The Blackout: I think this was the last movie I watched before my coronexperience Got Real, which may explain why I loved it at the time but can barely remember it now. Or maybe I killed this movie in a blackout??? ANYWAY it’s Abel Ferrara, who is rapidly becoming to me what like Eric Rohmer or Au Hasard Balthasar Guy is to Catholics who enjoy the higher pleasures of the mind rather than the lower, telling the story of a... Read more
When my nephew was bar mitzvah, he chose (!) as his Torah portion the Akedah, or Binding of Isaac, Gen 22:1-19. We were talking at the reception afterward and his dad recommended James Goodman’s But Where Is the Lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac, which the dad and I think also my nephew had read in preparation for the ceremony. I finally got around to reading it and now I can recommend it to you! Some very scattered... Read more
is up at We Are the Mutants: In 1983, Lizzie Borden attacked the World Trade Center. I’m talking about Lizzie Borden the film director, and the bomb that goes off at the top of the Twin Towers is the final image of her punk feminist film Born in Flames. (It’s safe to say that the shock of the ending has not been diminished by the passage of time.) Born in Flames is a loving—or at least, love-hating—tribute to the lower-rent... Read more
I tried to say something useful for the Catholic Herald: The corporal works of mercy – feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and so on – are insistently physical. It’s right there in the name! How can we perform corporal works of mercy when we’re all supposed to stand six feet away from each other? Some of the modifications needed to perform works of mercy are fairly simple, albeit sad: ‘‘visiting’’ the sick by phone or computer, or handing out... Read more
I’ve been thinking about doing this post for a while, and these days of shelter-in-place seem like as good a time as any. The Criterion Collection interests me because it seems to have a sensibility. It isn’t picking the best movies (imo!) or even the best lesser-known movies deserving a wider audience. I imagine the titular “criterion” as something closer to, “I want more like these.” So that’s what this list is: at least somewhat lesser-known, underseen films which, while... Read more
Sea Fever: Basically an Irish version of Underwater–trapped people encounter an unexplained underwater phenomenon which is as deadly as it is extraordinary. I liked it a lot more than Underwater (which I saw on the basis of Kindertrauma’s glowing recommendation). The budget is smaller but the characters struck me as more organically-developed, rather than having the characteristics that they needed in order to hit certain emotional beats–the captains in these two films have essentially the same tragic backstory, and yet... Read more
I’m in the University Bookman, with an essay I posted here but revised & improved for the magazine: Four of these novels are classics of revolt against the times: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Russian Civil War novel White Guard, and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. The fifth, Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, is an experimental science-fiction collage novel which at first seems to sit oddly among works otherwise set... Read more
of two very different books, which both riff on events in the living memory of the authors. Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis. This book tells you up-front that it will be about The Sixties–the mythical drowned continent of the title. And although I found this collection of linked novellas unsatisfying, its response to The Sixties surprised me, and it’s the book’s greatest strength. Because the major emotional key King touches here is guilt. The first novella, “Low Men in Yellow... Read more
in the order in which I saw them. Dead of Night: A 1945 British horror anthology. Mostly what you’d expect from that description: people gather at a country house and tell tales, there’s a sad one and a funny one and a kinda spooky children’s one. AND THEN THERE’S THE VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY. You know, I’ve always assumed people’s fear of dummies was semi-performative. But this anthology ends with an absolutely spine-chilling tale of a dummy who controls his ventriloquist’s life... Read more
my review–filled with spoilers!!–at America online: “BoJack Horseman,” the Netflix cartoon about the depressed, horse-headed celebrity, set itself the nearly impossible task of being a hopeful comedy about chronic alcoholic relapse. For a long time it seemed like the hope came from BoJack’s (voiced by Will Arnett) recurring attempts to change his life: his repeated brief stints of sobriety, the resentful care he offered his abusive mother, his TV comeback, his apologies (“Also I know that my apologies are pretty... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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