Hello hello! Welcome back to my lair. I’ve watched a lot of movies these year. I’ve read some books too! Didn’t do a lot of TV. But I watched a lot of movies. Let’s talk about them.
Because I think about this a lot now, and I find it important to say: I find the things I read and watch primarily through my day job at a resale shop. I credit this immensely with the variety of stuff I’m exposed to. It’s the one area of my life that is entirely absent algorithm — technology has absolutely no control over what strangers bring into my store every day. I’ve heard of and encountered so many things I never would have run into because of this, and I’m very grateful for it. It enriches my life immensely. Aside from that, I find things through the normal channels — social media, friend recommendations, T̷͉͖̤̺̺̒̈́̀͝h̷̭͎͒̒̀ë̸̱̞̞́ ̷̙̑̐̒͊͝Ą̵̗̈̈́̍̌̑͊l̸̢͔͚̬̟͐͊͆̔͛͝g̶̳̦̓̉͛̔͂̂ö̴̡͍̤́̂̓͐ŗ̸̱͙̩͐̿̊̽i̶̛̤̗͆̅ţ̶͈̙͛͋h̴̢̧̰͓̞̼̀m̶̰̾͊̎̆͠, and the good old liked-something-and-clicked-through-links-on-its-Wikipedia-page fallback. I mention this not because I think anyone really reads all this, but because I find it necessary to preface my personal reading and watching habits. It’s necessary context, imo.
And with that, 2023 in review:
I read 73 books in 2023. My Goodreads year in review is here. Here’s the ones that stood out:
Kulti by Mariana Zapata
Imagine me waving my arms VERY WIDELY, ABOVE MY HEAD, LIKE I’M TRYING TO DIRECT TRAFFIC. I don’t do the self-published contemporary romance booktok faves things. I’m a known hater! I’m a *known hater*. HOWEVER. I read this on a whim because it was about soccer, and — I actually quite enjoyed it? The writing was not good, let me clarify, on the sentence level, it exclusively uses family-friendly TV cussing and the protagonist’s internal monologue was determined to sound teenage. Despite that, it worked for me for a couple of reasons! First of all, I like soccer. Starting out strong. Second of all, it was an extreme slow burn. The characters spend hundreds of pages developing this strange professional friendship that’s a bit sexually charged but also a bit genuinely stressful and antagonistic due to 1) personal background shit 2) the fact that they’re colleagues 3) in a sporting environment where the success or failure of the team and tons of other people is always right offscreen as they bicker and flirt and all that other shit. It took a really long time to get the characters together, and that made it much more satisfying than if they had fucked 60 pages in. Third! Despite the childishness of the writing, there was a really, really fascinating dynamic between the protagonists — specifically, a female player who often gets in trouble and suffers consequences for her temper and aggressiveness is suddenly being coached by a male former player who acted the same way on the pitch but, instead of facing similar consequences, became notorious and successful. They have a couple genuinely fascinating moments of strife where you can see the male lead look at the female lead and be like: Oh, we’re more alike than different, and yet her life is like this. I don’t think the author really did this intentionally, besides wanting her protagonists to be similar in temperament, but she stumbled into something really interesting there, and I would have loved to read about it in a better book.
Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom
One time a lady called my store, claimed that she owned a book bound in human skin, and asked if we would buy it. We’re assuming it was a prank call; the book obviously never materialized, and even if it had, it’s impossible to tell human skin from other leathers with any certainty without professional analysis. I learned that in this book, which I found shortly after this incident and attributed to the delightful sense of humor of fate. This is a book about anthropodermic book binding, obviously, less of a technical treatise (for obvious reasons) than a personal research narrative by an author who’s interested in the subject and comes from a field where knowledge of the particularities are actually professionally relevant. There are very few confirmed anthropodermic bindings in the world, and they’re in university libraries or private collections, kept locked down. I learned a lot about the various ways these objects come into being, and became probably a little more interested than I should be about seeing one for myself. I’m just a little curious!
Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz
I wrote about my Eve Experience for my column earlier this year, but I think it’s worth revisiting. Autofiction is a little bit unnerving. I find it itchy to read something like this and know that there is no line between Babitz’s history and her imagination. I also find it thrilling and voyeuristic, and understand why people have gotten the way that they are about her. This is the first entry of the year in my personal canon of “bi people on bisexuality,” my pet subgenre and favorite topic. I appreciate Babitz’s strict adherence to the gender binary, so overwrought and Lana-esque, borderline camp even when she’s being entirely serious. The way she admits how strictly the difference between men and women rules her life and relationships feels honest in a way that’s almost uncomfortable. There’s always the sense with her that she’s playing a bit of a game, enjoying her ability to slip in and out of heterosexuality like clothing. Plus, she’s a very charming writer.
How to Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is good, kids. He’s good. Listen to the hype. He’s a bona fide talent who accidentally became a bestseller. He’s funny, more than anything, in this self-serious era, unafraid of just, like. Making a joke. In a book. That people are going to read. What a concept! He dedicates himself to these gimmicks and he goes all in. He’s created a really exceptional recipe for readable, comedic, casual horror; his books are easy in the way only the truly well-written can be, not a word out of place, not a word noticeably placed. His characters are good. His dialogue is precise, true-to-life, occasionally hysterical. His concepts are bonkers. His taste in gore is truly unmatched, with this book matching my until-now favorite of his explorations of the terrible things that can happen to a body in a short amount of time.
James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
This is an excellent biography. I’ve never read any of Tiptree’s work and I don’t know if I even feel like I need to but man, this is an excellent biography. I feel so strongly for Sheldon(/Tiptree) and the various aspects of her life that she felt trapped or free in and her desperate need for anonymity and for the Tiptree persona. Of course it’s always muddy to speak on the sexuality or gender identity of someone who’s not there to speak for themself but this book gets so close to it with the extent of the research it did, the access to Sheldon’s papers, and its commitment to telling her and Tiptree’s story from the beginning to end as honestly as possible. Biography as a genre is one I never feel like I appreciate until I read something like this, and then I’m just touched and overwhelmed by how close it is possible to get to another human being without really knowing them at all.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh is a star, it turns out. Like this whole time she has been. I don’t know what I’ve been doing but it’s clearly not reading her books. I read Eileen first which is also exceptional but suffers from third-act pullback in a way that seems to be common with her. This one does it as well, but it doesn’t suffer for it — it’s so evocative and impactful, here, to watch the world go narrow after so long of the protagonist trying for that, feeling both satisfied and starved when it happens, and all the while all the horror. Her characters have these clearly articulated worldviews that are so honest and repulsive you almost have to admire them. And yet it’s not one of those books where I’m like, jesus, who came up with this — her stories and her characters are so firmly rooted in reality that even when patently absurd things are happening, they feel grounded in that core of truth. We may not all know a woman who is abusing prescription medicine in order to sleep for a year, but haven’t we all kinda met that lady once? Satire, baby!
Real Life and The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor is like if Sally Rooney was good, I think. He does the same thing where he intimately concerns himself with the small emotional consequences of peoples lives but he never bothers to assume the reader’s immediate understanding of their lives and circumstances, not with their biology labs and their dance classes and their small Iowa towns that are recognizable to twenty-odd MFA students a year and no one else. He feels a bit like he’s a writer from a different era, which I think he’s aware of, given his social media and the cluelessness of some contemporary reactions to him, that don’t understand how you can write true earnest styled literary fiction and also make jokes on Twitter. Real Life is stronger than The Late Americans, imo, and the latter had a couple genuinely weak characters which was not a problem I had with the first, but I still love his writing. He encourages you to sink into his characters; he doesn’t have that sense of distance I feel sometimes in contemporary literature, where it’s like you’re watching people through a pane of glass. He writes people and they’re just there.
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
The story of this is that I watched the movie, started the book, and then didn’t put the book down until three AM that night when I had finished it. The film is excellent, with Raul Julia and William Hurt both putting in performances of a lifetime, but the book really got me in ways I can’t entirely explain. It’s so small in its scale, not even rising to the extravagance of warranting prose — the entire book is dialogue, save a few chapters at the end containing the text of documents — and yet the atmosphere it created of longing and quiet and frustration between these two men was so precise and gentle, so well-articulated and so intentionally developed. It’s funny, though the movie is the one that shows you the characters the book is what feels most voyeuristic, maybe just because of the sparseness of it all, like you’re just on the other side of the door, listening to a conversation you weren’t intended to hear. I thought it was wonderful.
For films, here’s my Letterboxd (I still don’t know how to link to 2023 specifically). I watched, by my count, 130 new-to-me movies this year, which feels a bit insane and is definitely a new personal record. The ones I keep coming back to:
Infinity Pool dir. Brandon Cronenberg (2023)
The scene that keeps coming back to me from Infinity Pool is the first time Alexander Skarsgård gets thrown in jail, separated from his friends, absolutely pants-shittingly terrified of what has happened and what is happening to him — and the cop comes in and sits down and is so unbelievably bored, explaining the services they provide as part of a tourism initiative, exploitative and appropriative and disrespectful of heritage and culture and so good for business, this thing they’ve taken advantage of and twisted into this weird bloody funnel the idiots and psychopaths with their foreign money fall through. The movie takes such lengths to make Skarsgård pathetic but it’s remarkable to me how every aspect of the environment they’re in contributes to the callousness, hyper-tuned to make him seem fragile, indecisive, easy prey. It’s a fairly blunt critique of colonialism, if you can call it that — perhaps just more of a representation of it, stark and sun-bleached, uninterested in moral questions besides the immediate and overwhelming evil of the people Skarsgård finds himself involved with — but the movie is much more interested in the sense established at the very beginning with that first spinning shot that this world is not the one he knows, that the questions asked here are different questions, that the answers he’ll find are different answers.
The Master dir. Paul Thomas Andersen (2012)
I can’t say how many times I’ve watched the scene halfway through The Master where Freddie and Lancaster, locked in adjacent jail cells, argue bitterly with each other, Freddie railing and screaming, Lancaster with his clear paced intentional speech until all of a sudden it isn’t anymore, his mid-Atlantic accent slipping when he snaps. I’m not sure I’ve seen a better pairing of actors in my entire life than Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and the strange, unpleasant, addicting, desperate relationship they create between each other in the middle of PTA’s unsubtle Scientology pastiche, a thin excuse for Hoffman to do some of his most incredible work charming Phoenix out of his miserable, lost life and into his hands. The movie feels taut. Even in aimless moments with weak minor characters the tension between Hoffman and Phoenix hums, just offscreen, waiting for these people and the odd off orbits of their lives to align again.
Dumplings dir. Fruit Chan (2004)
Bai Ling just barely ekes out Michael Gambon for my performance of the year. She’s got an energy in this movie that’s absolutely electric, so confident and careless, somatic and undeniably human but also so clearly not, with the easy energy she brings to the terrible things she does. It’s an exceptional movie for dozens of reasons, to the extent that I feel almost guilty for my unilateral focus on Ling, but it’s one of those performances (not even the character, necessarily!) that makes it impossible to look elsewhere, to remember anything else but the hem of her top riding up and her steady hand on the plate, the knife, the forceps. One of those instances of someone feeling a little bit realer than the story surrounding them, a little more brightly-lit, a little more defined — to horrifying results, of course.
Top Gun dir. Tony Scott (1986)
I don’t want to admit to this. I resent it, honestly. I don’t even think it’s a very good movie. I found it fairly messy and inconsistent on first watch! I did watch it twice, though, and it became a little bit haunting in the way that the eternal story of spunky brunette goads chilly blond into initially antagonistic but ultimately fulfilling partnership always ends up being. I was trying to have a Val Kilmer year but I think I ended up having more of a Tom Cruise year. Every time I wear aviators now my roommate goes, are you in your Top Gun era? Yeah, I think so.
Asteroid City dir. Wes Andersen (2023)
Wes got me this year!!! Historically I have not been much into Wes, I appreciate the spectacle but I am a hard sell on twee, and save The Grand Budapest Hotel none of his work I’d seen had inched me past the style-over-substance line. I’m not sure if my tastes have changed as I’ve gotten older or if I’ve just come around on ensemble casts and color but Asteroid City was a full 180 for me. A joyful experience beginning to end, expertly crafted, weird and fun and sweet, speckled with those moments of sudden earnest truth that still get me choked up to think about. Jason Schwartzmann at his absolute best, supported by such a great cast, those wonderful kids included. This shook me enough that I”m genuinely thinking I need to revisit Wes’ entire ouvre — the egg might have been cracked, for me, I think I might now be on his side. Maybe we are doomed!
Sunshine dir. Danny Boyle (2007)
This is an exceptional movie for a lot of reasons, but what I keep coming back to is probably the most polarizing part of the film, the very end, when Pinbacker moves onto the main ship and it becomes a surreal, fantastic slasher where previously it had been quite patiently dedicated to the realm of science fiction. The whole film hinges on the crew of the ship successfully reigniting the sun, of course, a premise which is both far too implausible to satisfy the real hard sci-fi heads and a bit outlandishly technical for the average joe. The movie leans into this, at first, with the requisite onboard oxygen garden and the gorgeous, impressive sun-shield that leads to Kaneda’s horrifying death scene. (The crew jettisoning Mace SANS SPACESUIT from ship to ship sounds totally fucking impossible to me, a person who knows jack shit about space, which makes me immediately think it’s totally real and based in fact.) You spend the whole movie thinking about this science shit! The foundation it has to work with is exceptional. And the third act jettisons everything, because — well. Because the sun, right? Time gets weird, space pulls and pushes, people go mad. That’s why the genre shift, that’s why the lack of answers, that’s why all of a sudden things that were clear weren’t anymore and we’ve lost the characters we love and the camera won’t focus on Mark Strong and it ends just like that, no satisfaction, really, just the thing that happens when you fly too close to the sun.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover dir. Peter Greenaway (1989)
I think more movies should look like this. Every color in this was a character of its own. My letterboxd review was “Michael Gambon absolutely foul” and that remains true, rest in peace good sir, king of all he surveyed. Watching this movie is like watching the scene in a cuckoo clock, it feels like a one-room set even though it spills out, gluttonously, into every other room inhabited by every other person who ever set foot in that horrible restaurant. The aesthetic is evil. Tim Roth is there, which I did NOT know, wearing his early career best of “twink Quentin Tarantino’s gonna try to kill”. I don’t even know what the conceit of this movie is. Someone who can write a script like this should be put on a watchlist. I want to print out every individual frame and wallpaper a room with it. Michael Gambon ABSOLUTELY foul.
Anatomy of a Fall dir. Justine Triet (2023)
I went to see this one entirely on a whim, knowing nothing other than it was highly regarded and European, because I wanted to see a movie on my birthday and The Killer was only showing late at night. What a random, riveting choice. Sandra Hüller puts on the performance of a lifetime, and though the conceit of the film makes it seem like the central question is of her innocence, it’s more a litigation of her personality, her relationship with her husband, her professional success, and her obligations to the people around her. It’s another addition to the bisexual canon of the year, too, and for me it had me frozen with what seems to be a uniquely bisexual fear, watching this woman who is so strong and self-determined, so capable, so aware of herself and what she is, in a relationship like this that comes to define her life — not an abusive relationship, not with a bad man, because whatever others may say about this movie, I do think Samuel is a sympathetic character, his selfishness born out of a genuine and unaddressed struggle — where at the end of the day she has made intentional choices and been careful with her life and the narrative still ends up with mistreated husband and callous wife, between misunderstood woman and man-better-off-dead. When Vincent says I don’t give a fuck about reality, you need to start thinking about how others see you and you watch her bow her head, like, fuck! Who cares if she killed her husband!
The Prestige dir. Christopher Nolan (2006)
I watched The Prestige on a plane and I thought it was fun but stupid and then I proceeded to think about it, constantly, for three weeks, which I’m learning means that my fairly brutal first instinct is in fact both fairly brutal and a first instinct. Obsession and the pursuit of perfection to the detriment of self is a favorite theme of mine and The Prestige gets it so well, how single-minded and nasty it lets Angier and Borden be without forgetting how ultimately little anyone else cares about the thing that drives both of their lives. The world keeps turning just beyond the frame of the film, and yet Borden sacrifices his individual lives and Angier sacrifices copy after copy of himself for no reason other than that need that comes from somewhere they can’t explain. It’s so juicy! It gets so dark! I then sought out and read the book, which I would say is a more technically competent achievement but only at the tail end reaches the moments of true horror that the movie flirted with every twenty minutes. I’m still tossing around how I feel about the different interpretations of Angier’s prestige, and I think i’ve settled on the fact that each medium chose the correct version of it. The book, with its lurid language and lack of visuals, is able to conjure that image of the horrid ectoplasmic half-thing that happens only on accident, one time, and ends up sending Angier to his grave — the movie forgoes the slow burn of his sickness in order to highlight the violent rivalry between the two magicians, the mournful half-life of the prestige subsumed into Angier and Borden’s obsession and gluttony. The book fundamentally is quite interested in family and in personal ties, in the responsibility of human beings to other human beings. The movie is concerned with mutual inhumanity. Both good and fascinating, both new favorites of mine.
And here are a few other movies I loved:
Titane (2021), Grosse Point Blank (1997), Dogtooth (2009), No Country for Old Men (2007), Mikey and Nicky (1976), Foxcatcher (2014), Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), Killing Them Softly (2012), The Hit (1984), Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Master Gardener (2022), Fellini Satyricon (1969), Vibes (1988), Raw (2016), Dark City (1998), Princess Cyd (2017), The Sisters Brothers (2018), RoboCop (1987), Body Heat (1981), 28 Days Later (2002), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), The Hunger (1983), The Secret of NIMH (1982), Barbie (2023), The Venture Bros: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (2023), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Bottoms (2023), The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023), The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), Possessor (2020), Collateral (2004), Pride and Prejudice (2005), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
I felt like I had a [capitalism voice] productive year in media consumption, but I struggled over these short reviews for multiple weeks, so what’s up? I have found a definite difference in how I watch movies, read books, and play the few games I’ve ended up playing this year. I feel like I think more, to put it clumsily, and now, temporally removed from the experience of these things, I struggle to access that again. It’s like I’ve already done the work, to some extent, and now it’s gone. I guess that can be a good thing and a bad thing. I spend a lot of my time in person with people talking about things we read and watch and that’s intellectually stimulating while being entirely separate from writing; still, I’d like to get better at putting words to paper when I feel like I’m coming up with them in an order that is interesting.
Previously this part has been a lot of numbers, wanting to do certain things a certain amount of times, monthly goals, specifics, whatever. That’s never really worked, I’ve mostly just done what I wanted to do. So this year I won’t set goals except the main one: I want to continue doing what I’m doing in a way that is both sustainable and productive. I want to write when there’s things I want to write, I want to see things that I want to see and read things I want to read and play things I want to play. That feels like the healthiest way to push against the Goodreads-reading-goalification of our artistic lives, the FOMO and the sense of lost time and the fear that everyone else is moving a little too quickly. I want to care about the things around me less and I want to care about the things in front of me more.
It’s cold outside. We’re two weeks into January. I’m doing alright; I hope you all are, too. I’m gonna go watch a movie.
