea of what Nolan is trying to do here. And like Rauschenberg’s famous combine paintings, “Tenet” seems, so far anyway, endlessly viewable. The more you look at it, the more you see, though you may never understand everything.
Here’s the full list of twenty-two movies that I watched in January.
“The Midnight Sky” (2020) ★★½ Incredibly earnest, overly careful misfire.
“Panic Room” (2002) ★★★½ Rewatched. Clockwork-like precision and tactility.
“Wira” (2019) ★★ Malaysian action spectacle never manages to rise above the level of highjinks.
“Lost Bullet” (2020) ★★★ Ridiculously fun car chase film from France. Basically “Le Fast Et Le Furious”; dumb as bricks but in a smart way.
“The Tragedy of Today” (1958) ★★★ This post-war Japanese noir is like an otherworldly mix of amorality and social decorum.
“The Vast of Night” (2019) ★★★★ A riveting, not-to-be-missed blend of horror vibes, sci-fi allusions and small town Americana.
“The American President” (1995) ★★½ Rewatched. Over-budgeted and flat-out corny prototype for “The West Wing.”
“The Night Manager” (2016) ★★ I watched this made-for-TV mini-series in honor of John Le Carre’s passing and largely regretted it.
“Promising Young Woman” (2020) ★★★½ Confused but confident, go-for-broke revenge comedy with a terrific performance by Carrie Mulligan.
“Hugo” (2011) ★★★½ Rewatched. Didn’t think much of it the first time, but on rewatch the CG holds up surprisingly well and the architecture of the story is more impressive than I remembered.
“I Am Waiting” (1957) ★★★★½ A masterpiece of B-movie melancholia from Japan.
“Batman Begins” (2005) ★★★½ Rewatched. Hardly perfect, but careens along with better ideas, script and casting than anything Marvel has done since.
“Mosul” (2019) ★★★★ This would be remarkable for its story of war-torn Iraq told from the Iraqi perspective, but it’s also an uncompromising, first-rate action film by any measure.
“Oliver & Company” (1988) ★½ When Disney animation was in the woods; excessively animated but poorly conceived.
“A Bug’s Life” (1998) ★★½ Rewatched. Twenty-three years later, the primitive CG is shocking but you can see they tried to invest it with real artistry.
“Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) ★★★★ Problematic but monumental epic that fully realizes its vision.
“Wolfwalkers” (2020) ★★½ Gorgeously animated with tons of personality, sometimes beyond the point of usefulness.
“The Rusty Knife” (1958) ★★ Grade school-level Japanese noir.
“Another Round” (2020) ★★★ A compelling performance by Mads Mikkelson elevates a fairly dopey premise that feels less and less convincing the more you think about it.
“Next Gen” (2018) ★★ I had low expectations for this Netflix back catalog kids film—and its story is forgettable—but the CG animation shows some real care and thought.
“The Cameraman” (1928) ★★★★ Unceasing physical comedy inventiveness from Buster Keaton, undergirded by deft pathos.
This is the latest roundup of my monthly movie consumption. You can also see what I watched in 2020, 2019, in 2018, in 2017, and in 2016. Finally, you can always keep up with what I’m watching by following me on letterboxd.com—where I’m also writing tons of capsule reviews.
For five years now I’ve been recording every movie I watch in my film diary at Letterboxd. Each month, I post a recap of what I watched the previous month, and at the start of each year I run down the full list of what I saw the previous twelve months. This is that full list, including a ranking of my favorite movies of 2020 (that I’ve been able to watch as of this writing). But first, here is a mildly interesting graph that I created from all of that activity.
Total Movies Watched by Year
That’s a quick overview of how many movies I saw each year since I began actively logging my movie consumption in January of 2016. For those who are counting, that’s actually a total of 1,011 over five years, with “year over year growth,” as they say, for every year…except 2020. I’m not quite sure why.
In theory I had more time for movies than ever during the pandemic—and they were easier to watch, too. I was able to see all but two of my top ten favorites (“First Cow” and “Emma.”) from home in their first run. As a result I probably saw a greater number of genuinely good movies in 2020 than in previous years, when I would have to make the time to trek out to theaters. In fact, compared to previous years when only the top five or so on my lists were movies that I was genuinely enthusiastic about, this year almost the full list of ten fall into that category.
On the other hand, one thing that became clear to me though is that the streaming media platforms still struggle to deliver genuinely good, original productions. Eight of my top ten movies were originally intended for theatrical release but were ultimately diverted to streaming. And only one of the remaining two, Steve McQueen’s highly variegated “Small Axe” series, truly originated with a streaming service. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was a thrill, and a triumph for Netflix—for my money among the best things that the service has ever done—but it’s an adaptation of a well regarded stage play by August Wilson. The streaming services have yet to prove that they can turn out quality beyond a very few of their most earnest prestige projects like these and 2018’s “Roma.”
Complaints aside, it’s worth remembering how lucky we are to have this virtually unlimited, on demand library of new and back catalog films to get us through this terrible pandemic. For my family and me, the luxury of retreating into movies while the world seemed to fall apart outside was essential to coping with last year’s lockdowns and the loss of social intimacy. We were even luckier in that before the pandemic hit, we had set up a projector in our basement that allowed us to simulate a small movie theater in the comfort of our own home. And when the weather turned warm, I brought that projector out to the backyard, hung an inexpensive screen on the fence, and we were able to watch movies after sundown in the warm summer air. All in all, I was more grateful for movies in 2020 than ever.
Top Ten
Okay, here’s my list. You can see my full ranking of movies made in 2020 here.
“The Assistant” An ordinary but harrowing day in the life of an idealistic young office worker employed by a horrible person. Extremely subtle and even non-specific while still managing to incredibly explicit.
“First Cow” A lovely, heartbreaking tale of a friendship between two otherwise overlooked bit players in the gold rush of the late nineteenth century.
“Sound of Metal” A drummer in a rock band loses his hearing and the audience joins him in his journey in a way that’s startlingly novel and real.
“Bacurau” A genre picture so weird and unusual that it seems to invent itself as it goes along. Thrilling.
“Tenet” A massively ambitious art film disguised as a summer blockbuster.
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” An impressively cinematic translation of a stage play, bolstered by amazing performances.
“The Vast of Night” The amazing technical chops that this indie sci-fi thriller pulls off with its tiny budget is impressive, but what’s even better is the wonderfully vivid characters and dialog that sweep you up into the period setting.
“Emma.” They’ll be making new renditions of this endlessly entertaining story forever, but this one is directed with brilliant, lively panache.
“Small Axe: Lovers Rock” By far the highlight of this five-part series because it evokes a deep, joyous mood that we rarely get to see. There’s also an early morning bicycle ride that took my breath away.
“Mank” A potent re-creation of a lost era of artistic industry.
And below you’ll find the rundown for all of 2020. You can also see Letterboxd’s automatically generated overview of my year here. Or You can turn back time and see what I watched in 2019, in 2018, in 2017, and in 2016. Finally, you can always keep up with what I’m watching by following me on letterboxd.com—where I’m also writing tons of capsule reviews.
“Early Man” (2018) ★★½ Charming but weightless, and disappointingly short on ambition for an Aardman film.
“Zazie dans le Métro” (1960) ★★★½ Bananas dream logic from the dawn of the French New Wave.
“Hidden Figures” (2016) ★★ Does everything by the book, which means it contains almost zero surprises.
“Contagion” (2011) ★★★★ Rewatched. Its prescience is frightening and illuminating but it’s also maybe the best medical thriller ever made.
“Onward” (2020) ★★★★ Doesn’t broadcast its artistry as loudly as Pixar’s more prominent features, but still deeply felt and satisfying.
“Clockwatchers” (1997) ★★★½ Mostly excellent meditation on the mundanity of office life a quarter century ago(!?). Worth it just to see Parker Posey at the height of her powers.
“Shoulder Arms” (1918) ★★★★ Chaplin at the battlefront. Filmed a century before Sam Mendes’s “1917” and every bit as technically accomplished, plus funnier.
“Jojo Rabbit” (2019) ★★½ Seems to have been made on a dare because there can be no other reason for this movie to exist.
“The Invisible Man” (2020) ★★½ This movie seems to have a very important message of some kind. It was hard to tell amidst all the screamingly obvious clichés.
“Spies in Disguise” (2019) ★★ A feast of CG texture mapping, and that’s about it.
“Birdman of Alcatraz” (1962) ★★★★ Rewatched. An issues movie about penology that veers on the didactic, but Burt Lancaster carries the whole thing with his uniquely fragile hyper-masculinity.
“Emma” (1996) ★★★ I could watch another dozen remakes of this story.
“Tangled” (2010) ★★½ Disney seems to think it can outsmart stereotypes by playing into them.
“The Lighthouse” (2019) ★★★½ Sumptuously crafted but a disappointingly predictable rendering of lunacy.
“Based on a True Story” (2017) ★★ Roman Polanski brings together two intensely watchable actresses, concocts a tantalizing conflict for them, and forgets to do anything with it all.
“Sons of the Desert” (1933) ★★★½ The sheer delight of Laurel and Hardy’s slapstick genius, stretched to its narrative limits.
“Vendetta of a Samurai” (1952) ★★★★ An unsparing indictment of the falsity of combat glory, wrapped inside a samurai flick.
“Knives Out” (2019) ★★★★ Rewatched. Had a ball again.
“Arctic” (2018) ★★★★ Sturdy man versus nature drama.
“Bad Education” (2019) ★★★ Superb direction can’t quite save this script from itself.
“Ali” (2001) ★★★★ Rewatched. A bit meandering but nevertheless mesmerizing, especially the first ten minutes.
“Fast Color” (2018) ★★★ Promising cast and premise, flat production.
“Spirited Away” (2001) ★★ Yes it’s amazing! No it didn’t work for me.
“Ip Man 4: The Finale” (2019) ★ Cheap, sentimental conclusion to a franchise that deserved better.
“Kedi” (2016) ★★★ Irresistible documentary somehow manages to render street cats in Istanbul as more vivid characters than most movies starring people.
“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986) ★★★★ Rewatched. What the grown up world was supposed to be like.
“Batman & Robin” (1997) ½ Entirely deserves every last bit of scorn ever tossed its way.
“Batman Returns” (1992) ★ Rewatched. Tiresomely fetishistic, and largely forgettable.
“Batman Forever” (1995) ★½ Rewatched. Not a good movie, but the costumes were ace.
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000) ★★★★½ Rewatched. Like a TV season finale so transcendent there’s no need to watch all the episodes that preceded it.
“The Little Prince” (1974) ★★½ Not without its charms, but sunk by the irritating titular performer.
“Big Hero 6” (2014) ★★ Rewatched. Its reverence for tech is not holding up well.
“My Brother’s Wedding” (1983) ★★★★ Imperfect but transfixing tragedy set in South Central LA.
“Never Goin’ Back” (2018) ★★★★ A morally reprehensible but briskly made triumph.
“Extra Ordinary” (2019) ★★★½ Yet another Irish indie in which an unattached driving instructor speaks to the dead and battles a one-hit wonder rockstar, to largely amiable effect.
“The Report” (2019) ★★★★ Setting aside the vanity of a screenwriter directing a movie about a guy writing something so important that middle-managers and executives want to water it down, this meticulous reckoning with Bush-era torture is terrific.
“Speed” (1994) ★★★½ Rewatched. A good example of how a dumb movie can achieve greatness.
“Top Gun” (1986) ★½ This thinly plotted recruitment film remains aesthetically undimmed, but it’s also still just as empty-headed as ever.
“Uncle Buck” (1989) ★½ Disappointingly few laughs; I added a half-star out of fondness for John Candy.
“Revanche” (2008) ★★★★ A taut, expertly directed subversion of the revenge thriller form.
“Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) ★★★ Rewatched. A pointed declaration of ideals about comedy vs. realism that’s not particularly funny or realistic.
“Bacurau” (2019) ★★★★ Bonkers B-movie set in Brazil that continually reinvents itself, thrillingly.
“The Truman Show” (1998) ★★★½ Rewatched. Charming but maybe most commendable for neutralizing Jim Carrey’s insufferability.
“Greed” (2019) ★★ Steve Coogan as anti-hero is so entertaining that this message movie mostly forgets to deliver its message until the end when it skirts by with lip service.
“Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011) ★★ Rewatched. Supposedly benign but takes a lot of offensive liberties with race and history.
“Millions” (2004) ★★★ Smartly directed fable of a kid’s experience dealing with the death of a loved one? I’ll take it. Corny sermonizing on the power of faith? Not so much.
“Monsters University” (2013) ★★★½ I know these back catalog Pixar sequels are not supposed to be well regarded but I really liked this one.
“Motherless Brooklyn” (2019) ★★ Edward Norton did his homework and he wants you to know it.
“The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) ★★★★½ Rewatched. Warmly imagined romantic comedy about pre-War Hungary.
“Sleuth” (1972) ★★★★ A delicious acting feast rolled up in a parlor room whodunit.
“Star Wars” (1977) ★★★½ Rewatched. Enjoying this movie today requires not just suspension of disbelief but also summoning up a willful ignorance of all the crap sequels that have followed.
“The Birth of a Nation” (1915) Talk about complicated. A disturbingly well-made paean to hatred and bigotry.
“An American Pickle” (2020) ★★ Starts off with crackle, then limps along to a whimpering finish.
“The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) ★★★½ Rewatched. The best made installment of the entire series, but perhaps not essential at all.
“The Traitor” (2019) ★★½ Goes deep inside the Italian mafia, reveals surprisingly little.
“How to Build a Girl” (2019) ★½ Shamefully squanders a terrific premise: excavating the way British music weeklies used to build up and tear down bands.
“Dazed and Confused” (1993) ★★★ A great hangout movie, sure, but in retrospect, quite toxic.
“The Violent Men” (1955) ★★★★ An old western with a terrifying view of how power is amassed.
“Lost in America” (1985) ★★½ Albert Brooks was ahead of his time, but not by much.
“Con Air” (1997) ★★ Rewatched. Holds its audience in starkly low regard.
“Stop Making Sense” (1984) ★★★★ Rewatched. Piercingly clear document of a band at a point where they finally figured out how to align their bizarre impulses with widespread accessibility.
“Only Angels Have Wings” (1939) ★★★★½ Rewatched. An intoxicatingly grubby little story of people lost at the edge of the world.
“Enola Holmes” (2020) ★½ I was totally signed up for this thriller about Sherlock Holmes’s super smart little sister, but it turned out to be not very smart at all.
“A Few Good Men” (1992) ★★★½ Rewatched. Not a masterpiece but for a movie where not a lot really happens on screen aside from some shouting, it’s remarkably entertaining.
“Black and Blue” (2019) ★★★ Pretty creaky policier, but there are still some vital ideas at work here.
“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) ★★½ Rewatched. For every smart narrative decision it makes, it follows up with a really dumb one.
“Phantom Lady” (1944) ★ Paper-thin noir peddling psychobabble as verisimilitude.
“Rebecca” (2020) ★★ Not terrible except for the fact that it invites direct comparison with Hitchcock’s classic.
“Deathtrap” (1982) ★★★★ A twisty murder thriller that’s maybe not so incredibly twisty, but it’s so tautly executed by the underrated Sidney Lumet that it’s a pleasure just to go along for the ride.
“Small Axe: Mangrove” (2020) ★★½ It’s shocking to watch a movie by Steve McQueen, one of the masters of nuance and subtlety, that’s clumsy and obvious.
“The Phantom Tollbooth” (1970) ★★ A swing and a miss at making a prestige picture from animation legend Chuck Jones.
“The Widow Couderc” (1971) ★★★★ A mysterious stranger who happens to look exactly like Alain Delon comes to a small French village and meets a widower who happens to look like Simone Signoret. Nothing too surprising happens, but the emotional authenticity that emerges is palpable.
“Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015) ★★ Rewatched. My kids are also into Marvel! Serves me right.
“Tampopo” (1985) ★★★½ A variety pack of Japanese love letters to good food. Defies description but delicious.
“Arsenic and Old Lace” (1944) ★★½ Rewatched. I remembered this being airtight and laugh out loud funny, but on rewatch it’s wildly uneven and little more than amusing.
“Small Axe: Lovers Rock” (2020) ★★★★Not everything quite lines up in this mood-first callback to West Indian nightlife in London ca. 1980, but it’s nevertheless a rapturous, irresistible romantic fairy tale on the order of “Before Sunrise.”
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016) ★★★½ Rewatched. Unpopular opinion: this is the best thing Disney has done with this franchise.
“I’m No Angel” (1933) ★★★ Like a pop song that’s little more than an irresistible groove, this thinly plotted comedy rides Mae West’s charm and attitude until you can’t say no.
“Let Them All Talk” (2020) ★★½ Steven Soderbergh asks: what if “Da 5 Bloods,” but by Woody Allen?
“Time Bandits” (1981) ★½ Not sure if this was made for kids or Terry Gilliam’s id, but it’s really noisy and uneven.
“Mank” (2020) ★★★½ Affecting re-creation of a lost Hollywood from David Fincher, our most underperforming auteur.
“First Cow” (2019) ★★★★ A lovely, minor footnote of a story about the 19th century frontier. Beautifully soft spoken and then, in the third act, remarkably effective at building tension.
“My Favorite Wife” (1940) ★ Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in a desperate attempt at recapturing the magic of “The Awful Truth.”
“The Muppet Christmas Carol” (1992) ★ When Gonzo is the straight man, things are not particularly Muppet-y, and not particularly fun.
“Back to the Future” (1985) ★★★★ Rewatched. A marvel of set-it-up and pay-it-off Hollywood storytelling.
“Other Music” (2019) ★★★ A sweet requiem for the lost hipster paradise of the world’s coolest record store.
“To Catch a Thief” (1955) ★★★★ Rewatched. Staggeringly gorgeous. One of the rare times when the form itself is so refined it matters more than the content.
“Soul” (2020) ★★★★ A hodgepodge of different movies. The least interesting of them is Pixar’s standard “secret, anthropomorphized world of things you usually don’t pay attention to” redemption tale. But when it lets its human characters actually be human, it soars.
“Mulan” (1998) ★★ Not particularly memorable, though not particularly terrible.
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020) ★★★★ A thrilling cinematic adaptation of a powerful stage script.
“Sound of Metal” (2019) ★★★★ At times this largely humorless drama about hearing loss threatens to be standard humorless indie fare, but it surpasses all of that by expertly putting the audience in its protagonist’s shoes. Also, absolutely killer opening scene.
“Small Axe: Alex Wheatle” (2020) ★★★ Another example of a story that would have been much better served as its own full-length feature than as an installment in an overly ambitious mini-series.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) ★★★★★ Rewatched. I’ll never be able to not cry when I watch this, I guess.
With the year finally slowing down a bit, I managed to watch twenty-nine movies in December. That might be a personal record. It’s awards season too, a time when I would normally be heading out to theaters to watch some of the best movies of the year, but of course most of them have been going direct to streaming in 2020. I sorely miss theaters, but I have to admit it was really satisfying to be able to watch these from the comfort of home.
One of the major highlights was “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” starring the magnificent Viola Davis and the sadly departed Chadwick Boseman. It smuggles a searing, tragic look at the experience of early 20th century black musicians inside a beautiful, late career Spielberg-style photographic sheen. I’ll never tire of watching Davis—she’s among the most compelling performers working today—but it was painful to watch Boseman’s last performance before his premature passing. This was a worthy final performance.
“Ma Rainey’s” shares something with three other newly released, would-be Oscar hopefuls: “Sound of Metal,” a bare-knuckled drama about a musician who loses his hearing; “Soul,” Pixar’s newest fantasia about a musician who contends with fulfilling his lifelong career ambitions; and “Mank,” which recounts the career of the putative writer of “Citizen Kane.” None of these are perfect, but in addition to representing some of the most exciting filmmaking I’ve seen all year, they, like “Ma Rainey’s,” examine the cost of making a living in the arts. I guess that’s what appeals to the Academy at this time of year.
Finally, I also finished watching Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe”, a five-part series of short films about West Indian life in London in the 1970s and 1980s (I watched the first one, “Mangrove” back in November). I found all of them extremely frustrating, though not because they’re bad. There are some real flashes of profundity in this series, but more often than not the suffocating constraints of their television origins are visible in the seams. There’s a debate about whether “Small Axe” is television or cinema but whatever you call it, to me it’s obvious they were budgeted and scheduled like television. Meaning: the lack of time, attention and care shows. McQueen’s talent as a storyteller is immense though, and in some instances he manages to transcend his constraints. But more often than not, the threadbare scripting and overly obvious dialogue suggest a creative process under duress. All five of these installments would have been much more successful as full-length, fully fledged feature films. It’s a shame that they didn’t get that opportunity.
Here’s the full list.
“Small Axe: Lovers Rock” (2020) ★★★★Not everything quite lines up in this mood-first callback to West Indian nightlife in London ca. 1980, but it’s nevertheless a rapturous, irresistible romantic fairy tale on the order of “Before Sunrise.”
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016) ★★★½ Rewatched. Unpopular opinion: this is the best thing Disney has done with this franchise.
“I’m No Angel” (1933) ★★★ Like a pop song that’s little more than an irresistible groove, this thinly plotted comedy rides Mae West’s charm and attitude until you can’t say no.
“Let Them All Talk” (2020) ★★½ Steven Soderbergh asks: what if “Da 5 Bloods,” but by Woody Allen?
“Time Bandits” (1981) ★½ Not sure if this was made for kids or Terry Gilliam’s id, but it’s really noisy and uneven.
“Mank” (2020) ★★★½ Affecting re-creation of a lost Hollywood from David Fincher, our most underperforming auteur.
“First Cow” (2019) ★★★★ A lovely, minor footnote of a story about the 19th century frontier. Beautifully soft spoken and then, in the third act, remarkably effective at building tension.
“My Favorite Wife” (1940) ★ Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in a desperate attempt at recapturing the magic of “The Awful Truth.”
“The Muppet Christmas Carol” (1992) ★ When Gonzo is the straight man, things are not particularly Muppet-y, and not particularly fun.
“Back to the Future” (1985) ★★★★ Rewatched. A marvel of set-it-up and pay-it-off Hollywood storytelling.
“Other Music” (2019) ★★★ A sweet requiem for the lost hipster paradise of the world’s coolest record store.
“To Catch a Thief” (1955) ★★★★ Rewatched. Staggeringly gorgeous. One of the rare times when the form itself is so refined it matters more than the content.
“Soul” (2020) ★★★★ A hodgepodge of different movies. The least interesting of them is Pixar’s standard “secret, anthropomorphized world of things you usually don’t pay attention to” redemption tale. But when it lets its human characters actually be human, it soars.
“Mulan” (1998) ★★ Not particularly memorable, though not particularly terrible.
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020) ★★★★ A thrilling cinematic adaptation of a powerful stage script.
“Sound of Metal” (2019) ★★★★ At times this largely humorless drama about hearing loss threatens to be standard humorless indie fare, but it surpasses all of that by expertly putting the audience in its protagonist’s shoes. Also, absolutely killer opening scene.
“Small Axe: Alex Wheatle” (2020) ★★★ Another example of a story that would have been much better served as its own full-length feature than as an installment in an overly ambitious mini-series.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) ★★★★★ Rewatched. I’ll never be able to not cry when I watch this, I guess.
Back in July I wrote about my overall low regard for documentary films. My argument mostly amounted to a frustration that documentaries, despite frequently adopting the guise of journalism, rarely acknowledge how little their narratives usually conform to actual facts. As a result I seldom choose to watch them; I’d just rather be watching something more transparently fictitious.
However, last month I saw two documentaries that frankly delighted me. First was “Jasper Mall,” directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb and released earlier this year, which captures a year in the slow, ignoble death of a shopping mall in suburban Alabama. Then, at the end of the month, I watched John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection,” directed by Julien Faraut in 2018, which is ostensibly a sports documentary but in reality is an indescribably unique meditation on the nature of filmmaking.
These are two very different kinds of documentaries but what they have in common, and what worked for me so well, was their honest disinterest in being journalistically comprehensive. “Jasper Mall” makes no pretense that it’s telling a complete story about how or why this particular shopping mall is in economic free fall—much less why countless more malls across America are undergoing similarly catastrophic decline. The movie features no suspiciously simplistic statistics or flashy animated charts, no authoritative voices chiming in on the economic underpinnings of the ongoing retail collapse, and no corny reenactments of historic events. There’s also no “investigative reporting” that tries to bend events into convenient narratives, and no reductive mischaracterizations of real people for the purposes of setting up simplistic villains.
Instead, “Jasper Mall” is just an extended set of visits with the shop owners and workers who are trying to make the best of a deteriorating decision, with the mall operators who are quixotically doing their level best to reverse the trends, and with the idle patrons who can do little more than witness the collapse. Each person tells their story simply and straightforwardly, with no pretense and no artificial drama. There’s no judgment, no admonitory message, no call to action.
If anything, “Jasper Mall” is really more like a horror film, just one where the terror moves in slow motion and the victims fade away quietly. Most horror films trap their characters in buildings or towns that allow no escape. Similarly, “Jasper Mall” never leaves the mall grounds, and at times it feels like the mall’s deep, moat-like parking lot forms the very edge of the world. The characters themselves disappear one by one, whether because shops close or because they literally pass away, and there’s a feeling that the end is near for all of them. It’s sad and sweet and a little humorous, and also unforgettable.
Julien Faraut’s “John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection” also works within a circumscribed scope in that it deals only with a few specific moments in time—specifically, the occasions on which the tennis great competed in the French Open in the early 1980s—and goes no further. We get no back story on McEnroe’s early tennis training, no commentary from mentors, peers or competitors, and virtually no context on McEnroe’s career beyond these appearances at all.
In fact, the entirety of the film is composed from training footage captured by a filmmaker-tennis player named Gil de Kermadec, who served as technical director of the French Tennis Federation during McEnroe’s peak years. Throughout his tenure de Kermadec made it a practice to capture countless hours of footage of players at the French Open in order to better understand how the body moves during play.
A tremendous amount of what de Kermadec captured was of McEnroe on the court: his famous tantrums and the confoundingly off handed elegance of his swings. From this source material, rediscovered just a few years ago, director Faraut fashions an utterly original film. The subject is ostensibly McEnroe, and indeed the player is rarely not on screen. But in actuality the documentary is an impressionistic essay on what it means to make a film, as Faraut is even more interested in what it means for the camera to witness a live sporting event than he is in McEnroe’s playing.
Faraut’s film is actually about the making of de Kermadec’s film project—which itself is really only partially about McEnroe. In many ways the true star is the footage itself, salvaged from nearly forgotten archives, and restored to its grainy, gorgeous 16 mm glory. Faraut occasionally slows it down and overlays an otherworldly guitar soundtrack on top of McEnroe’s ground strokes, and the results feel as if he’s pulling on and stretching time like silly putty. You feel transported to the matches, but more aware of the abstraction and artistic license that the camera imposes on events than in most any other documentary. I haven’t seen another movie like it all year, if ever before.
In all I watched sixteen movies in November. Here is the full list.
“Jasper Mall” (2020) ★★★½Unpretentious, unassuming, unforgettable documentary about one year in the slow death of a shopping mall.
“On the Rocks” (2020) ★★ I got this Sophia Coppola movie free for buying any Apple device!
“Return of the Jedi” (1983) ★ Rewatched. Jeez did this franchise run out of ideas quick, and boy are so few people willing to acknowledge it.
“Lady and the Tramp” (1955) ★★★½ The painted backgrounds are still astounding, and the story, such as it is, isn’t so bad either.
“Casablanca” (1942) ★★★★★ Rewatched. Wondefully complex and elegantly simple at the same time.
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” (2017) ★★★ Rewatched. I’ve seen way more of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark than I really need to.
“From Russia with Love” (1963) ★★★★½ Rewatched. The most low key Bond. The best Bond.
“Deathtrap” (1982) ★★★★ A twisty murder thriller that’s maybe not so incredibly twisty, but it’s so tautly executed by the underrated Sidney Lumet that it’s a pleasure just to go along for the ride.
“Small Axe: Mangrove” (2020) ★★½ It’s shocking to watch a movie by Steve McQueen, one of the masters of nuance and subtlety, that’s clumsy and obvious.
“The Phantom Tollbooth” (1970) ★★ A swing and a miss at making a prestige picture from animation legend Chuck Jones.
“The Widow Couderc” (1971) ★★★★ A mysterious stranger who happens to look exactly like Alain Delon comes to a small French village and meets a widower who happens to look like Simone Signoret. Nothing too surprising happens, but the emotional authenticity that emerges is palpable.
“Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015) ★★ Rewatched. My kids are also into Marvel! Serves me right.
“Tampopo” (1985) ★★★½ A variety pack of Japanese love letters to good food. Defies description but delicious.
“Arsenic and Old Lace” (1944) ★★½ Rewatched. I remembered this being airtight and laugh out loud funny, but on rewatch it’s wildly uneven and little more than amusing.
Two things that you don’t normally see on television very often are now on television: design and yours truly. The new series “New York by Design” (which follows last summer’s “California by Design”) is five episodes of stories about all kinds of design innovation: architecture, industrial design, consumer products, electronics, software and UX, and more. As it happens, I appear on the show as a presenter and a judge (Adobe is a series partner), along with some terrific company including Debbie Millman, Stefan Sagmeister, Tucker Viemeister and many more.
The show airs Saturday evenings on CBS Channel 2 New York and the full season will stream on Amazon Prime next February. You can actually see the first two episodes embedded below. In episode one, I talk with designer David Benjamin about Mycelium bricks, an organic building material made out of what would otherwise be discarded compost material. And in the second episode I pay a visit to Zimmerman Workshop founders Adam and Sofia Zimmerman, who designed a one-of-a-kind staircase that’s part architecture and part art installation. (The behind-the-scenes photo above is taken at the top of that staircase.) For more information about the series, and to watch future episodes posted after their original air dates, visit newyorkbydesign.com.
My wife and I had tickets to go see “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” back in March. We’d booked them several days in advance and leading up to that Friday we debated endlessly whether it was something we should even be doing. The pandemic was starting to tighten its grip around New York, and the wisdom of a subway ride and a movie theater outing was starting to seem dodgy.
Ultimately we opted not to go, which in retrospect was the right decision. But how I wish we’d been able to see this big, gorgeous, astoundingly well made arthouse film on a large screen, because it very much is a work of art. Nearly every frame of writer and director Céline Sciamma’s romance about painting is composed like an Andrew Wyeth canvas, though imbued with an otherworldly warmth that Sciamma and cinematographer Claire Mathon crank up with precise care.
At times, the pristine visual craftsmanship is almost a distraction—several shots of a a raging, preternaturally blue ocean practically shout above the acting. On the whole though, the dramatic tension more than justifies the aesthetic conceit: the movie’s characters are effectively stranded on an island with few expectations, and yet they’re able to realize immense beauty from their circumstances. This seamless joining of form and content is rare—and stunning.
Of the sixteen other movies I watched last month, it’s worth noting that the ones that debuted on streaming channels—the atrocious “Enola Holmes,” the diverting “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” and the flavorless “Rebecca” all support my running theory that the Netflix-age of original releases is one of underwhelming, slapdash quality. These movies are very rarely more than “fine,” and while it’s amusing to get easy, immediate access to them, the repeatedly empty calories-like sensation of disappointment is also getting really tiring. I can’t wait for this pandemic to be over.
“Lost in America” (1985) ★★½ Albert Brooks was ahead of his time, but not by much.
“Con Air” (1997) ★★ Rewatched. Holds its audience in starkly low regard.
“Stop Making Sense” (1984) ★★★★ Rewatched. Piercingly clear document of a band at a point where they finally figured out how to align their bizarre impulses with widespread accessibility.
“Only Angels Have Wings” (1939) ★★★★½ Rewatched. An intoxicatingly grubby little story of people lost at the edge of the world.
“Enola Holmes” (2020) ★½ I was totally signed up for this thriller about Sherlock Holmes’s super smart little sister, but it turned out to be not very smart at all.
“A Few Good Men” (1992) ★★★½ Rewatched. Not a masterpiece but for a movie where not a lot really happens on screen aside from some shouting, it’s remarkably entertaining.
“Black and Blue” (2019) ★★★ Pretty creaky policier, but there are still some vital ideas at work here.
“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) ★★½ Rewatched. For every smart narrative decision it makes, it follows up with a really dumb one.
“Phantom Lady” (1944) ★ Paper-thin noir peddling psychobabble as verisimilitude.
“Rebecca” (2020) ★★ Not terrible except for the fact that it invites direct comparison with Hitchcock’s classic.
Yesterday around midday I was at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn not long after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. There was a large throng of revelers there, pumped up with the adrenaline of a victory that millions have been anticipating for four long, painful years.
Traffic was knotted all around as the crowds converged on the the southern tip of the plaza, but no one seemed to mind—you could hear car horns blaring and drivers and passengers yelling out their windows, but out of jubilation, not anger. The crowd converged on the iconic Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, where people danced and chanted and clapped to music. A number of folks had brought drums and percussion instruments from their homes and they were beating a powerful tattoo that rang throughout the air, seemingly for miles.
Nothing had been organized but everyone was in unison, and people took turns dancing at the center, directly under the arch, passing around a huge American flag and waving it to the delight of hundreds of onlookers.
This woman danced with her infant child strapped to her back. I tried to get a closeup shot that showed the baby’s face, but I think I was too overwhelmed with the magnificence of her movements.
At one point this man stepped into the center. Even without the flag, he instantly drew everyone’s attention and he proceeded to lead the crowd in an exhilarating, impromptu speech about the triumph of truth. Several times he coaxed the crowd into kneeling down with him, and then together everyone jumped up with a burst of energy, shouting at their top of their lungs with joy.
When the news alert had come through earlier in the day, around 11:30a, I wasn’t even able to emotionally process the victory. My mind had been in such a despondent state since Election Night, both frustrated by the unresolved vote counts and the fact that millions of Americans saw no reason why Donald Trump’s lies, deceit and dereliction of duties should not be rewarded by another term in office. If I’m honest, it just disgusted me. But being there at Grand Army Plaza, surrounded by people of every race, color and creed, I was finally able to enjoy—at least for an afternoon—the wonder and beauty of a truly meaningful moment of progress in a much longer campaign to set the world right again.
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a terrific movie title for a year in which each month that passes has taken a “hold my beer” alacrity to one-upping the awfulness that preceded it. The fact that the movie was directed by perpetually inventive misanthrope Charlie Kaufman would seem to promise at least a diverting, brain puzzle-type examination of human experience.
For a while, this movie is that, but then it gets lost in its own head (something which you’d actually expect to happen to Kaufman movies more often than it does). It starts out as a fairly compelling two-hander, with its leads bantering on an extended drive to visit family, interlaced with a surprisingly deft voiceover (voiceovers are never surprisingly deft). Eventually though it starts falling back to standard Kaufman shorthand: dream logic blocking, elliptical editing, jump scare cutaways etc.
No one else can do this stuff like Kaufman can and so few even try, so it’s somewhat forgivable that little of it rises above the amusing. But the last third, which is by turns reminiscent of a rather unenthusiastic David Lynch or Jean-Luc Godard flick, feels much less assured as it devolves into a game of semiotic Clue, leaving the viewer to match up wryly dropped hints with narrative twists. Kaufman does not want to telegraph the “meaning” of it all or do all of the expository work for the viewer, which is fair, but I’m not convinced he’s fully doing his job as a storyteller, either.
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a disappointment but then again most of what we’re getting to see this year has been disappointing. I wrote in August about how subpar most of the direct-to-Netflix fare has been in general, but we’re also living through a pretty rough drought of genuinely entertaining movies that may stretch on for a long time. On the one hand, studios are holding back their most anticipated films until such a time when theater-going is a thing again. And on the other hand, the pandemic has surely paused or deferred production for a ton of what would have been entertaining to see next year, too.
Sorry, didn’t mean to be such a downer there.
In total I watched fifteen movies last month. Here’s the full list.
“Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011) ★★ Rewatched. Supposedly benign but takes a lot of offensive liberties with race and history.
“Millions” (2004) ★★★ Smartly directed fable of a kid’s experience dealing with the death of a loved one? I’ll take it. Corny sermonizing on the power of faith? Not so much.
“Monsters University” (2013) ★★★½ I know these back catalog Pixar sequels are not supposed to be well regarded but I really liked this one.
“Motherless Brooklyn” (2019) ★★ Edward Norton did his homework and he wants you to know it.
“The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) ★★★★½ Rewatched. Warmly imagined romantic comedy about pre-War Hungary.
“Sleuth” (1972) ★★★★ A delicious acting feast rolled up in a parlor room whodunit.
“Star Wars” (1977) ★★★½ Rewatched. Enjoying this movie today requires not just suspension of disbelief but also summoning up a willful ignorance of all the crap sequels that have followed.
“The Birth of a Nation” (1915) Talk about complicated. A disturbingly well-made paean to hatred and bigotry.
“An American Pickle” (2020) ★★ Starts off with crackle, then limps along to a whimpering finish.
“The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) ★★★½ Rewatched. The best made installment of the entire series, but perhaps not essential at all.
“The Traitor” (2019) ★★½ Goes deep inside the Italian mafia, reveals surprisingly little.
“How to Build a Girl” (2019) ★½ Shamefully squanders a terrific premise: excavating the way British music weeklies used to build up and tear down bands.
“Dazed and Confused” (1993) ★★★ A great hangout movie, sure, but in retrospect, quite toxic.
“The Violent Men” (1955) ★★★★ An old western with a terrifying view of how power is amassed.
