I’m at America: A boy starts to run across a field, and his parents call out to him to stop, to be careful of his weak heart. A tornado threatens the mobile home where they live, but it doesn’t reach them. The boy and his sister convince their grandmother, who speaks only Korean, that Mountain Dew is a health food. A white man carries a huge wooden cross down a country road, and when the boy’s baffled parents offer him... Read more
I recently watched 17 Blocks on streaming. This is a documentary shot over almost twenty years, with some of the filming done by the subjects: a black possibly-Catholic family on the harder side of DC. (We see a family funeral at a Protestant church but also references to Confirmation names and attending Mass, and a couple other hints which make me think they might be Catholic or maybe mixed-faith.) The fact that the family did some of the filming themselves... Read more
writing about the penitential peace movements of medieval Italy, and their lessons for the contemporary US: …Throughout the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries peace movements arose in Italy’s blood-rich soil: As a Florentine official described one such movement, “They seek peace, they pray for peace, they repeat peace, and all in one voice they call for peace, they clamor for peace.” The peace preachers were not only priests but also brothers from the new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans,... Read more
In the order in which I saw them, so pretty random. The Pajama Game: Beautiful ice-cream frocks! Early Fosse choreography (especially pleasurable in “Steam Heat”)! A bizarre and disturbing attempt to wring a rom-com out of industrial labor compromise! This frequently-charming musical about a corporate manager who falls in love with a union officer made me think of that Jacobin article, “The Romance of American Clintonism,” where You’ve Got Mail is a Valentine’s card to antipolitics, a big chocolate box... Read more
reviewin’. Also I started a newsletter! Sayaka Murata’s 2016 tale of a woman who becomes the perfect convenience-store employee, her whole body humming with the rhythms of the store, could have been a tragedy or even a grotesque. Instead it’s a strange romance, in which Keiko is the ingenue facing down societal disapproval in order to be with her fluorescent-lit, fully stocked beloved. Keiko, far from stalling out in life, has to grow and change in order to turn her... Read more
In order of when I saw these things, meaning that the best ones are the first and last. Nights of Cabiria: Giulietta Masina is phenomenal as Cabiria, a hard-luck woman who refuses to become hard-bitten despite years of street sex work in the rougher outskirts of Rome. She yells, she fights, but most of all, she longs. That pixie face is just suffused with helpless hope. The shot of her profile at the extreme right of the screen, staring in... Read more
I read Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File is a very personal meditation on, and investigation into, the other Till case. After Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, when his family was seeking justice, sources leaked his father’s military file, which spelled out details which even his family had never been told: that Louis Till was executed by the military for rapes committed in wartime Italy. This leaked file was used to discredit the family... Read more
I don’t intend to issue a verdict on this movie, which is about the secret postwar love affair between a former Nazi torturer and one of his victims. It’s the kind of premise where I think most people go in, if they go in at all, saying, “Convince me that this was worth making,” and I have a lot of criticism for the film but did also end up thinking that that isn’t the right approach to it. So here... Read more
One of the things I’ve been saying a lot over the past year or so is that if you’re gay and Catholic (or in another Christian church with a relevantly-similar sexual ethic) it is good to reach a point where you are grateful to be gay. You will probably need to work to get there. Your education in the faith will not have encouraged you to think this way and will likely have discouraged you. And yet coming to a... Read more
Let’s start with the five best things I wrote this year. Not counting the Gay & Catholic sequel (forthcoming, if the Messiah tarries and they don’t cancel my contract). Oh and if you want my other year’s-best posts, here are the links for movies and books. 5. “Out of Line: ‘Sticking It to the Man’ and the Pulp Revolution“: “Publishers struggled to keep up with the demand for cheap fiction. The hunger for writers allowed unexpected, previously-unpublishable voices to break... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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