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The Gory Joy of the Horror Musical I rarely watch traditional horror films. I’m a poor audience for a lot of what they’re aiming for. Perhaps at its most oversimplified, a horror film is thought to be looking to scare its audience, to really frighten people, and, honestly, sometimes even traumatize them. There can be value in that. The phrase ‘emotional roller coaster’ is a cliche, particularly when applied to films, but it’s still a good way to capture something of what’s going on when someone is watching a scary movie. Rollercoasters and horror films are a safe way to take your brain for a ride, to play with feelings and experiences you wouldn’t ever want as part of your day-to-day life. Horror as a genre can be more than just scares, though, and some rides can still be fun without being extreme. Recognizing that I am hypersensitive to people in realistic pain or distress, a lot of horror films are just off the table for me altogether. Not all of them though. Unless you’re the hardest-core horror purest, there is still plenty of room to play with the experiences of the horror genre without dialing up that visceral discomfort up to eleven. A pretty good example of this is the horror comedy, which I will discuss briefly in a moment, but an even better example for me would be one of my very favorite horror sub-genres which I’ll be discussing at greater length: the horror musical. Genre can get pretty fuzzy at its boundaries. Looking at a film like Young Frankenstein, it’s pretty clear that it’s a straight comedy and not a horror comedy. It’s playing with horror elements, but it’s an unambiguous spoof of horror films themselves, without playing with any of the feelings that horror movies are trying to evoke. Cabin in the Woods, on the other hand, is more straightforwardly a horror comedy because, besides being funny, it’s also genuinely scary in parts, and it is deliberately playing with ideas and images that make people uncomfortable. Perhaps the most well-known horror musical is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but it is also a case, like with Young Frankenstein, where it is not entirely clear whether it should be considered a horror musical or just a musical sendup of classic horror and sci-fi films. While much of the film is silly and camp, there are a few sequences that are disturbing in a way that would otherwise derail a straight comedy. We’re aiming to be light on spoilers here, but, besides the bleak ending, there is a gory ax murder and a somewhat infamous dinner sequence, that are each disturbing enough to signal that the film is pursuing something more than just straight comedy. This seems like a useful benchmark for identifying what distinguishes a horror musical from a more traditional musical: that it’s deliberately playing with ideas and images that would be likely to turn off all but a horror-friendly audience. There can also be a reductive impulse to think of all horror musicals as being horror comedies, but that doesn’t have to be the case. You might laugh at some moments in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but it’s largely a nasty and brutal piece of work. Adding music is generally antithetical to realism, but in Sweeney Todd, there are moments that hit all the harder because of how much they stand in contrast to the songs. Of particular note is the juxtaposition of Johnny Depp’s Todd singing as he slices a passive customer’s throat and fluidly slides their body from his barber chair down a trapdoor in his floor, set against the extremely realistic sound of that 200 lb body hitting the hard basement floor below. That sickly squelching thump of human meat and bone hitting the ground sticks with me as much as anything I’ve seen in any traditional horror film. Sweeney Todd is a lot of things, but what scenes like this make clear is that it is most certainly not a comedy. It’s these sorts of ideas I’ll have in the back of my head as I’m examining what I think some of the most effective horror musicals are. I’m looking at musicals with good songs, but that also have some demented bend to the stories they’re trying to tell. The importance of the music being solid throughout can’t be underestimated. Interrupting the narrative is risky, and to do so for a song that falls flat is riskier still. It doesn’t take much to lose an audience altogether. Think of the fairly baffling song, “Cheer Up, Charlie,” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (not a horror musical, but my goodness would it not take much to recut it into one), a slow maudlin song that all but brings the film to a standstill as it’s simply underlining for the audience an idea that the narrative has already made more effectively. As mentioned above, The Rocky Horror Picture Show may be the most well-known horror musical. In it, a recently engaged couple gets a flat tire on a rainy night and picks the wrong house to go to for help. Adapted from a highly successful stage show, the film is famous for having been a flop upon its release before developing the cultiest of cult followings. Around the country, as Halloween approaches, theaters make plans to show the film, sometimes with shadow cast on hand to act out the film at the same time, with the more adventurous theaters also providing props to the audience for their participation. Lots of other culty films have developed lesser versions of this kind of following, but they’re all following a template first laid out by the Rocky Horror fandom. I’ve written about The Rocky Horror Picture Show twice before. Once as part of a career retrospective article on the film’s star, Tim Curry, and again in an article noting similarities between it and Sunset Boulevard. It’s a film I have a lot of fondness for, coming back to it every Fall. Few people have been as good at anything as Tim Curry is here as Dr. Frank-n-furter, and few experiences feel more like Halloween to me than seeing this film with a live cast. Though perhaps a little less well-known, what may actually be the best horror musical is another film I’ve written about before, 1986’s Little Shop of Horrors. Continuing a theme, this was also adapted from a stage production, written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Adapted from the ultra-low budget (and unexpectedly great) 1960 Roger Corman film of the same name, where a stock boy, named Seymour Krelborn, working at a Skid Row florist, finds a strange and unusual plant with strange and unusual appetites. Things start to go right for Seymour when he starts giving the plant what it wants but starts to unravel as he has to go to ever greater lengths to satisfy the plant's hunger. Ashman and Menken are both musical and musical theater royalty due to their collaborations here, as well as on The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, and Aladdin; and it’s the quality of the music that most sets Little Shop of Horrors apart from other horror musicals, working in numerous musical styles and delivering lyrics that can swing widely between, poignant, funny, sweet, and sinister. The standout of the otherwise star-studded cast is Ellen Greene, reprising the role of Audrey that she had originated on stage. Also working in the film’s favor is Frank Oz as the perfect director for the practical effects and puppetry the film required, in his first non-Muppet project, along with supporting appearances from the likes of Steve Martin, Bill Murray, and John Candy. My favorite horror musical, and a significant motivation for writing this article, is the criminally under-seen, Reefer Madness: The Musical. Again, a stage adaptation, this time loosely riffing on the anti-drug propaganda film from 1936, Reefer Madness. Starring Alan Cumming, Kristen Bell, and Christian Campbell, part of the film being somewhat lost to time is that it premiered on cable on Showtime, and had an extremely limited theatrical run. The original Reefer Madness has itself long become a cult film because of how hyperbolic of a morality play it is about the dangers of marijuana use. This musical adaptation raises those extremes to even more absurdist heights. Where the original saw weed turning kids into zonked-out zombies, the opening number of this film sees kids in the grip of marijuana being turned into literal bloodthirsty zombies out to eat their parents. Christian Campbell and Kristen Bell play Jimmy Harper and Mary Lane, two all-American high school kids whose budding romance crumbles as Jimmy falls into a depraved marijuana addiction that captures Mary Lane as well when she tries to save him. Tony award-winning Cumming is unbelievable in multiple roles here, and it will never get old hearing Bell’s Princess Anna voice sing about sadomasochism in a reefer den. An unusual touchstone for musical theater is Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, The Phantom of the Opera, about a mysterious figure haunting a Parisian opera house, who becomes obsessed with a female performer there. Three films that have tackled versions of the story are: Joel Schumacher’s 2004 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash hit Broadway musical Phantom of the Opera, Brian De Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise, and 2014’s Stage Fright. Webber and Schumacher produce a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, yielding something of a gothic horror. De Palma relocates the story to a more modern setting, mashes it up with the story of Faust, and sets it in a rock club. Stage Fright turns the story into more of a summer camp slasher film and sets it at a youth theater camp. The 2004 Schumacher film earned back double its budget at the box office and enjoys a very strong fan base, but was savaged by critics at the time. What is without question though is that it has some of the most spectacular art direction and set design you’ll ever see. What’s the best way to create the effect of the opera house burning down? To actually build and burn down an opera house. It is the least of a horror movie of these three films, though Phantom of the Paradise is a wild film. In many ways, it shares a lot of the same DNA as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, wallowing in 70's excess and pretty overtly wearing all of its earlier film influences on its sleeve, but leaning a bit more into the psychedelia of the era. Here, the phantom of the title is a songwriter named Winslow Leach, who was screwed over by a record producer and club owner named Swan, played perfectly by the film’s actual songwriter Paul Williams. The phantom comes to haunt Swan’s rock club, which is preparing to open with a performance of music that Swan has stolen from Leach. This musical is a little unusual in its structure in that so much of the music from early in the film is more sketchy and underplayed because what we’re seeing is songs being written, and rehearsed by performers still figuring their parts out. This does serve to somewhat mute the impact of the music early on, but the delayed gratification more than pays off when we finally hear everything fully developed in the climactic performance at the end of the film. This stylistic choice may have contributed a bit to the film having trouble finding an audience when it was initially released, but it also serves to make the finale something incredibly explosive. Stage Fright is a little shaggy compared to most of the other films that I’m discussing here, with an ending that only kind of works, but it gets major bonus points for its infectious theater kid energy. Meat Loaf plays a theater camp owner who used to be a major theater producer, having fallen on hard times when, after the opening night of a production ‘The Haunting of the Opera’ that his wife was staring in, she was murdered, leaving him the widowed father of two. Now, ten years later, he is trying to stage another production of that work, this time possibly starring his daughter, only for further bloodshed to follow. Another figure who features prominently in this world of horror musicals is Tim Burton, who has made three films in the genre: his two stop-motion animation films, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, along with his adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Being PG-rated animated films, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride are both fairly family-friendly. There might be some temptation not to consider either of them horror films, but I think it’s more helpful to think of them as starter horrors, films pitched to younger audiences that give them a point of entry to the genre, with scares geared toward what they can handle at their age without being overwhelmed. A marvel of The Nightmare Before Christmas is the degree to which it follows the story arc of a more traditional Christmas story. Something happens to disrupt Christmas, but at the last minute, the characters we’ve been following work with Santa Clause to restore everything to how it’s supposed to be, thus saving Christmas in the St. Nick of time. In this case, Jack Skellington, the most important figure in Halloween Town, who has come to be bored by his many frightful annual accomplishments, discovers a portal to a different holiday world that gives him some new ideas. Burton makes an interesting choice to split up the role of Jack Skellington between Chris Sarandon, taking on all of Jake’s spoken dialogue, and Danny Elfman, who wrote the music for the film, doing all of the singing. The two performances blend together seamlessly, combining to make for one of the better voice performances you’ll hear. Corpse Bride tells the story of a young man and woman who meet on the eve of their arranged marriage, but, while the man is outside practicing his vows for the ceremony, he accidentally proposes to and weds the corpse of a bride that was murdered and buried by her husband the night of their wedding. Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, and Johnny Depp play the three parts of the love triangle that are trying to navigate the world and underworld as they untangle the mess. Stephen Sondheim had said once that Burton’s Sweeney Todd is the only adaptation of one of his shows that he’s fond of. What Sondheim appreciated was Burton’s dedication to trying to faithfully transpose to show from stage to screen, without being pointlessly beholden to choices Sondheim only had to make in order for the show to work on a stage in front of a live audience. What Sondheim loved is how Burton found a way to stay faithful to the show, while having the confidence to also excise and change whatever needed to be changed for the show to work as a film and finding a visual language that only ever adds to what Sondheim was going for. The story is of a once-young married barber, who is falsely imprisoned by a judge who is after his wife. After many years in prison, the barber is finally released and returns to London with eyes on revenge. Johnny Depp plays the barber, and Helena Bonham Carter plays the woman who rents him space above her meat pie shop, a shop that also happens to provide them with a lucrative means of disposal for the bodies that start to accumulate. This last section is comprised of films that don’t form a tidy group, or that I might not rate quite as highly as all of the ones I’ve listed above, but they are still films that I think are great examples of this sub-genre and well worth your time. Anna & The Apocalypse is a musical teen drama set in and around a high school at Christmastime, during what turns out to be a zombie apocalypse. Tonally it feels like it owes its biggest debts to TV shows Glee and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as the film Shaun of the Dead. The cliche of being a teenager is how much it can feel like the end of the world when things go wrong, and that proves to be no less true when it’s the actual end of the world. The film manages to pack in the high school experiences of how it feels being disconnected from others, how it feels to find that friend group that makes you feel like you can take on anything, and how it feels when that friend group starts to break apart as people move on, all into one heightened bloody two day period. Suck is an incredibly odd artifact of a film. The elevator pitch for the film is, what is it like being on the road with a struggling rock band when one of your bandmates has a substance abuse problem, and what if that substance is human blood? With unlikely cameos from Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, and Moby, this film does a good job capturing the sense of being in a band that is just successful enough that nobody involved can admit to themselves that they should move on. Dave Foley is a scene stealer as the amoral agent with a surprisingly accepting attitude towards vampires. Cannibal! The Musical was a student film Trey Parker wrote and directed while at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The film purports to tell the story of Alferd Packer, who was accused and convicted of murdering and cannibalizing a party he was leading through the mountains of Colorado during winter. The scenes of murder and cannibalism that bookend the film do get a little gory, but this is otherwise mostly a comedy in the spirit of other musical comedies that Parker would go on to do like South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, and his Broadway show, The Book of Mormon. Being a student film, it’s pretty rough around the edges a lot of the time, but even early on, Parker shows a great ear for musical comedy. Repo! The Genetic Opera has a strong following, some fascinating casting choices, and an interestingly maximalist visual style. I would highly recommend it if you wish the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Once More with Feeling,” had a sequel. The film takes place in a future where anyone can buy replacement organs from a company called GeneCo, but if you can’t keep up with your payments, a repo man will find you and take those organs back. The story itself is rather operatic with the incredibly violent family that runs the company squabbling amongst itself over who will take over the company when the patriarch dies, entangled with the story of a man who is being blackmailed to work as a repo man, and the daughter he is trying to keep that a secret from. At the outset of this, what I said of horror films is that they were a way to play with feelings and experiences that we wouldn’t want as part of our day-to-day lives, playing with the images and ideas that frighten and disconcert us. What horror musicals nail more than anything else is that spirit of play while engaging with the ideas at work in horror. There’s a place for extreme and traumatizing horror, and I won’t argue too hard against someone that wants to insist that’s all horror is, but I love that there is a room somewhere for films that can also play with the things that scare us with a spirit of gory joy. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story What I thought of when I first heard about Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, was Milos Forman’s 1999 film, Man on the Moon, about stand-up comedian and performance artist, Andy Kaufman. I grew up loving Andy as a form-breaking comic talent and I remember being incredibly excited by the idea of someone like Forman making an Andy Kaufman movie. What I was disappointed to discover when I sat down in the theater, though, is that isn’t quite what Man on the Moon was. It was a movie about Andy Kaufman’s life, but aside from a somewhat daring opening sequence, it wasn’t anything like what I realized I actually wanted: a movie in the subversive spirit of what Andy himself would have made. That was kind of a lightbulb moment for me when it came to biopics, and how big a difference there is between a biopic being an accurate representation of the events of someone’s life versus being an authentic representation of what that person was all about. Man on the Moon succeeds on that first measure, but it couldn’t help but fall short on the second because it was core to who Andy Kaufman was that he never let the audience in on a bit. A just-the-facts account of his life is about as antithetical to who he was as you can get. “Weird Al” Yankovic has been a pop culture fixture for almost 40 years, and the theme of his work throughout has been bringing craftsmanship and a relentless silliness, even self-described stupidity, to his song parodies and other projects. The concern with a “Weird Al” movie is that stuck within the confines of a biopic, it would either be unwilling to be as silly and stupid as it needed to be authentic to “Weird Al” as an artist, or that it might go so far towards the opposite extremes of silliness that it wasn’t sufficiently rooted in anything real to give an audience something to care about. As it turns out, though, I needn’t have worried. In many ways, this film, for all its absurdity, is the most authentic expression in his career of who “Weird Al” Yankovic is. Rather than wade too far into spoilers for a film that’s only been out for a little bit, I wanted to try and talk about Weird, by discussing how it relates to some other films that are working in this same kind of space. Given how directly Weird is attacking the tropes of musical biopics, the film it might most easily be compared to is 2007’s, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. That film picks and chooses from a number of biopics about musicians to invent its titular Dewey Cox, blending together some of the most hackneyed tropes of those films with some of the assorted artist’s most outrageous stories, to create something wonderfully absurdist that amounts to a retelling of the previous 50 years of popular music. What seems so much more subversive about Weird, though, is the idea of a real person like Weird Al, using his own life to create something similarly absurd. Weird isn’t entirely fiction, using funhouse mirror versions of the events from Al’s life to tell this story, but what starts out as a sendup of musical biopics winds up being something a bit more abstract like a Charlie Kaufman film about a famous parody artist with nothing left to parody but himself. Another film very much in this spirit is George Clooney’s 2002 adaptation of Chuck Barris’s “unauthorized autobiography,” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which purports to tell the story of Barris’s life as the tv host and producer that created The Gong Show, as well as his supposed secret double life as a CIA assassin. In both films, it’s someone presenting their own fabricated autobiography. Still, Barris’s story is a bit more performance art as he has never been willing to acknowledge his story as being made up. Clooney and the film are aware they are making a comedy, but doing so by taking Barris’s story seriously. In Weird, conversely, the performances are played straight for maximum comedic effect, but never to the point that the audience needs to take any of the events depicted in the film at all seriously. “Weird Al” has always been fairly overt in his work. Part of his mass appeal is that he wants everyone to be in on the joke. He famously asks permission from artists before parodying their work because he’s looking to be inclusive and to work with people that are in on the joke. The vibe of the film throughout is, “isn’t it wild that we get to make this.” And lastly, there’s something I see in Weird that I also saw in David Wain’s 2018’s film, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, about Doug Kenney, the co-founded National Lampoon magazine. It would be a spoiler for that underseen film to say too much about it here, but A Futile and Stupid Gesture is more straightforwardly a biopic that makes some incredibly bold choices with its narrative framing and with a twist of the ending that makes the film something much more interesting than the standard fare. Weird does something like this in that, in the beginning the film is loosely telling something like “Weird Al”’s story. He really did start to learn to play the accordion because of a door-to-door accordion salesman that came to his house - though in real life his dad didn’t nearly beat that salesman to death for bringing such a devil instrument into his house. There really is such a thing as the Yankovic Bump, where recording artists saw a surge in their sales after he parodies their work, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that “Weird Al” had to worry about being stalked and murdered over. Narratively though, each of these jokes starts to add up, such that you end up in a narrative space very far afield conceptually from where the film begins. In both cases, the ending isn’t real, but it’s the one most satisfying for the story being told. The biggest factor in how successful the film is, though, is how committed Daniel Radcliffe is. He can do a thing in this film that “Weird Al” can’t, which is, deliver on the comedy while playing this heightened reality completely straight. “Weird Al” is a charismatic presence and can sell his own brand of humor in his songs and music videos, but there is always a very overt wink to the audience with everything he does. Because a part of the target of this film is Oscar bait biopics, what was needed was someone who could throw themselves entirely into the wig and mustache and Hawaiian shirt of it all of the ridiculous “Weird Al” character, but also be able to play the scene where he puts out a cigarette in the hand of a record executive with enough menace and over-seriousness for the absurdity of the moment to hit, yet not so real that it pulls people out of the movie. Radcliffe balances this perfectly throughout. Comedy roles never get the consideration they deserve when award season rolls around, but Radcliffe really is doing some wonderful work here. Everyone surrounding Radcliffe is wonderful as well. Toby Huss is superb as “Weird Al”’s weirdly angry father. Evan Rachel Wood is so good as bizarro Madonna that I kinda wish she were the one cast in that biopic about herself that Madonna currently has in development. Part of the bending of reality of the film is how many of his famous friends and fans “Weird Al” has appeared in cameos throughout the film. Many of them are surprises that ought not be spoiled, in particular an especially star-studded pool party. Everyone in the film understood the assignment and to a person seems to be having the time of their life. There is something that just makes sense about this being the film that “Weird Al” would make. It’s so fitting that someone who has made his career parodying other people’s work would find the perfect capstone to his career parodying himself. Even more fitting, though, is how well it turned out. For an idea that began its life as a fake movie trailer, there’s every reason to think there wouldn’t ultimately be enough there to stretch that short skit of a joke into a film, but boy is there nobody in the world better at wringing every joke there is to be found out of a funny premise. There has never been anyone better at turning the silly and stupid into the sublime. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last film we get from him. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Christmas in Eyes Wide Shut Every year, as we get closer to the holidays, you’ll start to see and hear people discussing holiday movies, and a contemporary part of that discussion is quibbling over whether such-and-such a film is a Christmas movie. The archetype of this argument is that the film, Die Hard, because it takes place at an office holiday party on Christmas Eve, should be considered a Christmas movie. I’m not that interested in this part of the conversation, but what I do find interesting to look at is what the motives and implications are for setting a movie like this at Christmas. In the case of Die Hard, there are structural and thematic reasons why this choice makes sense. A late night holiday party gives a reason for a small group of people to serve as hostages to be in this office building after hours; and, since part of the emotional core of the film is Bruce Willis’ John McClane trying to reconcile with his estranged wife, Christmas is a great backdrop for that kind of homecoming. Setting aside the question of whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie, that it is set at Christmas does play an important role in the story being told. Another film that has taken on some prominence recently in this conversation around unconventional Christmas movies is Stanley Kubrick’s final film, 1999. Eyes Wide Shut. Like Die Hard, and the other films in this discourse, Eyes Wide Shut is a film that is very overtly set at Christmas, but isn’t interested in engaging directly with traditional Christmas themes. This is a choice of some kind as this shift of setting is one of surprisingly few changes from the novel the film is based on, with just about every scene in Eyes Wide Shut dressed so that you never forget when the events depicted are taking place. There is a danger of overinterpreting Kubrick in these kinds of choices, but I do think that in this case he is trying to say something here, and I’m interested in exploring what that might be. The film is based on Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, Dream Story. It’s a story about, among other things, dreams and class and marriage, mostly told through a dark night a husband has after his wife confesses to once contemplating being unfaithful to him. The story begins with the husband and wife reading to their young daughter as she falls asleep before they plan to head out for the evening. The one scene of the nighttime story we hear described is of a galley ship out to sea, with a team of slaves rowing below deck, while a prince lays by himself up on the deck, wrapped in his purple cloak, staring up at a starry night sky. As the couple finish reading this bit, the two parents observe that the child’s eyes have shut while she wears an expression “as if she had been caught getting up to mischief.” It’s a sweet domestic moment before the father and mother leave for a masquerade party that night to mark the end of the carnival season. The film does begin similarly, but even before this scene, the very first shot we get during the opening credits is of the wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), from the back as Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 plays. It’s night. She’s in the bedroom of what seems to be an expensive city apartment. She’s presumably coming home from a night out, undressing, letting her dress fall off her body to reveal that she’s naked underneath. It’s only a 7 second shot, but it’s enough time to play with an audience’s expectations of what this film is going to be. It’s a moment out of time from the rest of the film that you could read almost anything you like into. It can seem sexual because it’s someone as famous and beautiful as Nicole Kidman getting naked, but it’s not filmed in any especially sexy kind of way. She’s simply a woman standing in her bedroom, casually undressing, but the audience can’t help but project something onto what they’re seeing, unavoidably reading something, probably too much, into the behavior of a woman, caught in a private moment simply existing in our gaze. When we next see Kidman, it’s a different time. She and her husband Bill (Tom Cruise) are now getting ready to go to a party. Bill putters around their bedroom in his tuxedo, talking to Alice, looking for his wallet, before walking into the bathroom where Alice, in another fancy black dress, is sitting on the toilet, finishing going to the bathroom. They have such a lived-in domesticity and comfort with one another that this intimate moment plays as the most unremarkable thing in the world. Similar to the book, as Bill and Alice make their way out of the apartment to head to the party, they stop in the living room to give their young daughter a kiss goodbye and some last minute instructions to the babysitter, before heading out for the night. In one sense this is where the film and the book start to diverge, but more as a matter of emphasis and pacing than content. This next party set piece of the film is mostly faithful to the book, and serves the same function as setting in motion everything to follow, but what Kubrick will take twenty minutes to unfold, the book will dispense with in a paragraph. It’s also at the party where Kubrick introduces his biggest addition to the narrative, the wealthy host of this incredibly lavish party, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). We can tell that Bill and Alice are wealthy in their own right from their NYC apartment, and we will learn that Bill is a high end doctor catering to affluent patients, but the wealth of the Zieglers is another level altogether. The contrast drawn out by Bill and Alice not knowing anyone at the party and feeling out of place. They get separated when Bill spots someone at the party he does know, and goes over to talk to him while Alice goes to the restroom. The person Bill spots isn’t another guest at the party, but rather one of the hired help: a piano player with the band that Bill recognizes as an old med school classmate of his, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). We see Bill blossom a bit talking to Nick, presumably in part just from seeing a friendly face, but also clearly because Nick is someone at this party to which Bill can feel more successful. They talk briefly, making plans to catch up at one of Nick's other upcoming gigs in the city, before Nick is pulled back to rejoin the band. Now separated from one another at the party, both Bill and Alice each experience a small adventure. Alice is by herself at the bar waiting for Bill, drinking champagne to try and get comfortable, when a suave older Hungarian man begins to hit on her. Alice appreciates the attention, agreeing to dance with him, all while his advances become increasingly blunt. Bill is elsewhere, talking with two young models who openly flirting with him, and will ultimately try to lure him upstairs for sex. Alice will eventually resist her pursuer’s advances, leaving him on the dance floor to go look for Bill. We don’t see as definitive a resolution between Bill and the two women interested in him, as he is interrupted right as it becomes clear what’s being offered to him. Before we can be sure that Bill will say ‘no’ to these two models, he is summoned by one of Ziegler’s assistants. What we will learn when Bill makes his way upstairs, is that sometime after we first met Ziegler, when he and his wife were welcoming Bill and Alice to the party, he had apparently snuck upstairs for an assignation with another woman. When Bill finds them, Ziegler is dressing, and his mistress, Mandy, is sprawled out naked on a couch, unconscious from an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Because I’m specifically looking at Eyes Wide Shut through the prism of Christmas, a connection I made this time that I hadn’t before is some of the resemblance between this scene and a key scene in Billy Wilder’s 1960 film, The Apartment. In that film, C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemon), is a low level employee at an insurance firm who is letting executives at the company use his apartment to meet their mistresses, in order to try and get a leg up at the company. The night of Christmas Eve, Baxter comes home after his boss, who had been scheduled to have been using the apartment, should have been finished. Once there, Baxter finds the woman from the company he likes, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), unconscious in his bed, having taken an overdose of sleeping pills after meeting up with his boss. Baxter has to run to the apartment next door to ask the doctor that lives there, Dr Dreyfus, to come help Ms. Kubelik. Dr. Dreyfus is able to revive her, and Baxter spends the next few days nursing Ms. Kubelik back to health. When Bill is summoned in a similar way to revive Mandy, he is also able to do so. He gives much the same sort of instructions to Ziegler that Dr Dreyfus gave to Baxter, with the difference being that Ziegler can barely hide how put upon he is to not be able to just have someone put her in a cab and send her home. Ziegler will do what he has to in order to extract himself from this situation, but he cares as little about Mandy herself as Baxter’s boss cared about Ms. Kubelik. In both the book and the film the husband and wife go home from the party and are both romantically charged up for one another after having been sexually pursued by their respective strangers at the party. In both the book and the film, the couple makes passionate love, and again in both book and film, this passionate outburst is tempered for each of them when they wake up the next morning to return to their less exciting everyday lives. It’s the next day, as they are each stewing in the ordinariness of their lives that they each begin to dwell on the excitement that could have been theirs, seemingly having lost sight of the passionate night they actually did have with one another. The way it’s phrased in the book, “And all at once, those inconsiderable experiences were bounded magically and painfully by the deceptive appearance of missed opportunities.” After this long day, they put their daughter to bed and retire to their bedroom. Perhaps chasing something of the excitement of the night before, Alice grabs their small stash of marijuana from a Band Aid box in the medicine cabinet. We next see the two of them in bed (in admittedly one of the more bizarrely acted scenes ever put on film), seemingly quite high. Alice asks Bill about something she’s clearly been stewing about since the party. She had seen him with the two girls at the party, noticed that he had then disappeared for a long time, and wanted to know if Bill had slept with them. Bill plays dumb. “I wasn’t hitting on anyone,” he says. We know otherwise and, importantly, so does Alice. This may be the choice Bill makes where things start to devolve for him. Bill could have chosen to be honest with his wife here, but he doesn’t. This dynamic will underpin the rest of their interactions in this scene and the remainder of the film. While Alice is willing to be brutally open and honest with Bill, to a fault even, Bill is not willing to do the same. When Bill deflects about the two models and misleads about why he was upstairs with Ziegler for so long, He asks Alice about the man she was dancing with. Alice tells Bill that he tried to get her into bed at the party, but she is deeply troubled by how unthreatened Bill is by this confession. She’s hurt by his complete lack of jealousy in this moment, feeling taken for granted, feeling like she’s been filed away in his mind as just a faithful wife and mother, and not as a sexual being, not as someone that another man could find interesting enough to try and steal away from him, not as someone capable of being tempted to let herself be stolen away. So, Alice makes a confession. She asks Bill if he remembers a trip they took to Cape Cod the previous summer; if he remembers one night sitting in the dining room of the place where they were staying at a table next to where three naval officers were sitting. He doesn’t remember because the moment Alice has in mind meant nothing to Bill, but she tells him why it’s so burned in her memory. She had seen the naval officer earlier that morning and they shared a glance that shook her to her core. She reminds Bill that they had gone up to their room and made love that afternoon while their daughter went to the movies with a friend, but confides that she was thinking about the naval officer the entire time. So built up was this infatuation in her mind, that she tells Bill that she felt like she would have been tempted to give up everything - her marriage, her family, everything - to be with that man, even if it was only for one night. But she also adds: “And yet it was weird, ‘cause at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever, and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad.” The next morning she says she woke up in a panic, uncertain if she was more worried that the naval officer had left the hotel, or that he hadn’t. By dinner that night, when she realized the man had left, she says she felt relieved. Bill is silent for this whole confession, and as we will discover more and more over the course of the film, his world is shattered by this revelation. There’s no time to discuss though, because a phone call comes right then, summoning him to the bedside of a patient of his that had just died. Bill will go out into the night, and all of his misadventures that follow will be motivated by the sudden jealousy, and fear, and emasculation that came from what his wife just confessed to him. For our purposes, we don’t need to belabor all of the shenanigans that Bill will get up to over the course of this night and the next day, but I will briefly list them here. At the bedside of his dying patient, his grieving daughter will throw herself at Bill. Bill will be accosted by some drunk frat guys on the street that will insult him and question his sexuality. He’ll let himself be picked up by a young sex worker, named Domino, and brought to her apartment, but will chicken out when he gets a checkup call from Alice before anything can be consummated. Leaving there, he’ll stumble across the jazz club where Nick Nightingale is performing, where Nick confides in Bill that he’ll be playing blindfolded at some kind of high end sex party that night, and Bill pressures Nick to help him sneak in. Nick caves, telling Bill that the secret password for the party is “Fidelio” - An opera by Beethoven about a faithful wife who disguised herself as a man to rescue her husband from prison. Bill secures the costume he needs and sneaks into the party. He is warned almost immediately after he arrives by one of the women who recognizes that he doesn’t belong there, and she tells him that he’s in danger if he doesn’t leave immediately. Bill doesn't listen, and circulates through the party, among the other masked and cloaked observers, watching the different groups of men and women have sex. One of the naked masked women approaches him, asking him if he wants to go somewhere more private. He agrees, but is pulled away before anything can happen by the first woman who warned him earlier. She tries to warn him again, but it’s too late. Bill is brought to a room where most of the cloaked figures have assembled to confront him. Before he can be punished, the woman who had been warning him all night offers herself up to be punished in his place, and Bill is allowed to leave with a threat to never discuss what happened. Bill arrives back home at four in the morning, their Christmas tree the only light on in the apartment. He hides his cloak and mask before going into the bedroom where he finds Alice laughing in her sleep. Bill wakes her and she jumps, shifting from laughter to fear. He asks her what she was dreaming of, and she describes a nightmare where the two of them were frightened and naked, and she thought it was his fault. In the dream, Bill went looking for her clothes and she suddenly wasn’t frightened anymore. She was now lying naked in the grass when the naval officer came out of the woods and saw her there and started laughing at her. Alice stops here, but Bill knows there is more to her dream, because she was laughing when he came in, and he presses her to tell him the rest. Now holding onto Bill, on the verge of tears throughout, Alice describes how the naval officer starting to kiss her, and then they made love; And how there were all these people watching. Then she was having sex with all the other men there, she didn’t know how many. She knew Bill could see her and what she was doing, her impulse was to make fun of him, to laugh in his face, so she laughed as loud as she could. She’s crying now as she tells Bill this, and he doesn’t know what to say. The remaining hour of the film is mostly Bill retracing his steps from the night before. Discovering just how badly things went, or could have gone. At Nick’s hotel, Bill learned that Nick showed up bruised and scared at 4:30 in the morning to check out, and in the company of two large men. Bill goes to the address of the party from the night before, and someone comes out and hands Bill an envelope with his name typed on it. In it is a letter warning him not to investigate any further. He returns to Domino’s apartment, and meets her roommate Sally, who seems to also be a sex worker. Bill seems to be interested and on the verge of hooking up with Sally, when he learns that the reason Domino isn’t there is that she just learned that morning that she was HIV-positive. From a newspaper Bill learns that Mandy from Ziegler’s Christmas party - who it turns out was a former Miss New York, making her prominent enough to warrant an article in the paper - had died of a drug overdose. Pausing to read the article, you can see that she had been seen returning to her hotel in the company of two men about the same time that Nick was being brought back to his hotel. Was Mandy the person who tried to warn him? At this point, Bill gets a phone call from Ziegler, summoning him to a meeting. Once at Ziegler’s, Victor tells Bill that he knows everything and that Bill needs to stop looking into this. He’s talking out both sides of his mouth a bit - on one hand telling Bill that these are dangerous people that he needs to be real careful not to cross, and at the same time trying to reassure Bill that Nick is fine and that Mandy’s overdose was just an inevitable accident. Ziegler is trying to weave a narrative for Bill that will both let him go home not thinking he got two people killed, but also still scare him enough to keep his mouth shut. Bill does go home. Maybe this would have been something he could have put behind him, until he walks into his bedroom and sees his mask from the party resting on his pillow, next to his sleeping wife. He breaks. His crying wakes up Alice, and he says he will tell her everything. We presume that he does, because the next shot we see is Alice, her eyes bloodshot and smoking a cigarette. The room is sunlit, suggesting she’s been up all night hearing Bill’s tale. Perhaps there’s more to discuss, but Alice says their daughter will be up soon, and is expecting for them to take her Christmas shopping today. The final scene takes place at a toy store, presumably FAO Schwarz, or similar. This setting is another departure from the book, where Bill’s confession and this next scene are all one piece. Something about what happens next Kubrick specifically wanted to set not just in a Christmas setting, but in the most nakedly commercial facet of the holiday. This echoes a bit the way he’s used Christmas throughout the film. never the traditional themes of the holiday, but the trappings. Trees and lights and presents and parties, but just these surface appearances. Walking among the toy store aisles, Bill asks Alice what they should do. To which Alice says, “What do I think we should do? I think we should be grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real, or only a dream.” Bill asks her if she’s sure, and she adds, “Am I sure? Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.” Alice is clearly struggling some to make peace with what her husband confessed to her, but she is choosing to make peace with it. Whether or not that’s the right choice is up to her to decide. She is choosing to accept what happened and try to repair their bond. She tells Bill that she loves him, but that there is something that they need to do as soon as possible. Bill dutifully asks what that is. And Alice answers with the somewhat infamous last word of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, “Fuck.” So, is Eyes Wide Shut a Christmas movie? I don’t know, probably not. It being set at Christmas plays no role in the plot. The Ziegler's Christmas party could have been anytime, and they could have been doing any kind of shopping in the final scene. But, that said, is there something Kubrick is trying to say by setting it at Christmas? Probably so, but maybe not Christmas in the sense we usually think. In some ways, Christmas is a holiday of appearances, which something that traditionally Christmas movies can feed into. Carefully orchestrated Christmas cards pictures taken between fights. Cheery lights on the house that might not reflect the lives of the people inside. When we first meet the Zieglers it’s one picture perfect happy couple meeting another as the Zieglers welcome Bill and Alice to the party, only for us to meet Victor again upstairs just a little while later, standing above a naked unconscious woman that isn’t his wife. The course of the film reveals all the ways that Bill and Alice aren’t so picture perfect, too. But there’s something Alice says in that last scene that sticks with me. When Bill asks her what they should do she says “we should be grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures.” There is something a little Christmasy about the idea of counting your blessings and being grateful for what you have and have overcome. This is my take away, at least. Eyes Wide Shut is a film about marriage and fidelity, that looks at the differences between how things appear and what they are actually like, and examines the tension between the things we want and our appreciation of what we have. Each of those themes makes sense to interrogate through a lens of Christmas. Where we leave Bill and Alice is in a toy store at Christmastime, a place more than any other in the world that screams out from every shelf, “Look at all the things that could be yours!” But they have everything that they need at the moment. They have each other, and a better understanding of one another. They’ve been through a lot together, but their eyes are open now. It’s a Christmas miracle! Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the memories that Viktor Frankl relates from his time in a concentration camp is of a particularly memorable sunset. He describes the scene of him and his fellow prisoners being exhausted after another endless string of grueling workdays. They were laying together on the floor of their hut, when another prisoner came in, telling them that they needed to come outside to see something wonderful. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner says to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’ Frankl’s book is, among other things, an exploration of how people find and create meaning in their lives, and how through such meaning, people can sustain themselves during even the very worst of circumstances. In this anecdote of Frankl’s, the sunset in no way erased anything of the seemingly hopeless circumstances that he and his fellow prisoners were just barely living through, but, just the same, a moment of shared beauty was still something that, if only for a moment, made them feel a little more alive and lightened their load. Reading this story recently, I thought of a pivotal scene in Hal Ashby’s 1971 film, Harold and Maude. The titular Harold and Maude have just spent the day together. Harold, never stated, but about twenty or so; Maude, on the very cusp of turning 80. They are sitting side by side in a marshy and rusted-out trainyard, with a very busy highway in the background behind them. Harold is beginning to realize that he’s falling in love with Maude. Holding her hand, he looks down and notices, for the first time, the concentration camp number on her arm. At that same moment, with a joyful gasp, Maude points to a flock of birds taking flight in front of them. The camera cuts to a view from behind them that shows what they’ve been looking at all along is a beautiful magic hour sunset, with waves gently crashing right in front of them. The contrast is drawn between their surroundings and what they’re choosing to look at instead is plain. We cut back to the view of them from the front, and again see the ugly, industrial debris all around them. Maude makes a passing allusion to the glorious birds that Dreyfus saw on Devil’s Island, without mentioning to Harold, or the audience for that matter, that Devil’s Island was a French penal colony, or that Alfred Dreyfus was a French military officer falsely accused of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment there due to the rampant antisemitism in the French military at that time. Maude knows the story, but her interest in the moment is only the glorious birds that Dreyfus had marveled at. We cut again to a view from behind and watch the two lovebirds snuggling further into one another, savoring the beautiful moment, though surrounded by ugliness. Looked at from one angle. Harold and Maude is a carpe diem story, similar in spirit to the later Dead Poets Society. Harold overlaps in a number of ways with the unformed schoolboys of that story, and Maude overlaps more than a bit with the manic pixie English teacher that taught them all to seize the day. The key difference though is that having taught Harold his much-needed lesson - shaking him from his aversion to life and fixation on death - Maude actually goes on to take her own life. It would have more straightforwardly underlined her message to Harold if Maude merely died, but it dramatically complicates that lesson when she chooses to end her own life. There’s a climactic suicide in Dead Poets Society as well, but it’s noteworthy how the two films differ on this. In Dead Poets Society, it’s a young boy who takes his own life out of feelings of hopelessness. The closer parallel for Harold and Maude would be if it were Harold who had taken his own life rather than Maude. In the case of Maude, she is anything but hopeless. She’s satiated. She’s lived a rich and full life, and she sincerely wishes the same for everyone else, but she’s had her fill and is ready to be done. In the first scene where Harold & Maude speak to one another, they’re both recreationally attending the funeral of a gentleman that neither of them knows. Maude comes up to Harold to ask if he knew the deceased. When Harold says, “No,” she mentions to him that the man died at 80, which to her is a good time to pass on: I heard he’s 80 years old. I’ll be 80 next week. Good time to move on, don’t you think? …Well, I mean 75 is too early, but at 85 you’re just marking time. You may as well go over the horizon. It’s this idea that I struggle with most in this story. As I’m writing this, the legendary star of stage and screen, Rita Moreno, has just turned 90 and is being talked about as a strong possibility to receive an academy award nomination for her role in Stephen Spielberg’s recently released adaptation of West Side Story. She has 14 acting credits since turning 80, including 46 episodes as a regular on a TV series. Rita Moreno has certainly not just been “marking time.” My own parents are rapidly approaching their 80s, and I hope that they also have a great many fulfilling years ahead of them, and will have something to look forward to in every day they have left. But, that said, I’m probably not being honest with myself if I don’t concede that there is something to what Maude is saying, and all I’m doing is quibbling with which age she picked for her departure. In every life, if it lasts long enough, the inevitability of its ending can’t help but eventually become an ever-present and all-consuming concern, and not wanting to live to see that day seems to make some sense. Not wanting to live long enough to outlive all of your friends, or the usefulness of your own mind and body, makes sense. However, how we square acknowledging that with Maude’s life lessons to Harold, has everything to do with her being 80, and his only being 20 or so. Maude is interesting in that, as far as the film goes, she doesn’t have a character arc. From the first words we hear her speak, she is already on a course she has chosen for how her story will end. Her interactions with Harold don’t divert her from that course at all. Her character arc has already happened during the long and rich life she lived before the film even starts. Harold, as the cliche goes, still has his whole life ahead of him. While it’s at least coherent that Maude may want to choose to end her life before she is no longer able to enjoy it, she awakens Harold to the idea that a similar fatalism makes no sense for him when he seemingly has so much wonderful life available to him. When Harold tearfully confides in Maude what first prompted him to start faking his suicide - the reaction he saw from his otherwise unfeeling mother after she had thought he had been killed in an accident at school - and how he came to think he’d enjoy being dead, Maude makes her full-throated endorsement of life: I understand. A lot of people enjoy being dead. But, they’re not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. Play as well as you can. Go team, Go! Gimme an ‘L’. Gimme an ‘I’. Gimme a ‘V’. Gimme an ‘E’. L-I-V-E Live! Otherwise, you’ve got nothing to talk about in the locker room. This isn’t just a thing that Maude is saying for Harold’s benefit, while secretly having given up on her own life. She is living her life fully and is collecting stories for the locker room right up until the end. She’s leading police on high-speed chases. She’s liberating trees from city streets to replant in the woods. She’s posing nude for an ice sculptor. She’s living all the days she’s chosen to have left. Even as she’s riding with Harold to the hospital in the ambulance he has called, she is more bemused by the whole thing than anything. Harold implores her not to die, and tells her that he loves her. She’s thrilled by this. Not so much that he loves her, but that he’s loving at all. “Oh, Harold,” she says. ”That’s Wonderful. Go and love some more.” I think it’s this last line that captures the enduring legacy of this film. At that moment, Harold says, “No. Never.” But, we leave him on a slightly more hopeful note as the credits roll. He’s somewhat at peace with what has happened, and what’s in store for all of us eventually, softly dancing towards the horizon and playing the banjo that Maude gave him, having absorbed the lessons she had to give. He has lived and loved, and thankfully, he will go on to do so again and again. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

It makes sense that Lin-Manuel Miranda would see something in Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM! that suited his own strengths and sensibilities for his directorial debut. It doesn’t hurt that he knows the show first-hand, having starred in a 2014 revival. It’s a New York City story, like his own In the Heights, albeit through a different neighborhood and cultural prism. It’s about a protagonist explicitly writing like they’re running out of time and turning out to be right, like with Hamilton. It’s about the minutiae of someone trying to get a musical off the ground, which Miranda knows firsthand, and it’s a look at a wunderkind in the time before the acclaim, which Miranda should know something about as well. Jonathan Larson is best known for writing the music, lyrics, and book to the musical, Rent. Rent, as we hear at the very beginning of the film, was a phenomenon, running for 12 years on Broadway, winning both the Drama Desk and Tony award for Best Musical, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Unfortunately, the tragedy of Larson’s story is that he didn’t live to see any of that success. Larson died of an aortic aneurysm, the result of a misdiagnosis, just before Rent’s first off-Broadway preview performance at the New York Theater Workshop. He was 35 years old. tick, tick…BOOM! isn’t about Rent, or explicitly about Larson’s death, though both can’t help but be in the background here if you are already familiar with Larson’s story, and both feature in the closing moments of the film. tick, tick…BOOM! is Larson’s own autobiographical musical account of his struggles to establish himself in NY’s theater scene. Miranda’s adaptation of that project widens the aperture a bit to tell a fuller version of that story. The framing device he uses is that we’re watching Larson stage a performance of tick, tick…BOOM! recounting his failed efforts to get his previous musical, SUPERBIA, off the ground. Miranda cuts between Larson's performance and him going through those experiences, but with that reality punctuated occasionally by additional, full, world-bending musical numbers. I didn’t exactly know how this story was going to play out while I was watching it, except for realizing that neither tick, tick…BOOM!, nor SUPERBIA, were the thing that Larson was best known for, so it seemed unlikely that we were going to get the story of his big break. The film begins with the stage performance of tick, tick…BOOM!, with Jonathan lamenting his anxiety about his lack of success and his impending 30th birthday - with a literal ticking clock underlining the message. As the audience to that performance, we are with Jonathan in the future, looking back on the story that he’s telling. No matter how the story he’s telling goes, there must be some hope to it, because we are getting to watch him on a stage tell it to us. At the same time, we are also another 30 years in the future from that audience, also aware of the greater successes he would go on to have, but not live to see. There is an interesting parallel here to another musical, of sorts, released this year: Bo Burnham’s Inside. The surrounding context is different for Burnham, in that everything he is singing is being further heightened by suffocating pandemic quarantine, but the underlying idea is the same: that the idea of turning 30 feels like a turning point in life where youth is officially behind you, and there is a growing compulsion to assess what you’ve accomplished with your life up to that point. There is also tidy symmetry in that Larson is singing about turning 30 in 1990, which is the year that Burnham sings about being born. What both films capture is that universal feeling of hitting a point in your life where it suddenly feels like the idea of time changes from something in great abundance to a dwindling scarcity. The pressures and passage of time feature in different ways throughout tick, tick...BOOM!. Jonathan not only feels like he’s running out of time in his own life to make his mark, but he also finds himself endlessly short of time in his day-to-day life to do all of the things he wants, and needs, to do. He’s days away from the critical workshop performance of his show, SUPERBIA, but he’s still missing the song that everyone that matters agrees the show is missing. He doesn’t have time to work on the song because he needs to work to make money to pay for the musicians for the workshop. He doesn’t have time to talk to his girlfriend about their future because he needs to prepare for his workshop and somehow finish that song. The conclusion of Larson’s journey in his production of tick, tick…BOOM! is that, although he may be turning 30, and although the musical he spent the majority of his adult life working on isn’t going to get produced, he’s still living the only life he could imagine for himself. So what if SUPERBIA didn’t succeed the way he wanted? He still made it. People liked it. He’s still proud of it. On to the next one. There’s still time. Happy Birthday! And yet, there’s only still time until there isn’t. Larson has made peace with the relentless ticking, but it never stops for anyone. The feat of both Larson, and Miranda, is being able to honor that idea that we are all running out of time in our own ways, while still being sincerely joyful and celebratory about the things we can choose to do with the time we do have. It’s great that Larson went on to create Rent, but he doesn’t actually know that yet at the conclusion of his production in Boom!. Whatever is next for him, the ending to the story he is telling is already a happy one for him, because he has made peace with the person he was meant to be, whatever may come next, whatever time he might have left. The film, despite the very great many things already working in its favor, hinges entirely on Andrew Garfield’s performance as Jonathan, and he more than delivers. After seeing the film, I was dumbfounded to discover that he doesn’t come from any extensive musical theater background, but prepared for the film with just a year of vocal training. Additionally, when not singing, he carries himself throughout the film with such an impossibly easy charm that he feels like the tailor-made first choice for the kinds of roles Tom Hanks made his career on. Garfield is going to get Oscar consideration for this performance and it’s going to be richly deserved. Miranda should also be applauded for his handling of this adaptation. I had to remind myself throughout that it was this, and not In the Heights, that was his first time directing. Working with a smaller ensemble, and occasionally limited in scope because of COVID protocols during production, Miranda has produced an incredibly complex narrative, working in both different times, but also in different senses of reality, often within the same scene, yet yielding a finished product that goes down as clean and easy as can be. He’s proven himself to be a more than capable director, and, in the spirit of this film, I bet the next one will be even better. I had already submitted this review when the news broke of Stephen Sonheim’s passing at the age of 91. Sondheim was the very definition of a giant in the world of musical theater. He was an important mentor in Jonathan Larson’s life and appears as an encouraging presence throughout tick, tick...BOOM! in a role played by Bradley Whitford. A story making the rounds in the days since his passing is that Sondheim was also an encouraging presence in the making of this adaptation of tick, tick...BOOM!, offering to rewrite the final voicemail his character leaves for Jonathan to more closely match what he would have actually said at the time. Then, when Whitford was unavailable to record the rewrite (perhaps conveniently unavailable), it’s actually Sondheim’s voice we hear in the film. Even before his passing, it was something wonderful to hear because of his relationship with Jonathan, but even more so now. It’s heartwarming to hear about such a vibrant and creative force using every last bit of the time available to him to its fullest. May we all be so lucky. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

A look at Guillermo de Toro's Pinocchio 2022 has unexpectedly been the year of Pinocchios, with three different filmed adaptations being released of Carlo Collodi’s 1880s children’s book, The Adventures of Pinocchio. There was a Russian animated version released in English with Pauly Shore voicing the titular Pinocchio, and SpongeBob Squarepants’ Tom Kenny as the voice of Geppetto; there was a potentially even more misguided version by Robert Zemeckis that combined a live-action Geppetto played by Tom Hanks acting against a computer-animated version of the 1940s Disney iteration of Pinocchio; and lastly, and most successfully in my view, Guillermo del Toro’s darker stop-motion animation take on the story, set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Funnily enough, Tom Kenny provides the voice of Mussolini here, and funnier still, if IMDB is to be believed, he’ll also be voicing Pinocchio in yet another version of the story set to be released next year. It’s just so many Pinocchios! The Tom Kenny of it all aside, it is curious, to say the least, to see the same story adapted four times in two years, but that barely scratches the surface of how many adaptations of this story exist. Honestly, however many adaptations you think there have been, the true number is probably quite a bit more than that, and all spread out over more than a hundred years. The seemingly definitive version of the story for my whole life has been Disney’s 1940s version, only the second feature-length film released by the studio, and the follow-up to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Pinocchio. It is so tied to the history of The Walt Disney Company that the film’s opening song, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” has long been something of a theme song and guiding ethos for the company. Long before the Disney film, though, there was a silent-era, live-action version from 1911 that is a fascinating artifact of film history, being one of Italy's first feature-length films. I’ve had no luck finding a definitive list of every adaptation of the story there has been over the years, seemingly due in part to how disparate the adaptations have been. There’s a 2015 Czech version, numerous TV movies including a 2008 version with Bob Hoskins as Geppetto, a 1967 version from Germany that mixed live-action with real puppetry, a Japanese animated series from 1976, and dozens more besides. There have also been countless films that have overtly riffed on elements of the Pinocchio story, like 2021’s Finch, 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, and 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, to name a few. The unifying feature across almost all of the adaptations of the Pinocchio story is that there is a craftsman that makes a child, which then comes to life, and over the course of the story, that fabricated child develops a longing to become more real. In some ways, this is itself something of a riff on the same ideas of the Frankenstein story, and many other folk tales besides, but there has been something unique to the dynamics of the Pinocchio story in particular that has seemingly encouraged so many creators to attempt their own adaptation. It’s a story that lends itself to examinations of parents and children, what it is to be human, what it is to be good, the nature of lying, what it is to be real, and so much more besides. Looking at del Toro’s version, it’s interesting to see which bits of the story he chooses to tweak and highlight, what things he invents himself, and where he is drawing inspiration from the book versus paying some kind of homage to the original Disney film. I’m particularly interested in how overtly religious his treatment of the story is. When we meet him, Gepetto is not just a woodworker but is engaged in a long project of carving a crucifix for his local church, and it’s the accidental bombing of this church through which he will lose his son, Carlo; Gepetto is carving the world’s most famous dead son right before he loses his own. Gepetto will go on to plant the pinecone that Carlo was holding before he died, and from the tree that pinecone grows into, he will drunkenly carve another son, the wooden puppet that will become Pinocchio - a kind of resurrection of its own. It’s also something of a miracle that seemingly the only two things in the church that survived the bombing unscathed were Carlo’s pinecone and Geppetto’s crucifix. When it happens, Carlo’s death is especially painful because he doesn’t even know what’s coming when the building starts to shake. Excited, he asks, “What’s that sound, papa? Is it a plane?” Geppetto knows, though. And we’ve already been warned by this point of Carlo’s fate from the opening narration, so we suspect what’s about to happen, too. Carlo does briefly make it out of the church, but he runs back in to grab his perfect pinecone, having become attached to the idea that he could plant his own tree to one day make things from it just like his father. When the bomb hits, Carlo is holding his pinecone, staring up wonderingly into the eyes of Christ on the cross. Carlo’s perfect pinecone survives the blast, bouncing out the front door and down to the place in the ground where Gepetto had been knocked to by the blast. There is a random senselessness to Carlo’s death that is deeply unsettling. We learn that the town and church weren’t even the intended target of the bombing. There was no target at all. The planes were just dumping their bombs to make their planes lighter for the flight home. Our narrator for this early part of the story is Sebastian J Cricket, the stand-in for Jiminy Cricket from the Disney film, and the unnamed talking cricket of Collodi’s book. As in the other versions of the story, Sebastian will often function as something of a conscience for Pinocchio, accompanying him on some of his adventures, having taken up residence in a hollowed-out portion of the pine tree that became Pinocchio’s body. These themes of death and grieving play a big role in del Toro’s approach to the story. Both in big ways like the cruel death of Carlo, but also in smaller ways, like Gepetto’s first explanation of the significance of the pinecone to Carlo. Gepetto and Carlo have just cut down a pine tree for wood, to which Geppetto says, “When one life is lost, another must grow.” Life and death are an endless and inevitable cycle, but here Geppetto is placing the emphasis on the happier side of that cycle. Yes, everything ends, but from every end comes the beginning of something new. Almost unspoken is that when we meet Carlo and Geppetto, they’ve already experienced a significant loss. Mom is out of the picture, but the only reference we get to her is Carlo asking Geppetto to sing Mama’s song so that he can sleep. It’s tragically losing his son that shatters Geppetto, but the ground for that tragedy is seeded by the earlier loss of his wife, Carlo’s mother. The grief of that ending is also the beginning of something else, though. It’s this grief that leads Geppetto to plant Carlo’s pinecone, which is what grows into the tree that Geppetto cuts down to make Pinocchio, which is how he comes to have the second son who is with him most of the rest of his life. Where one life was lost, another grew. Pinocchio and Geppetto, as depicted by del Toro, are an interesting study in contrasts. In del Toro’s version of the story, Geppetto is far more complicated than the versions in the 1940s Disney film, or Collodi’s book. In the original Disney version of the story, Geppetto is simply a woodworker living on his own, who happens to carve a little boy puppet, and idly muses to himself how nice it would be if it were alive. He’s surprised when he wakes up to discover that Pinocchio is alive, but this Geppetto loves and accepts him immediately. The tension of the story is never really between the two of them. In the book, it’s a bit more complicated, as Collodi is trying to tell a story about the importance of obeying your parents, so, though Gepetto does love Pinocchio, much of the early drama of the story comes from what happens when Pinocchio doesn’t listen to Geppetto or do what he’s supposed to do. For del Toro, his Geppetto struggles mightily to accept Pinocchio. He is a grieving father and he is bewildered by his puppet coming to life, and he is appalled and offended that it calls itself his son. Geppetto is angry at the chaos Pinocchio causes in his life, and it’s in a moment of frustration that he calls Pinocchio a burden, which is the impetus for Pinocchio to leave home. Despite all that, it also says something of Geppetto’s character that he does take on the responsibility of parenting this child in need of raising, and that, despite the difficulties, he also comes to love Pinocchio as a son. His feelings for Pinocchio resonate more for the audience both because they are harder earned, and because they reflect a bit more accurately the messiness of the emotions that come with being a parent. Pinocchio is something else altogether. Despite some echoes here and there, he is decidedly not Carlo. Just as siblings can be wildly different, where Carlo was obedient, Pinocchio is willful; whereas Carlo was mild, Pinocchio is rambunctious. As we learn, Pinocchio may be alive due to a soul borrowed from Carlo, but he is wholly his own person. In every version of Pinocchio, there is a naïveté to him that is an engine for much of what happens in the story. In del Toro’s version of the character, that manifests as something of a Zen beginner’s mind. His Pinocchio is naive, but he runs towards everything with an openness and eagerness and a complete lack of preconceptions. Where Geppetto was a grieving old man grinding out the last of his days, Pinocchio came into his life as Life and Joy personified. Even, early on, when Pinocchio gets too close to the fireplace and his feet catch on fire, he squeals with joy, “Look at me! I’m on fire!” And when Geppetto extinguishes him, Pinocchio says “Papa, you’ve ruined the nice light on my feet.” When his feet are burned off, he accepts it without hesitation and moves on; and when Geppetto builds his new legs, he accepts that too, and is overjoyed. Over time, Pinocchio does grow more sophisticated about the world, better-understanding people and Geppetto, but largely maintains this joyful beginner's mind throughout. Throughout the film, Pinocchio has many adventures after leaving home. He joins the traveling carnival to send money back home to Geppetto, so as not to be the burden that Gepetto called him out of frustration. Because Pinocchio can’t exactly die, he gets briefly pulled into the Italian war effort, and as with many versions of the story, he ultimately winds up reuniting with Geppetto and Sebastian while trapped inside the belly of an enormous sea beast. From here we get an incredibly rich ending from del Toro that ties all of the themes of the film together, elevating it to something truly special. We get the action set piece of the finale as Geppetto, Pinocchio, and Sebastian escape from the belly of the sea beast. We also get the emotional rollercoaster of Pinocchio sacrificing himself to save Geppetto, Geppetto grieving the loss of another son, and Sebastian making a sacrifice of his own to bring Pinocchio back from the dead. We get a brief happy ending of the three of them together, having survived these adventures, but del Toro gives us a further coda to the story. Circling back to the idea that everything ends, del Toro also gives us the inevitable passing of Geppetto, after his well-lived life, and we also get a similar ending for Sebastian. Our final shot is of Pinocchio, leaving flowers on Geppetto’s grave, walking off into the distance, leaving the ending of the life he has known, to enter the beginning of another. There have been many Pinocchios, and many reconfigurations of the story, but this one may be the best. Guillermo del Toro owes a debt to Collodi’s book for providing the bones of this story, and he owes a debt to the original Disney film for how it synthesized and streamlines all the best ideas from Collodi’s book, but it would be hard to overstate just how much greater depth and pathos and humor he brings to this story. That itself helps underline the themes of endings and new beginnings he’s working with. We pass stories like Pinocchio down, each generation adding to it and reshaping it to the needs of that time. Maybe eventually someone will tell a version of this story that will carry it even further than del Toro has, but for now, we have this one, and I will treasure it. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Damian’s Favorite Films of 2022 Hello! Welcome to another year-end top ten film list! This was a fun year with some big wild swings, some of which you’ll find on the list you’re about to read. So, in that spirit, I decided to take a bit of a swing with how I put this list together. I’m pretty fond of structure. I like outlines and well-defined acts in stories, or when directors break their films into sections with title cards. I like a plainly stated thesis, with signposting along the way that lets the reader know exactly where we are and where we're going. These sorts of devices appeal to the part of my brain that wishes it could be so orderly. So, with that in mind, I've tackled my list for 2022 by breaking it into a series of double features. This is my top ten (plus two honorable mentions), and they are in the order I would list them, but they’re also grouped into pairs that should work well thematically if you wanted to curate a little movie night for yourself. Will this actually work? I have no idea, but as many of the films on this list will make clear, you only live once, so why not have some fun with it? Enjoy! Curation Honorable Mentions: The Menu & Sr. What I see The Menu and Sr. sharing is attention to the creative intentionality we can bring, or at least try to bring, to the things we make and do with our lives. The Menu shows a perversion of that creative drive by unhealthy inputs and feedback, while Sr. shows something like the best-case scenario of a creative life well lived. The Menu may have been the biggest inspiration for tackling my top ten list in the way that I have. Ralph Fiennes plays world-class Chef Slowic, a chef gone mad, curating the final menu of his long and illustrious career. Slowic explains to the small group of customers that have come to his private island restaurant, that he and his team have meticulously crafted an unforgettable menu for them, only later revealing that part of the plan for that menu includes no one inside the restaurant surviving the final dish. Anya Taylor-Joy is perfectly cast as Margot, the foil for Fiennes’s Slowic, and the sole innocent who was never supposed to be there. Ralph Fiennes is unreal, conveying both a believable mastery of his craft and cult-like control over his staff while embodying a scarily grounded total break with reality. The rest of the ensemble is wonderful as the trashy fodder that comprises the ingredients of this horrific dish. In The Menu, the film and the evening are paced by the menu for the night. Each new dish allows Fiennes an opportunity for exposition, to reveal a bit more to the customers and audience about where we are in the meal and where we’re going, dropping hints to the customers about their fate. But, while this was once what Chef Slowick lived for, there is now something empty in the kind of experience creation he is engaged in; he has been hollowed out, realizing he may have wasted his talents and time, catering to what he now sees as the very worst people. He mistakenly sees this last menu as something of a redemptive final statement that might justify and tie together his whole misspent life. In Sr., Robert Downey Jr. is making a documentary about his ailing father, the counterculture director Robert Downey, Sr. I’m fond of Downey Sr.’s films, and I can remember being a burgeoning film fan, haunting cult movie sections in my early twenties, trying to track down gems like Putney Swope and Greaser’s Palace. I went into this film expecting a simple retrospective on the rest of his work and life. And we do get that, but true to Downey Sr.’s creative and contrarian temperament, we also get something much more interesting. Downey Sr., even in his failing health, has no interest in being a passive subject for any film, and will only participate in his son’s project if he can shape the film being made, making and editing his own cut in parallel with his son’s documentary. The final product is a fascinating blending of the two. We do get a standard survey of his work, and talking head interviews with people he worked with, like Alan Arkin; but we also get a meditation on Downey Sr.’s inevitable passing, from him and his family, along with a look at the restless creative spirit of someone taking even their very last days to follow their inspiration to make something new. Longing #10) Three Thousand Years of Longing & #9) Cyrano What I see Three Thousand Years of Longing and Cyrano sharing is a look at lovelorn figures trapped in seemingly inescapable circumstances, largely resigned to their lot, but still nursing a deep desire to somehow transcend their situation through a connection with someone else. Three Thousand Years of Longing was the film on this list that I’ve seen most recently, and it may be the one most likely to be bolstered by recency bias. I had set it aside because I had heard it described as a “well-intended misfire” by director George Miller. It’s possible that having heard about those misgivings, though, I was properly prepared for what this quiet film really is rather than expecting some kind of supercharged follow-up to Miller’s previous film, Mad Max: Fury Road. The film stars Tilda Swinton as Alithea, a professor with a research interest in narrative stories and storytelling, who discovers an antique bottle in a market in Istanbul, which happens to contain a djinn, played by Idris Elba. The Djinn offers Alithea three wishes, but she is familiar with the common warning that runs through such stories: to be careful what you wish for, and she finds herself more interested in hearing the Djinn’s own story, rather than in making any wishes of her own. In one sense, the story is very contained, as the core plot is mostly just the Djinn telling his millennia-long story to Alithea in her hotel room. At the same time, we do get to see flashes of the story of how the Djinn had been bound to the human world for so long, and how he hoped, all the while, that someone would make the wish that would finally free him. We cut between the hotel room and the voluptuously depicted ancient settings where his tale takes place, while always keeping in sight that the important part of the story is the quiet connection beginning to form between Alithea and the Djinn in the present day. I have heard some criticism of the story’s final act and its conclusion, but it was specifically those choices that elevated the film from good to great for me. The ending isn’t grand or explosive, but rather something much simpler and more intimate. We’re told in the title that it’s a story about three thousand years of longing, and what we get in the end is seeing that longing finally satisfied. Cyrano is the first of two films on my list that are from 2022 that played extensively at festivals back in 2021 and qualified for last year’s Oscars. There are a few films like this every year that are held back as part of an awards strategy but wind up falling through the cracks. Peter Dinklage stars as the titular Cyrano in this musical reimagining of the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Edmond Rostand's 1897 play. Dinklage gives what ought to have been a best actor-nominated performance. He’s reprising the role that he originated on stage, in the adaptation penned by his wife, Erica Schmidt, with music provided by Aaron and Bryce Dessner from the band The National. Haley Bennet also reprises her role of Roxanne from that same stage production and is incandescent as she believably plays someone that you could imagine anyone falling in love with. Bennet’s husband, Joe Wright, makes it even more of a family affair, by signing on to handle the directing duties. I’ve long been a fan of Steve Martin’s 1987 version of this story, Roxanne, which he wrote as a light romantic comedy take on this story. This new version remedies the one reservation I have always had with Martin’s take, though, by returning to something more like the original ending of Rostand’s play. What all of the versions of the story have in common is that Cyrano (named C.D. Bales in the Martin version) is a widely respected figure in his community, admired for his poetic wit and feared for his fighting prowess. He’s cultivated these abilities to compensate for how ugly and isolating he finds his appearance to be. On the stage, and in the Martin version of the story, this defect is usually depicted with a comically oversized prosthetic nose. What Schmidt and Dinklage recognized is that some of the weight of the story is undermined by the audience’s awareness that, underneath that prosthetic nose, is still a handsome actor who gets to set aside his prosthetic when the curtain falls. By casting Dinklage as Cyrano, his height is something the audience never loses sight of. Where this inferiority complex comes into play is that Cyrano is in love with a woman he is close friends with, Roxanne, but he can never believe that anyone, especially Roxanne, could love him back, so he throws himself into his work and his poetry and his fights. He is stoically resigned to his lot, until one day he is given the misperception that Roxanne might have feelings for him. He is briefly elated, making it all the more painful and raw when he learns that it is actually a handsome, if somewhat dim, man named Christian, whom Roxanne has fallen for. The story becomes a complicated triangle where Cyrano, in order to have some way to express everything he feels for Roxanne, offers to write love letters to her on Christian’s behalf. Cyrano loves Roxanne, Christian loves Roxanne, and Roxanne loves who Cyrano makes her think Christian is. Martin, in telling the story as a romantic comedy, wraps everything up with a happy ending that superficially satisfies, but can’t help but leave you conflicted about the fundamental lie at the origin of Cyrano’s and Roxanne’s and Christian’s relationships. As Edmond tells the story, and as Schmidt and Dinklage repeat it, it’s rightfully a tragedy. Only on Cyrano’s deathbed does Roxanne realize what has happened, and only then does Cyrano confess. It’s a more appropriate conclusion to the story, as Cyrano’s deception isn’t rewarded with the happily ever after that Martin wants to give him, and we leave the two of them longing for the life they could have had with one another if Cyrano had simply swallowed his pride and been honest with Roxanne from the beginning. Family #8) Petite Maman & #7) Turning Red What I see Petite Maman and Turning Red sharing is an examination of the often rocky relationships between parents and children, particularly between mothers and daughters. In both films, through some unusual circumstances, the children are given an opportunity to understand their mothers as the children they once were. Petite Maman, like Cyrano, is another film released this year in the US, that qualified for the previous year’s Oscars. While the release of Cyrano was badly mishandled, Petite Maman simply suffered from being an international film that just finally came to the U.S. at an inopportune time to be widely seen and fully appreciated. In Petite Maman, a young girl, Nelly, accompanies her parents to clean out her mother’s childhood home after the passing of her grandmother. Nelly, too young to be of any real help, spends her time outside playing in the woods surrounding the house, the same woods her mother played in when she was a child. Out in the woods, Nelly befriends another young girl, Marion, who is in the process of building a tree fort. It’s this brief magical friendship that will end up having such a profound impact on Nelly’s understanding of, and relationship with, her mother. I’ll hold off saying any more, as this was a fairly underseen film and it would greatly benefit the viewing experience if you can go into it as unaware as possible of its twists and turns. Looked at in one sense, Turning Red was my favorite superhero film of 2022. It’s basically an X-Men origin story about a young girl who discovers that something in her genes gives her a special power that has only started to manifest now that she’s hit puberty. In this case, 13-year-old Meilin discovers that if she loses control of her emotions, she turns into a giant red panda. Just below the surface, the film is a metaphor about the experience of going through puberty, but a bit deeper still, and it’s even more about the relationship between parents and children. Meilin learns that this ability is a family secret that all of the female members of her family have to contend with. The fallout of this revelation brings to head the tension between Meilin and her mother, the tension that mirrors what any parent struggles with when trying to accept that their child is growing up. Ultimately, this will wind up strengthening the bond between Meilin and her mother, as it eventually brings home for Meilin the idea that her mother was once a young girl too, who went through the same experiences, and importantly, she remains at heart something of that same young girl to this day. What proves to be the biggest difference between their respective experiences, though, is that Meilin has the unconditional acceptance of her friends. It’s a wonderful film about navigating some of the messy life milestones we may all share but don’t discuss as often or readily as we should, and how much of a difference it makes to have and offer support to the people in our lives as we all try to make the best of things. (For a full review of Turning Red, click here). Regret #6) Good Luck to You, Leo Grande & #5) Everything Everywhere All at Once What Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and Everything Everywhere All at Once share is that they both tell stories about how it’s never too late to start your life and become the person you always wanted to be and that you should be prepared to help the people in your life do the same. (For a full review of Leo Grande, click here). In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Emma Thompson plays a recently widowed older woman who is struggling to come to terms with how impoverished her sex life was during her long marriage to her husband. Now, at her current age, it feels like it may already be too late to experience anything different. When we meet her, she is in a hotel room awaiting the arrival of the male sex worker she has hired; when that man arrives, she tells him her name is Nancy (which it is not), and he will give Nancy the professional name he works under, Leo Grande. While each of them pretends to be someone else, they will teach each other a bit about who they really are. This film is specifically about sex, particularly in terms of being honest with ourselves and our partners about our wants and needs. The larger theme, however, is about the regrets that come with age as we reflect on the accumulated years of things we never said and all the lives we never led. There is a version of this story that could be much slighter, just a rehashed carpe diem tale of someone older getting their groove back, and some of that is here, but this is a smaller film that takes seriously that, however young you might feel in the moment, we still need to make peace with the fact that all of our options and abilities will diminish over time. A fresh start that doesn’t take into account such inevitabilities is just putting our regrets into a box to re-experience at a later date. What Nancy finds over her series of encounters with Leo Grande isn’t simply a moment of youthful indiscretion, but actual peace with who she was, is, and will be. She’s able to find a way to enjoy what’s available to her in the moment, without being distracted by what might have been, or being scared of what might be looming over the horizon. In Everything Everywhere All at Once Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a married woman with one adult daughter, who finds herself barely keeping her head above water as the owner of a rundown family laundromat. When we meet Evelyn, her husband Waymond is about to serve her divorce papers, she’s in the middle of a contentious audit, and her relationship with her daughter, Joy, is frayed to the breaking point. Up to this moment, we’re being introduced to a woman who finds herself unhappy with the life she finds herself stuck in, but the film rescues her from that in the biggest way possible. Evelyn is pulled from her audit by a version of Waymond from another universe, thrusting Evelyn into a story that places her at the center of a crisis that concerns the future of all reality, a crisis whose resolution will ultimately depend on her being able to repair her relationships with her family. The miracle of this film is that it is an unabashedly over-the-top presentation of mind-bending events, that somehow still manages to stay rooted in utterly honest and relatable human relationships. Evelyn overcomes the limitations of the life she felt trapped in, but that only becomes possible by her first making things right with the people she is sharing that life with. Rebellion #4) Roald Dahl's Matilda: The Musical & #3) RRR What Matilda and RRR share is that they’re stories of truly exceptional individuals standing up to cartoonishly villainous oppression, while also doubling as larger stories about the mass movements of ordinary people engaged in collective actions that are needed to ever make real and lasting change happen. Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical is an adaptation of the award-winning West End and Broadway stage musical from 2010, which is itself an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1988 book. Matilda is a precocious genius of a young girl, born to neglectful parents who neither like nor want her. They only finally enroll her into school when forced to by the local authorities. Matilda has a contentious relationship with her parents but she is largely able to manage them by being so much smarter than either of them. Matilda is briefly excited by the prospect of going to school, thrilled to be able to enter a world of learning and books, but that happiness is brief as she discovers that her new school is actually a prison-like environment under the tyrannical rule of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. In a lot of ways, Matilda is a kid’s wish fulfillment story. The protagonist is the very smartest and bestest kid, who takes on cartoonish and uncomplicatedly evil villains, whom they will defeat in a grand fashion. In this case, Matilda will unite all of the kids around her to defeat Miss Trunchbull, gaining herself her first real friends, before also replacing her mean parents by going to live with her favorite teacher, Miss Honey. There is a great deal that is wonderful about this adaptation. Emma Thompson is having the time of her life chewing scenery as Miss Trunchbull; Lashana Lynch is absolutely lovely as Miss Honey, playing the idealized version of the teacher every kid would want; and Alisha Weir is a bit of a miracle as the young rebel genius, Matilda. Matthew Warchus’s direction captures the magical realism of Roald Dahl’s world while leaving enough grounding to still care about the emotional connections between the characters. What elevates this film to something truly special, though, is the music and lyrics from Tim Minchin. His sense of wordplay is just superb. He has an enviable ability to shift gears within songs to be raucous, joyful, menacing, or lovely as needed. They’re the perfect anthems for any revolution-minded children in your life. Somewhat oddly, the thing that kind of unlocked S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR for me was seeing the list of films he submitted on his ballot for BFI’s Sight and Sound list. Among the 10 films he listed as the “best of all time,” he included Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and Apocalypto, along with Disney’s The Lion King and Aladdin. These are certainly unique choices, particularly taken together, but I think this does illuminate something about Rajamouli’s aesthetic. There’s often visceral violence to some of the action scenes in RRR, but it’s also blended with an often cartoonish magical realism. This is a film that will display a British soldier clubbing a mother unconscious as her child is stolen from her, and will show another character catch an out-of-control motorcycle with his bare hands and start swinging it around over his head like it was made of just so much balsa wood. The story of RRR imagines that two real-life Indian revolutionary figures had met one another, and became friends, before beginning their fight against the British empire. I came to the film having been told that it had action sequences that had to be seen to be believed. It more than delivers on that promise, but what I was unprepared for was just how much movie it is. RRR is one of the most tonally diverse things I’ve ever seen. It’s an unbelievable action movie, it’s a high production value historical epic, it’s sometimes a romance, sometimes a heist picture, and more than a few times, it’s a full-scale musical with one of the best bromances I’ve ever seen depicted on film. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about RRR has been just how successful it has been in the United States. Where once you might be hard-pressed to find someone in the general public that could name even one Indian film, now you can readily find people that can identify the distinction between Bollywood and Tollywood films; and we can look forward to the song, “Naatu Naatu,” from the film, potentially being performed at the Academy Awards because it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Here’s hoping that this is just the beginning of a trend that will continue for years to come. Mortality #2) Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio & #1) White Noise What Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Noah Baumback’s White Noise have in common is a hopeful grappling with ideas of mortality. They’re both stories that take seriously the limited time we have on this Earth while making an argument for filling that time with all the joy and connection that we can. In del Toro’s reimaging of Pinocchio, he begins the film in a bleaker way than the story is usually told. His Geppetto is a grieving father, struggling to accept the death of his young son, Carlo. When this Geppetto drunkenly carves a wooden child puppet, he’s just trying to process his grief. He certainly never wishes that this puppet would come to life, and wouldn’t if he ever thought that was a possibility. He’s completely unprepared for when Pinocchio comes to life and is offended that Pinocchio calls himself Gepetto’s son. Pinocchio’s infectious joy for life does eventually bring Geppetto out of his grief, though, and they do come to love one another. After many adventures, Gepetto and Pinocchio, along with Sebastian J. Cricket, and Spazzatura the monkey, come to live happily together; but that isn’t where del Toro leaves us. A story that begins in loss also ends in loss, but now through a brighter lens. Geppetto is an old man when he carved Pinocchio, and their time together was always going to be short, and del Toro doesn’t hide that part of the story from us. Gepetto does eventually die, as does Sebastian J. Cricket, but while Carlo had been so cruelly taken from Gepetto without warning, Pinocchio gets to spend time with Geppetto and Sebastian preparing himself for their passing. We leave Pinocchio at the end of this particular story, walking off into the sunset to begin a new story. Everything may eventually end, but every ending is a beginning for something new. (For a deeper dive into all things Pinocchio, click here). White Noise is Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1986 novel of the same name. In it, DeLillo examines American ideas around Consumerism, Vacuous Academia, Misinformation, Pharmaceuticals posing as the solution to all of life’s problems, and the pervasive fear of death. The centerpiece of the film is an Airborne Toxic Event created by a runaway chemical reaction caused by an explosion when a truck containing flammable materials collides with a train carrying a toxic chemical compound called Nyodene D. The explosion creates a deadly dark cloud over the town that leads to an emergency evacuation. The film is told in three parts. Before the toxic event, we are introduced to college professor Jack (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their collective children from various marriages. Prior to the event, we see Jack and Babette as a loving couple with a happy family and life. In the background, they each have normal fears of mortality but they are able to joke with one another about which of them they hope dies first, as they discuss their respective fears of death versus their fears of being alone. The toxic event changes all of that. Coping with the fear of death through jokes and the like becomes impossible when a literal dark and deadly cloud is forming over your head. The middle section of the film is the family’s disaster movie journey to escape to safety. A different story might end with them having finally made it to their evacuation point, happy to be alive and looking towards an uncertain future. What White Noise does, though, is give us a long look at the mundane aftermath of such an experience. Jack, Babette, and their family are all fine. The cloud is dissipated and they can return to their town and lives, but now with that whole experience looming over their heads. Jack and Babette spiral out from this experience. What anxiety Babette previously had is now out of control. Jack had prolonged exposure to the cloud while they were evacuating which could possibly take years off his life. This next bit may be a spoiler, but a big part of my affection for this film comes from its ending. Through a series of circumstances, Jack and Babette find themselves towards the end of the film laying side by side in hospital beds, each with superficial gunshot wounds. Reaching across the empty space between them, they hold hands, once again talking to one another with something like the easy comfort they had with one another during the first act of the film. This is something like my favorite film ending trope: two people who have been through hell, and may have more to go through, yet, but are just happy to have someone to go through it with. With so little in this world to have faith in, they have faith in one another. What more could anyone ask for? Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Spoilers ahead for Oliver Hermanus’ Living There is a song by the Scottish band, Frightened Rabbit, called “Head Rolls Off”; and when that band’s lead singer, Scott Hutchison, passed away in 2018, his family started a charity organization, called Tiny Changes, that took its name and guiding ethos from part of that song. The organization's focus is youth mental wellness particularly geared toward suicide prevention, and the relevant part of the song goes: When it's all gone Something carries on And it's not morbid at all Just that nature's had enough of you When my blood stops Someone else's will thaw When my head rolls off Someone else's will turn And while I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to earth I mention all of this here because I couldn’t get this song out of my head when I left the theater after watching Living, the recent remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru. This adaptation is set in 1950s post-war London, from a screenplay by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter, Kazuo Ishiguro. In Living, Bill Nighy plays an older civil servant, named Rodney Williams, who is struggling to come to terms with having been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Prior to receiving his diagnosis, Mr. Williams was just a widower, living in his home with his son and daughter-in-law, going to a job each day where he was respected by his subordinates as a serious-minded, if perhaps overly fastidious, boss. Known for his reliability and punctuality, Mr. Williams becomes briefly unmoored by the news of his diagnosis, before ultimately finding something worth devoting himself to. In some sense, given his age and the loss of his wife, Mr. Williams was already just killing time with his life, unconsciously waiting to die when he was diagnosed; and part of the reason he winds up not sharing his diagnosis with his son and daughter-in-law is that he intuits from things overheard that they are largely waiting for him to die as well, already making plans based on the inheritance they expect to receive. He can only intuit this, though, as what underlies their relationship with one another is a polite lack of substantive communication. This is a family that can reliably gather together each night for dinner, exchanging pleasantries over passed dishes, while never viewing one another as someone that could be confided in with anything honest or hard. So, largely isolated, Mr. Williams goes through a number of stages trying to process his situation. He briefly entertains suicide before giving his sleeping pills to a man he meets named, Sutherland, a somewhat bohemian writer he overhears complaining of insomnia. While making the offer, Mr. Williams confides his diagnosis to Sutherland and admits that after deciding that suicide wasn’t for him, he had been taken by the idea that he might seize the day, and live out his remaining days with some gusto, before realizing that he had largely forgotten how to live. Sutherland takes some pity on Mr. Williams and brings him out for a drunken night on the town, and Mr. Williams finds some momentary joy in that new experience, but also some melancholy, and this proves not to be the answer that he needs. Mr. Williams next tries to find some life in the company of a young woman that had recently worked for him, Ms. Harris, who had just left his office for a new job at a restaurant nearby. Mr. Williams also confides his diagnosis in her, letting Ms. Harris know that there was nothing untoward he felt towards her, but that he hoped he might be able to learn something from her about the joy and energy with which she seems to go about her life. Mr. Williams and Ms. Harris are able to form some kind of bond over this, but this also isn’t quite the answer he needs for what ails him, either. What he needs to do is somehow find his own joy and purpose if there’s to be any hope of it being a lasting feeling. Mr. Williams does find something. In a sense, he throws himself into his work, but a facet of his work he had long forgotten. Picking up a thread from earlier in the film about a group of mothers who had visited his office in the hopes of getting the government to turn a bombed-out vacant lot into a community park, before being sent on their way, on an endless bureaucratic wild goose chase, bouncing from department to department, finding nobody willing to take responsibility as being who they needed to talk to in order to get the project started; And what Mr. Williams remembers is that it is within his authority in his job to actually help people like this, to shepherd along projects that can make some small lasting changes in people’s lives. Like a 1950s Leslie Knope, Mr. Williams decides to make it his purpose to make this park happen. The film makes a wild choice here, one that particularly benefits from seeing this film in a theater where you can’t readily check how much more time is left in the story. We get a sequence of a seemingly rejuvenated Mr. Williams, leading the men from the office out into the rain to see in person the lot that the mothers have been talking about. Despite the heavy rain, there is a happy brightness to this moment, but we make a fairly hard cut from Mr. Williams stepping out into the rain, to the church where his funeral service is taking place. In the moment, you can believe that this could be the end of the film, and ultimately his story was always going to be how his story had to end. It’s abrupt, but almost no matter what happens after Mr. Williams steps out into the rain, he’s better off than where we began his story. He could have been hit by a bus a moment later, but he still would have died possessing some purpose and joy. We do get quite a bit more than this though. Mr. Williams has died, but what we get for the rest of the film is a mix of flashbacks of people’s remembrances of his final days, along with the lessons they take of how they might apply Mr. Williams’s example to their own lives. We get to see the building of the park, and the children playing in it. We get to hear from mothers and other people in the community who had grown fond of Mr. Williams because of what he was doing. We get to hear the men from his office piecing together that Mr. Williams knew he was dying, that it had sparked this sudden change, and how that ought to guide them in how they run the department in his absence. We also get to see a burgeoning relationship between Ms. Harris and one of the young men from the office. Though Mr. Williams is now gone, we do get to see that something carries on. With the ending structured this way, it acknowledges, but decenters, Mr. Williams’s death; while emphasizing the important part about those final months, that he had found a joyful purpose, and that, as the song said, while he was alive he made tiny changes to Earth. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

** Warning: contains significant spoilers for White Noise ** Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise, was my favorite film of last year. More than that, I strongly suspect that it’s going to be a lasting all-time favorite film for me that I will happily return to repeatedly; But, something I’m discovering is that I seem to be somewhat by myself in that high opinion of the film. Now, I have no problem being the lonely voice trying to reclaim a maligned masterpiece, but I’m especially surprised that I need to play defender in this case, as I genuinely think White Noise is an obvious and straightforwardly great film. I remember when White Noise was first announced. It was thought to be a likely candidate to be in the mix for all manner of end of year awards, just on the strength of the book’s reputation and Baumbach’s recent success with Marriage Story. After people actually saw the film, though, none of that materialized. It ended up being largely absent from critics’ end of year top 10 lists; And, looking at review aggregator sites, it seems like it received a fairly lukewarm response from critics, and an almost hostile response from general audiences. Maybe part of the blame for its reception is that it’s a film about death; and not death in the usual heightened movie sense of something like a disaster movie or revenge film, but rather the disquieting and mundane sense of death as something ever looming in our everyday lives. Since this is exactly the kind of thing that people go to movies to escape thinking about, I could see how that might be alienating. To try and see where things might have gone wrong for the film, I went looking for some more specific complaints by skimming through the negative reviews of the film that I could find, and making myself a little word cloud of whatever terms appeared the most often. Based on that, the most common criticisms seemed to fall into a couple of different groups: first, that the film was seen as pretentious or vacuous, second that it felt detached and ungrounded; and third, that it seemed jumbled and haphazard. Harsh words, but, I can kind of see where each of those observations is coming from. I just happen to think each of those elements is largely intentional, and that they wind up contributing to my affection for the film. Structurally, White Noise is broken into three acts, along with a small opening prologue and a wonderful final coda that plays out during my favorite closing credits sequence since Inland Empire. The beginning is a short jaunty lecture being delivered to a college class by Don Cheadle’s professor character, Murray Siskind, discussing how he takes car crashes in films to be an example of secular optimism, showing the ever-expanding scope of what human beings can do with human things; and that underneath their seeming violence is a spirit of innocence and fun. Notably, this isn’t how the book opens, so the presumption from Baumbach is that he would like us to keep this in mind with everything we’re about to see, and we can decide for ourselves whether or not underneath the coming violence we’re about to witness, we will find that same spirit of innocence and fun. The first main section of the film introduces us to the Gladney family. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a professor of Hitler Studies, at The College on the Hill. He lives with his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who teaches an adult education course on movement. They each have been married 3 times before, and are raising an eclectic brood of children from those various marriages, along with a young son, Wilder, that is theirs. This first act is mostly a skewering of academia and consumerism, featuring fatuous conversations between Jack, his fellow professors, and his friends Murray; often in the aisles of the local A & P Supermarket. This section of the film culminates in a surreal and bravura scene of the two men simultaneously giving different lectures to the same class, on Elvis and Hitler respectively. I’m vocationally predisposed to enjoy the jabs at academia, and the absurd, yet credible, idea of a college having a world class Hitler studies department amuses me to no end, but what I love most about this whole opening section of the film is actually the Altman-esque way we get to see the Gladney family bounce off one another in their home, especially the playful relationship between husband and wife, Jack and Babette. Their children are all wonderfully cast, each with their own voice and personality, but the moment I come back to the most is just between Jack and Babette. It’s a conversation between the two of them in bed, where they’re half joking about how they each want to be the one of them to die first, hyperbolically talking about not being able to bear the thought of having to go on living without the other. This exchange especially resonates with me because I know that I have had this exact conversation, in precisely this tone, with my wife. It’s a playful exchange, and sincerely so because that’s the only way to talk about such things, but both of them also know that they are whistling past the graveyard too and that there is real anxiety underneath what they’re saying. Going back for a moment, the transition between the first and second act is that simultaneous lecture that Jack and Murray are giving. As Jack is building to a crescendo, we start to see his words intercut with a disaster unfolding at the same time on the other side of town. While they are lecturing on Elvis and Hitler, about what those two figures share in the obsession about their lives and deaths, a train carrying a massive amount of hazardous materials is in the midst of derailing and ultimately exploding, due to a collision with a car. This chemical explosion will create a life-threatening airborne toxic event that will lead to a large-scale evacuation of the region. Due to this car crash, Jack and Babette’s fear of death has now become manifest as a literal dark and poisonous cloud looming over their heads. It’s in this second act that the film makes its first big shift, turning into a peculiar kind of disaster film. The train crash is dramatic, but there is an initial detachment to how Jack and Babette handle it. While their oldest son, Heinrich, is watching the rising plume of smoke at the crash site with a pair of binoculars through their attic window, Jack is actively downplaying the severity of what’s happening. Partly this plays like a parent wanting to put a happy face on bad news, but it also reads like denial on Jack’s part that such a thing could happen in his bucolic college town. It’s not exactly blindness to what could be happening, but a willful reluctance on Jack and Babette’s part to fully reckon with the worsening news, and increasingly frequent sirens, until finally a car with a megaphone drives down their street ordering all homes to be evacuated immediately. The evacuation itself is odd in contrast to other disaster films. The family piles into the car, and backs over their garbage cans as they quickly pull into the street, like you may have seen in a dozen other movies before, only to immediately settle down into the slow and orderly crawl of cars heading out of town. Rather than being panicked or exhibiting some heroic steely resolve or performing any number of other possible cinematic emotions, what they’re doing is looking to the people in those other cars in order to try and calibrate how scared they're supposed to feel. In moments the film can truly look like a disaster movie, though. We get one shot of the black cloud at night during the evacuation, dramatically lit by helicopter spotlights and bursts of lightning; a shot that would be right at home in a Roland Emmerich movie, right down to the people slowly getting out of their cars to stare in wonder and awe up at the sky. But nothing more comes of that moment. Everyone just gets back in their cars and starts driving again. Next thing we know, we’re arriving at their assigned evacuation point at a Boy Scout camp, Camp Daffodil for a brief respite. By the very next morning, they suddenly have to evacuate again as the cloud is still coming towards them. There is an actually thrilling sequence where Jack decides to follow some survivalists who drive off into the woods rather than following the rest of the evacuees out of the campsite. There is a high-speed chase through the woods, a chase that briefly entails their family car getting caught and sent floating down a river, only to escape the river by floating close enough to the river bank to gain enough traction to escape. Back on solid ground, they tear through the woods and into a cornfield that ultimately just dumps them out onto the same they would have been evacuating on in the first place, with all the cars that are making their slow and orderly evacuation from camp. In some ways, the third act is the wildest swing of the film, and possibly what might have been most alienating to some viewers, because we get something of a third mini-movie. After 9 days, the cloud has been dispersed, and everyone can return to their homes, and now the question is how to go about one’s life having survived something like this. The very strangest thing about this part of the film is that this seemingly fantastical disaster actually happened in real life only weeks after the film’s release, near the same part of Ohio where White Noise was filmed, with some of the very same people who played extras in this evacuation sequence having to evacuate their own homes for the same reason. A train derailed carrying large amounts of vinyl chloride that vented into the atmosphere creating an airborne toxic event like in the film, and it was five days before anyone from within a mile of the crash site was allowed to return to their homes. Something we are starting to see there that resembles what happened in the film is the strangeness of the beginning stages of normalcy reasserting itself in the aftermath, but particularly that kind of disingenuous normalcy that is just pretending everything is fine, or the kind of normalcy that is simply choosing not to think about what has happened or is still happening all around you. What I appreciate about White Noise is the way it captures something of this transition from mundane daily worries, to total catastrophe, and how complicated the pull of normalcy is in any aftermath. Maybe we haven’t all had the experience of fleeing some disaster, but most of us know something of being blindsided by tragedy in some form. There’s a complicated mix between things around you returning to normal whether you’re ready for it or not, your own desire to return to normalcy however impossible that might be, and the inevitable emergence of some new normal. There is never any going backward, but the vacuum created by any disaster or tragedy will be soon filled with something whether we like it or not. In the third act of the film, Jack, Babette, and the family are trying to get their footing after the disaster. Jack returns to the familiar, preparing for a conference his college is hosting and his regular shopping at the A & P; while Babette, on the other hand, is struggling to find a new normal. We learn more about something teased about Babette in the first act of the film. She has been secretly taking an experimental drug called Dylar, which has been specifically designed to help with anxiety about death. It does this mostly by creating a profound forgetfulness. Babette has now become even more dependent on this drug in the aftermath of the disaster and has had to go to incredible lengths to continue getting it. In the bigger picture, between both Jack and Babette, what we’re seeing is some of the unsatisfying ways humans try to cope with mortality: work, consumerism, pharmaceuticals; and before the film is done, we’ll also take a look at violence and religion as coping mechanisms, too. Jack will finally learn from Babette about the medication she’s been taking, why she’s been taking it, and what she had to do in order to keep getting it; and Jack will become completely unmoored by this knowledge. Now the film turns into a revenge thriller as Jack is driven to find the man that’s been manipulating Babette. Again though, like with our mini disaster movie, this thriller will also be subverted. In seeking revenge, Jack is looking for one more coping mechanism that will give him the illusion of control. He will track down the man that’s been taking advantage of Babette, and Jack will shoot him with a tiny gun lent to him by Murray during the evacuation. Babette, having followed Jack, will find him just after his having placed the wiped-down gun in the man’s hand. While Jack is distracted, the actually not-yet-dead man will fire the final bullet in the gun, grazing both Jack and Babette. For some actual thrillers, this could be the ending. But, seeing Babette, and maybe realizing that his revenge hasn’t accomplished anything, for him, the man, or Babette, Jack decides he’s not really a killer and that they can’t just leave the shot man to die. Fortunately for Jack, the man has been taking even higher doses of the drug than what he’s been giving Babette, and he has already forgotten that it was Jack that shot him. Jack and Babette drag him to their car, and drive to get them all help at a nearby emergency room run by an order of nuns. Jack and Babette pound on the door, while Babette calls out “We’re shot!” Literally shot, but the phrasing lets us know that they’re emotionally shot as well, pounding on the door of a building with just the word emergency and a giant neon crucifix over it. If Jack and Babette were looking for some comfort in religion here, though, they’re out of luck; as the nun they speak with has lost her faith. She can’t offer them Heaven or angels or hope for anything after this life, and can only recommend that they find what comfort they can by believing in one another. While the nun is speaking to them, Jack and Babette reach between their beds and take one another’s hand. On the screen, the subtitled text beneath their held hands is just the words “We pray”. When the nun leaves, Jack and Babette talk, and we can see that they’ve emotionally come full circle to where we met them at the start of the film. We end on the family, making another trip out to the A & P, maybe heading once more into the breach of distracting consumerism, but at least going happily and together. And, in that moment at the end of a film where the music kicks in and the screen would otherwise go to black, the camera stays with the family as they head into the store, and we watch they, and everyone else in the store, dance to LCD Soundsystem’s “new body rhumba” for the duration of the closing credits. This is the innocence and fun we were promised at the outset of the film. White Noise is a messy film. It has a strangely chaotic and playful energy throughout, which is striking because of what the film is so overtly about. But, as with a film like Harold and Maude, that odd energy is what lets you linger on the subject without getting overwhelmed. That odd energy is what lets us look at a subject like human mortality and hold onto the idea that there is still room in the days remaining to us for innocence and fun. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film, Amélie, has some of the trappings of a romantic comedy but it's ultimately something quite a bit different. It is a film that is deeply concerned with the connections people make with one another, and, like a typical romantic comedy, it does let us revel in the joys of young love when our two dreamers, Amélie and Nino, finally do wind up together; but, the relationship they are about to embark upon is largely beside the point. What Amélie is really about is steeling up our courage to take the risks that are a necessary part of a life well-lived. This may seem like a bit of a digression, but the strongest association I have with Amélie, is with the earliest days of social media, specifically with early Facebook. When that platform first launched, it functioned more like a network of interconnected personal websites. One could think of their own page as a thing to be curated because early on, you actually had to go to someone’s page in order to interact with them. The setup of those early Facebook pages was fairly rigid, with a particular amount of space allocated for your relevant personal information, and then boxes where you could list your interests, your favorite books, tv shows, and movies. For people you already knew, seeing what interests someone opted to share on their page was a way to get to know them better; and for the people you wanted to get to know, seeing what they were into theoretically gave you some potential ice breakers. You might only see how someone wished they were, or how they wanted to be seen, but it still told you something. The first thing about this that reminds me of Amélie is the way that Jeunet introduces all of his characters. Using a technique he employed in his short film, Foutaises, Jeunet introduces many of the characters in Amélie by explicitly showing us very brief vignettes where we are both told and shown the things that they like and dislike. We meet Amélie’s father, Raphael Poulain, with a little montage where we learn that he doesn’t like peeing next to others or clingy wet swim trunks; and that he does like peeling large strips of wallpaper, lining up and shining his shoes, and emptying his toolbox, cleaning it out, and putting everything back inside. Amélie’s mother, Amandine, we learn, she dislikes puckered fingers in the bath or having her hands touched by strangers; but she does like figure skater’s costumes on tv, polishing the parquet, and emptying her handbag, cleaning it out, and putting everything back inside. Neither of these collections of quirks gives us that much deeper insight into either character, but the intimacy of these details still makes you feel like you know them and how they fit together. The second thing about Amélie that makes me think of those early days of Facebook has to do with those boxes where people would list their favorite things. Amélie is one of those films that I could see on someone’s list that let me know I had found one of my people. There’s something both validating and inviting about seeing your interests mirrored in someone else. It’s interesting how the very smallest thing can sometimes spark a sense of connection. Amélie and Nino see something of their own quirky dreamer natures reflected in one another, and, before they’ve ever spoken, they feel drawn to one another in a way that doesn’t entirely make sense to either one of them at the time. After Amélie leaves her first note to Nino on the back of a square of photo booth pictures, a half-asleep Nino has the following exchange with the faces in the pictures about why she did it: Man in photo: She’s in love Nino: I don’t even know her Man: You do Nino: Since when? Man: Since always. In your dreams The third way in which Amélie reminds me of Facebook is less tied to the early days of social media and feels like something a bit more true of today. Amélie doesn’t know how to relate to anyone without some kind of artificial framework. The motivating event for her in the story is finding the lost box of childhood treasures in the bathroom of her apartment and deciding to try and find the person they belonged to. But, she’s incapable of just being open and vulnerable with people about what she’s trying to do. Everything is a spectacle, or a stratagem, for Amélie to hide behind. Amélie can’t just return the childhood treasures to Dominique Bretodeau, she has to stage him finding them without explanation in a phone booth on his walk to the market; and even after he’s found it and is trying to find someone to share this astounding experience with, Amélie plays dumb. She smiles at his story, knowing that her plan to astonish him worked, but she can’t bring herself to say one word to this person aching to share his experience with anyone. She can’t just have a conversation with her father about how he should travel (as he and his late wife had wanted) but instead, sets up an elaborate prank sending his garden gnome around the world to shake him out of his rut. She can’t just tell Nino that she’s found his photo album and wants to return it to him, or that she likes him, instead, she has to set up an elaborate ploy to lure him away from his bike so she could have him see her return it to his bike from too far away for him to catch up with her before she makes her escape. Even when Nino follows her scavenger hunt to her work, just like she planned, and is standing right in front of her, asking if she is the girl in the picture, which she obviously is, Amélie still can’t bring herself to take the risk of just saying ‘yes’ and seeing what he would do next. The resolution of Amelie’s character arc isn’t merely that she ends up with Nino, but that she finds the courage to take the risk of making herself vulnerable to someone else. For Jeunet, it’s important that we gather that it’s the risk, not the reward, that’s the point. His aim is to deliver a satisfying ending to the story he’s telling, while also highlighting the virtue of failure and the different ways that relationships, even the best ones, can go wrong. A regular at the restaurant where Amélie works is the failed writer, Hipolito. He says at one point: “I love the word ‘fail’. Failure is human destiny. Failure teaches us that life is but a draft, a long rehearsal for a show that will never play.” Amélie’s mother and father were a good match for one another, but in the present day of the story, her father is a grieving widow. The older couple Amélie talks to while trying to track down Dominique Bretodeau, are happily enough married, though the husband is beginning to go senile. The concierge at Amélie’s apartment building was happily married until her embezzling husband ran off with his secretary. And, throughout the film, in the background of the story is the recent death of Lady Di, herself the archetype of a storybook relationship gone wrong. The primary example of a relationship’s potential to fail is when Amélie plays matchmaker. We are first introduced to Gina and Joseph when we see where Amélie works. Gina works with Amélie. Joseph is a regular at the restaurant. The two of them had some kind of relationship in the past that Joseph can’t let go of. He sits in the restaurant every day, jealously watching Gina’s every move, making comments into a tape recorder whenever she interacts with another male customer. Amélie surreptitiously redirects Joseph’s attention from Gina to Georgette, the miserable hypochondriac who runs the cigarette counter, convincing each other that the other secretly likes them. And, for a time, Amélie’s stratagem works. Joseph and Georgette are happy and infatuated with one another, figuratively and literally climaxing with a not-so-secret liaison in the cafe’s restroom. Joseph’s jealousy is relentless though, and he starts subjecting Georgette to the same treatment as Gina, and he even returns to making the same comments about Gina. Amélie’s efforts at matchmaking are a failure, but neither Joseph nor Georgette come away from the experience empty-handed. Regardless of how things turned out, the only time in the film that we see either of them happy is those few days of infatuation. Better a day of happiness than none at all. To circle back to that earlier digression, the fourth way that Amélie makes me think of Facebook is the way that the message of this movie stands in contrast to the riskless safety of social media - the curated broadcast of life that passively waits for others to engage with it. Part of how Amélie became so isolated is that growing up being homeschooled by just her distant father, she never learned the risks and rewards inherently tied to intimacy and vulnerability. She took refuge in her dreams, and although that shared experience is the beginning of the connection between her and Nino, the thing she needed to learn was how to stand in front of someone else, in the real world, without curation or stratagems, and let herself be open and vulnerable to whatever might happen. In this way, the ending of the film is broader than just Amélie and Nino winding up together. We see our failed writer, Hipolito, walking along the street and coming across something he had written, that had been spray-painted onto the side of a building. We see Dominique Bretodeau, having been so shaken by the appearance of his lost childhood treasures, that he has sought out and reconnected with his estranged daughter and grandson. And we also see Amélie’s father loading his luggage into a cab, as he finally embarks on his long overdue trip. Only then do we close on Amélie and Nino joyously riding his bike together through the picturesque streets of France. We don’t know what will ultimately come of any of these adventures, but we can see on the faces of all concerned that they were all worth the risk however they may turn out. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

One of the better films of 2020 was the documentary Howard, about the role that one-time Beacon resident Howard Ashman played in helping save Disney animation in the late 80s and early 90s. Though Ashman only worked for Disney for a few years before his untimely passing in 1991, he, along with his songwriting partner Alan Menken, were instrumental in the success of three of Disney’s most beloved animated films: The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, and Aladdin. My main quibble with the documentary was that, because it was primarily concerned with his relationship with Disney, it didn’t give much attention to what I think is actually the best, or at least most representative, of Howard’s projects, his musical adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. Little Shop of Horrors, the 1986 film, is based on the off-off Broadway musical that Howard Ashman co-wrote, directed, and produced at the theater he co-founded. The stage production is itself a musical adaptation of the 1960 Roger Corman B-movie of the same name. Until very recently, all I had known of the Corman film was that (1) it was filmed notoriously cheaply and quickly, with the two days of principal filming all taking place on leftover sets from Corman’s previous film, in a brief window before they were to be torn down. (2) It boasts a brief and unusual appearance by a very young Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient. And (3) since Corman didn’t anticipate much long-term value to the film, he didn’t bother with copywriting it, so its public domain status has led to its omnipresence in discount DVD bins for years. My biggest discovery on finally watching the original film was that it’s actually really good. Not ironically good, or good despite its limitations, but a genuinely engaging and funny horror-comedy that holds up so well that it’s easy to see what inspired Ashman to want to adapt it. The basic story of Little Shop of Horrors is pretty much the same in both the original film and in the stage adaptation. Seymour Krelborn works at a Skid Row flower shop called Mushnik’s, where a strange and unusual plant with a taste for human blood happens to come into his possession, and tragedy ensues. The musical does a bit more than the original to establish Skid Row as a place of desperate and hopeless lives on the margins. In the song, “Skid Row”, The whole ensemble sings: Gee, it sure would be swell to get outta here Bid the gutter farewell and get outta here I'd move heaven and hell to get outa Skid I'd do I-dunno-what to get outta Skid, But a hell of a lot to get outta Skid, People tell me there's not a way outta Skid But believe me I gotta get outta Skid Row! This quickly establishes not only that Skid Row is a place that people might be willing to do anything to escape, but that they might also be justified in what they have to do to escape and survive since no just society ought to have a place like Skid Row in the first place. When Seymour discovers that his small sickly plant needs blood to survive, he makes a fateful decision that may be the one truly selfless choice he makes: he pricks his fingers and feeds the plant drops of his own blood. The plant does thrive, and as it grows, it begins to have a transformative effect on the flower shop. Its strangeness begins to draw customers into the store to get a closer look at it, which dramatically boosts store sales. Seymour’s role in the growing success of the store raises his esteem in the eyes of his boss, Mr. Mushnik, and in the eyes of the co-worker he likes, Audrey. Over time, the plant grows so large that Seymour can’t sustain it on his own blood alone any longer. The loss of the plant would be a pretty significant blow because of how much his life has already been improved by it, but he doesn’t know what to do. It’s at this point that the plant reveals that it can speak. In the musical, not only can the plant speak, but it can bargain. The plant takes credit for the turnaround in Seymour’s life and tells him that it’s just the start. If Seymour can keep tracking down blood to keep the plant fed and growing, the plant will make all of Seymour’s dreams come true. This is the moral turning point of the story. In the musical, Ashman wrote the song “Feed Me”, where the plant offers its Faustian bargain to Seymour: How'd ya like to be a big wheel? Dining out, for every meal I'm the plant can make it all real You're gonna get it Your mileage may vary, but I also get a kick about the amount of overlap between this song and one of the songs Howard wrote for Aladdin, “Friend Like Me”, where another supernatural creature offers to make all of the protagonist’s dreams come true. Though, in Seymour’s case here, the offer comes with truly terrible strings attached. Seymour is resistant to the plant’s entreaties. He knows it’s wrong. He’s briefly tempted in the abstract, but he knows he couldn’t murder anyone. In both the original film and Howard’s adaptation, a body count nevertheless begins to accumulate. They differ importantly in the how, though. In the original it’s largely happenstance that leads people to die. Seymour accidentally causes a man to be hit by a train; he accidentally kills a sadistic dentist; he murders a prostitute, but only after being hypnotized by the plant; and he ultimately loses his own life trying to kill the plant. The key point of departure between the original and the adaptation is that Howard greatly streamlined the deaths in the story to highlight that Seymour, whatever his initial intentions, is responsible for how things get out of hand. The sadistic dentist in the Corman film is just a customer of the flower shop. In Howard’s adaptation, the dentist is Audrey’s abusive boyfriend, which makes him more palatable for the audience as plant food. After the song “Feed Me”, Seymour goes to see the dentist, armed with a pistol and with every intention of killing him: If you want a rationale It isn't very hard to see No, No, No... Stop and think it over, pal The guy sure looks like plant food to me! The guy sure looks like plant food to me! The guy sure looks like plant food to me...! He's so nasty treatin' her rough! Smackin' her around, and always talkin' so tough! You need blood and he's got more than enough! I need blood and he's got more than enough! But the dentist accidentally kills himself before Seymour gets a chance to act. Seymour has ample opportunity to intervene, but chooses to let the dentist die. Seymour is briefly rewarded for his crime. With the dentist out of the way, Audrey and Seymour declare their affections for one another in the song “Suddenly, Seymour”, but Seymour discovers shortly after that Mushnick saw him chopping up the dentist’s body at the flower shop. Mushnick attempts to blackmail Seymour. If Seymour leaves town, and lets Mushnick keep the plant, he won’t be turned into the police. Seymour could leave town, or he could let himself be arrested for the crime he did commit, but he opts instead to coax Mushnick to get close enough to the plant that he gets eaten. It’s at this point that we get the critical point of departure between the original 1960 film, Howard’s stage adaptation, and the version of the 1986 film that was released. Frank Oz was chosen to direct the 1986 film adaptation of Howard’s stage show, from a screenplay that Howard wrote. Oz was a perfect match in a lot of ways. Coming from an already long career working with Jim Henson, having recently taken the leap to co-direct The Dark Crystal with Jim, before directing his first solo film in The Muppets Take Manhattan in 1984. Oz was perfectly suited to handle the puppeteering involved in Little Shop of Horrors, along with the set design required, navigating the complicated tone of the story, and dealing with the challenges of weaving songs into a narrative. Most importantly, Oz was in agreement about what the story was trying to say, right down to the bleak ending where Seymour loses Audrey to the plant before himself being eaten, and then building upon that ending by adding what would have been an impossible to stage sequence where we get to see the plants start to take over the world. That ending was written and filmed, with the final plant rampage sequence costing $5 million of the film's total budget of $25 million. Oz and Howard fought to keep the ending in the film, but, despite how well it had always played on stage, test screenings of the film with the original ending went so poorly that if a new happier ending weren’t shot, the film was never going to be released. I don’t begrudge the film it’s happy ending, because that’s the film I fell in love with, and for a long time that was the only version I had ever known. Also, the happy ending does play better despite its structural shortcomings. Seymour pulls Audrey out of the plant’s mouth in time for her to survive. Seymour now electrocutes and destroys the plant with a live electrical wire - though it’s never been clear to me how he managed to do this without electrocuting himself, too. And then Audrey and Seymour escape to marry and settle down in a quaint tract home, though one which we discover has a tiny baby plant smiling in the front yard right before the credits roll. It’s an emotionally satisfying ending because we’ve so bonded with Audrey and Seymour that we do want to see them live happily ever after and can talk ourselves into believing they deserve it because of the adversity they’ve had to overcome in their lives on Skid Row. That said, I’m glad we have the original ending, too. Seymour is complicit in the death of two people, and it’s weird that he gets to live happily ever after. Also, the scenes of the plant rampage are noteworthy because they’re not happening on Skid Row. It’s the cityfolk and suburbanites that stand by and allow the misery Skid Row to exist in the first place that are under attack. It’s this total package, even including the two endings, that makes Little Shop of Horrors my favorite project Howard Ashman was associated with. His lyrics are always extraordinary, the very idea of adapting the original Little Shop of Horrors as a musical is such a big swing of an idea that it’s a marvel that it works at all, the fact that he can take such a silly premise and still have so much worthwhile to say with it is that much more impressive still. You can keep your Little Mermaid, your Beauty & the Beast, and your Aladdin; Little Shop of Horrors is better than them all and the one that I’m most looking forward to sharing with my kids one day. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

As much as we may enjoy an underdog tale of smart and scrappy upstarts taking on the rich kids, the sad lesson of Moneyball is that the rich kids may beat the smart kids anyway, and then copy all of the smart kids’ best ideas. The wonder of Moneyball is that it delivers on all of the human drama of a typical sports movie - even giving you a nail-biting game-winning walk-off home run - while actually telling a story mostly about the unfeeling market forces chugging away underneath that drama. Moneyball is both a fairly bleak film about the unsettling dynamics of a world where people are reduced numbers and numbers are king, and it is also one where the stories of the people living in that world are still affecting despite that fact. Micheal Lewis’s 2003 book, "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," was written about the 2002 season of the major league baseball team, the Oakland A’s. Lewis didn’t know how the season was going to turn out when he started the book but was drawn to the topic because of the anomalous track record of the team in prior seasons. Just the year before, in 2001, the team had the second-lowest payroll in the game, less than a third that of the team with the highest payroll, while also managing to win the second-most games. It seemed like the team had found some secret that other teams hadn’t picked up on yet, and Lewis wanted a front-row seat to their follow-up to see if he could find out what they were doing differently. Lewis was, in some ways, an ideal person to take on this project. First, because he wasn’t a baseball writer or someone otherwise connected to the game. Coming from a background working on Wall Street, and later a second career as a journalist writing on business, finance, and economics, Lewis didn’t approach baseball with any more prejudice or preconceptions than the average fan. What Lewis would discover was that a growing organizing principle of the Oakland A’s was to challenge the existing orthodoxies inside baseball in order to take advantage of the market inefficiencies they found - something Lewis was highly qualified to understand and explain to others. Second, a hallmark of Lewis’s work is that, no matter how technical the subject he is trying to convey, he has a peerless ability to ground that information in the stories of the people personally involved. The film centers on the General Manager of the A’s: Billy Beane. The book expands the world a bit beyond that, but Beane is largely the central figure there as well. Beane, played in the film by Brad Pitt, personifies the tension at play in the story. Before becoming the GM of the A’s, he had a disappointing career as a major league ballplayer. His career was particularly disappointing because, coming out of high school, the consensus view of the team scouts that saw him play was that he was something like the most promising young player in the country - a can’t-miss prospect that would go on to miss. In the book, Lewis takes more time than the movie does to outline that what killed Billy Beane’s career is that he could never make peace with the unavoidable struggle and failure involved in developing into a professional player. What the scouts saw in Billy was a strong, fast, tall, graceful, handsome, athlete, in the very mold of what a baseball player should look like. What Billy discovered too late was that his anger and fear of failure, fueled by his struggles on the field, stopped him from getting out of his own way enough to turn his ability in to results. What it turns out makes Beane the perfect person to challenge baseball’s conventional wisdom was how wrong that wisdom ended up being about him. What’s driving Beane is a desire not just for his team to win games, but to win the World Series, and to do that in spite of the comparatively meager resources available to his team. And it’s not just that he’s driven to win, but specifically, to win with the cards he’s been dealt. In the 2002 season, the newest challenge for him to contend with was that three of his best players were leaving for more lucrative contracts with richer teams and that they would need to be replaced. Beane can’t buy the best players the way other teams can, so if he is going to field a winning team, he’s going to need to find value where no one else is looking. Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill, is a renamed version of the actual A’s Assistant GM, Paul DePodesta. Brand is an economics major from Yale who is fluent in the different approaches to player evaluation that Beane needs. Instead of leaning into traditional scouting - that is subjectively evaluating the players by watching them play - Brand was part of a growing movement that leaned heavily into primarily evaluating players by analyzing the numbers - hits, walks, strikeouts, etc. - that they’ve produced in games. As informative as traditional scouting might be, trying to evaluate a player’s abilities by sight is unavoidably susceptible to bias. By eliminating everything about the player that can’t be reduced to a measurable number, Brand and Beane are able to identify the players that other teams haven’t noticed yet, making it possible to sign those players to contracts for less than what they should actually be worth. For the story, this is where things start to get really interesting. On one hand, this is the tale of a numbers-based approach to running a baseball team that’s exclusively looking to maximize runs as a means to win games. On the other hand, this is also the human story of an intense, recently divorced GM, in Beane, who is driven to win because of how much he hates losing and failure; an Assistant GM in Brand who feels like an outsider trying to prove that his way is better than the old ways; and a team of somewhat misfit toys being given opportunities to prove themselves that no other teams would be willing to offer. The analytic approach that Beane and Brand are espousing doesn’t treat individual events on a baseball field, individual games, or even individual players as especially important in the long run of a season. What matters is the total number of runs the team scores over what their opponents score, and how that impacts their total number of wins at year's end. Beane can’t actually embody that principle, though. He still cares so much about the moment-to-moment successes, or even more about not failing, that he can’t even bring himself to watch his team’s games. However numbers-oriented the approach, the numbers will always need to be interpreted by people, to make decisions about people. The misfit toys that Beane and Brand find are Scott Hatteberg, David Justice, and Jeremy Giambi. Jeremy Giambi is the younger brother of the best player the A’s lost, Jason Giambi, who is largely overlooked by other teams because he is a very slow runner, a poor fielder, and has a reputation for partying. David Justice is a former great player, now overlooked by other teams largely for the sin of reaching the advanced age of 36. Scott Hatteberg was a catcher who suffered nerve damage in his throwing arm that prevented him from playing that position anymore. Where other teams saw a catcher that couldn’t play anymore, Brand and Beane saw a great hitter they could try to hide on the field at first base, where he hopefully wouldn’t be called upon to throw enough to hurt the team. These three players almost feel like caricatures of the kinds of players you would invent for a sports movie. That’s part of what helps ground this as a feel-good story. You genuinely feel good about watching these overlooked and undervalued players succeed. But, those good feelings aren’t quite everything they seem. These are the three players we’re following at the outset, but Jeremy Giambi gets traded to another team early in the season because he isn’t gelling with the team plan. Narratively, you expect him to finish the year with the team, and it feels abrupt that he was introduced into the story only to be unceremoniously traded, but he helps represent the point that the players are largely just widgets to plug in or dispose of as circumstances demand. With David Justice, we see a conversation between him and Beane where Beane bluntly lays out for him that what Beane wants to do is squeeze out every last bit of value out of the end of Justice’s career, and in exchange for that what Justice gets is to keep being paid to play a little bit longer. In the film, it plays as a scene where Justice is mature enough to understand that as the deal. In the book, though, that conversation happens, but it doesn’t include Justice at all. It’s something that DePodesta says to Lewis, bluntly laying out how the team sees its players, but also saying how you could never actually tell the players that. Hatteberg in some ways makes for a more traditional hero for the story, in that we get to see him as the inverse of Beane: presented with challenges that really should end his career, he is able to overcome that adversity to find success anyway. He learns to make himself into a capable first baseman against long odds and his own fear of failure. And he plays the key role in the seemingly feel-good sports movie happy ending, except that winds up not being the end of the story at all. The third act of the film is about the team’s history-making twenty-game winning streak, focused on the nail-biting twentieth game. The team goes up by 11 runs early. We watch Beane start to let his guard down and actually enjoy what is looking to be a historic moment. We watch him struggle to keep it together as the opposing team comes back and ties the game up. We watch Scott Hatteberg come to the plate and hit a game-winning walk-off home run. We’re elated. But, as soon as it’s over, Beane says to Brand: it’s just another game. And it is. It’s a storybook moment, but it’s the season that counts, proof that their methods work. And, in the end, the Oakland A’s do go on to make the playoffs but get knocked out by another team in the first round. Only one team gets to win the last game of the season, and once again, it won’t be them. After the season, Beane takes a meeting with the owner of the Boston Red Sox, where he is offered more money than any GM in baseball history to come to work his magic on their team, to lead a team front office that is already being built to employ those methods whether he comes over or not. Interestingly, Beane turned down the money, opting to remain in Oakland, so he could stay close to his teenage daughter. This doesn’t come up in Michal Lewis’s book. The interactions between Billy, his ex-wife, and daughter feel like the sort of truth-bending for the sake of a good story that Aaron Sorkin might have added to his draft of the screenplay, but it’s true. Beane has said in interviews since that he stayed in Oakland for his daughter and has never regretted it since. The Red Sox, on the other hand, using Oakland’s methods, and combining them with the league’s second-highest payroll, would go on without him to win the first of three World Series titles in 2007. Part of what makes Moneyball interesting to me is that it feels strange, yet right, that the ending is as upbeat as it is. Yes, Beane’s team loses in the playoffs. They don’t even make it to the World Series and they still haven’t in all the years since. Beane turns down the big contract that would have given him his best shot to build a team that could win the World Series. But, we don’t really care because he seems happy, driving along listening to the song his daughter recorded for him. He’s happy where he is, trying to win with what he has, and getting to watch his daughter grow up. The baseball in this film winds up just being the setting for a different and more personal story being told; one where, despite it all, the important things about life can’t be reduced down to mere numbers. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th & 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.