First Quarter Evaluations
A collection of twenty-seven reviews of film and literature. Kind of like Letterboxd meets Goodreads... is that what synergy is?
I think I have mercury poisoning. I eat like a suicidal Connecticut housewife from the 1950s, all tuna salad and martinis and deviled eggs and oysters and cornichon, and I think that having a culinary palette that matches my aesthetic palate is producing disastrous results on my health. That, or I’ve just been a bit (more) depressed for the last few months. Whatever the cause, the effects are apparent: I have admittedly been slacking in my writerly duties. Due to heavy metal poisoning or moderate mental illness or a failing of personal character and fortitude, I owe the world—or, better put, my paid subscribers, a.k.a. my world <3—an essay. I’m working on a longer piece adapted from my lecture at the University of Chicago last week (special thanks to Arya and Novak!) that was about the nuances of writing about trauma, particularly in navigating the tension between the radical power of telling our own stories with the exploitative nature of a literary market that seeks to consume stories of marginalized pain. I hope this will be out soon, but until then I have this less formal (but very long, 6,000 word) piece. Without further ado, I present:
Twenty-seven reviews of every book I have read and every film I have seen in theaters this year, presented in chronological order. This includes ten books and seventeen films, my six favorites marked by an asterisk.
The Iron Claw dir. Sean Durkin*
Slowness by Milan Kundera
Eileen dir. William Oldroyd
Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki
An American Werewolf in London dir. John Landis
Poor Things dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
The Boy and the Heron dir. Hayao Miyazaki
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Anatomy of a Fall dir. Justine Triet
The Holdovers dir. Alexander Payne
All of Us Strangers dir. Andrew Haigh
Chapeau Claque dir. Ulrich Schamoni*
Love Lies Bleeding dir. Rose Glass
Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l’hôpital psychiatrique Blida-Joinville, au temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956 dir. Abdenour Zahzah
Between the Temples dir. Nathan Silver
I Saw The TV Glow dir. Jane Schoenbrun
The Zone of Interest dir. Jonathan Glazer
The Door by Magda Szabo*
Drive-Away Dolls dir. Joel Coen
Earth Angel by Madeline Cash*
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Stop Making Sense dir. Jonathan Demme*
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
Why Look At Animals by John Berger
The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin
Life For Sale by Yukio Mishima
Challengers dir. Luca Guadagnino*