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A look at The Civil Dead and Jethica An idea most frequently associated with Roger Ebert is the description of films as empathy machines. In 2005 he gave a speech outside the Chicago Theater, when a plaque was being dedicated to him, where he said: “We are all born with a certain package. We are who we are. Where we were born, who we were born as, and how we were raised. We are kind of stuck inside that package, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people, and find out what makes them tick, and what they care about. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Now I would push Roger a little on that last line, but only in the sense that it’s not films that make us empathic - we already are unavoidably so by nature - but a film can do an effective job of enlivening our empathy or guiding it in new directions. Exactly how empathy functions is a contentious issue, but there are features of empathy that have been well-established for a long while now. Notably, our empathy is most readily activated by that which resembles ourselves in some way, and this impulse is surprisingly broad in its application. If you’ve ever put a pair of googly eyes on something, then you know firsthand how readily we can anthropomorphize basically anything in the world. It’s this same principle that does a lot of the heavy lifting in most animated films. One wouldn’t think, for example, that you would be able to tell a compelling narrative story about abstractions like our emotions, yet Pixar’s Inside Out was able to sufficiently humanize concepts like Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness, to tell an enthralling tale. More impressively, that story also was able to say something worthwhile about the young human girl, Riley, that was experiencing those emotions, and by extension, was able to say something about the human experience in general. Almost anything can trigger our empathy, and it reveals something about us when it happens. I say all of this as a preamble to discussing the unexpected role that I see empathy playing in two smaller films from earlier this year: The Civil Dead and Jethica. Both of these films are ghost stories of a kind, though neither is, strictly speaking, a horror film. In both cases, they are stories about people who are haunted by ghosts but are using a literal haunting to say something about being figuratively haunted. They are also both stories that take some pains to get us to sympathize with both the haunter and the haunted. To explain what I think is most interesting about this approach, forgive me for a brief digression into the history of empathy. One of the earliest robust discussions of the mechanism of empathy occurs in Adam Smith’s 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This discussion occurs so early in the historical discourse on empathy that it precedes ‘empathy’ being coined as a term by 150 years. At the time he was writing, Smith and his contemporaries used the term ‘sympathy’ to refer to what we now call empathy. I mention all of this here because the culmination of Smith’s first introduction of what he takes sympathy to be, is his pointing out what he takes to be the furthest extreme of our natural impulse to sympathize: our inclination to sympathize with the dead. What’s so noteworthy about our impulse to sympathize with the dead is that we’re experiencing some kind of fellow feeling with someone we know to no longer be feeling anything at all anymore and that asymmetry highlights how our empathy always says far more about us than it can ever say about whomever we are empathizing with. We can never actually know how someone else really feels, but only how we imagine we would feel in what we take their circumstances to be. Smith says this of our sympathy with the dead: “We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is the real importance of their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations.” For Smith, all of our sympathy for the dead, even our understanding of the dead, only comes to us through a prism of our being alive, and it’s very much that idea that’s at work in these two films I want to discuss. It won’t be possible to fully explore what I want to say about The Civil Dead and Jethica without spoiling those films, particularly their endings. However, since I think not many people have seen them, I’ll begin with a rough sketch of what they’re each about, and let you know where to jump off if they sound like something you would want to check out without being spoiled. The Civil Dead is about a young photographer, Clay (Clay Tatum), who lives in an apartment in LA with his girlfriend. One day, while his girlfriend is away on a trip, Clay goes out to take pictures and runs into someone he used to be friendly with back in his hometown, Whit (Whitmer Thomas). Whit talks Clay into hanging out the rest of that day, and on through the night. Whit finally reveals to a hungover Clay the next morning that Whit has actually been dead this whole time, and is a ghost that only Clay can see and hear. The rest of the film is the two of them navigating that dynamic. Jethica is about two women, Elena (Callie Hernandez) and Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson), who are each being haunted by the ghosts of men who forced themselves into their lives. Elena is living way out in the middle of nowhere in a trailer in the desert that belongs to her grandmother, trying to figure some things out with her life. One day she runs into an old friend of hers, Jessica, at a gas station. Elena learns that Jessica is driving cross country, seemingly on the run from something, so Elena invites Jessica to come to stay with her at the trailer as long as she needs. Jessica agrees, and once at the trailer, she confides in Elena that the reason she had left home was because of a situation with a stalker that got out of control. A guy named Kevin (Will Madden) had been following her, leaving her unhinged messages, demanding she sees him, and threatening her if she didn’t. Elena hears Jessica out, even listening to some of the messages, and tells Jessica that she’s safe now and can go take a shower and relax. While Jessica is in the shower, though, Kevin shows up outside the trailer, ranting and pacing outside, yelling for Jessica to come out. This is a little bewildering, not least of which because the trailer is truly in the middle of nowhere, nothing but flat desert to the horizon in every direction, and there’s no sign of another car out there. Kevin eventually disappears again, and Jessica brings Elena outside to show her Kevin’s body in the trunk of her car. Jessica tells Elena how Kevin had shown up at her house threatening her, and she had stabbed him in self-defense. She had fled with his body in her car, but his ghost had been haunting her ever since, continuing to stalk her even in death. I’ll pause here because I haven’t yet relayed anything important that isn’t already in the trailers for these two films. If either of them sounds intriguing, please check them out before reading on if the element of surprise is important to you, because each film takes these initial premises in some interesting directions. That warning given, I proceed. What The Civil Dead is interested in, in a loose sense, is what we owe others. The film is told from Clay’s point of view, but there is an interpretation of what happens that would straightforwardly paint him as the villain of this story. When we meet Clay, his girlfriend has just left town, so Clay starts running a scam out of their apartment. Posing as a realtor showing his apartment as available to rent, he holds an open house, collecting application fees from people excited to find such a large apartment available so inexpensively. When we first meet Whit, we learn that he first moved to LA to become an actor, and had reached out to Clay to try to connect with him early on, but Clay kept blowing him off. Even aware of how Clay had been ducking him, Whit is thrilled to now have someone who can see and hear him. At this point, Whit doesn’t know how long he’s been dead, but it’s been a crushingly lonely experience, being invisible, and unable to sleep, or eat, or touch anything. Just stuck existing emptily. Clay and Whit do find a brief camaraderie with one another, in large part because Whit can help Clay with his money problems. Clay wheedles his way into a high-stakes poker game run by a producer he knows, where Whit can tell Clay what cards everyone is holding during the game. At this point, the way the rest of this film could play out is a string of adventures that Clay and his ghost buddy could have, but Clay doesn’t really want that. Clay finds Whit to be too clingy. So, under the guise of arranging for them to be able to spend some quality time together away from Clay’s girlfriend, who still doesn’t know anything about their situation, Clay takes some of his poker winnings to rent a cabin in the woods for him and Whit to go hang out. They go and do even have a fun first night together, but on the second day, Clay lures Whit up into the attic of the cabin, shutting him in up there, knowing that Whit has no way to let himself back out. And the film ends with Whit yelling to Clay for help as Clay packs his car up and drives back home, the cabin slowly receding in the car’s rearview mirror. The way our empathy is manipulated here is impressive. We can step back and look at the way that Clay probably tells this story to himself after the fact and the way this film could have been framed; Clay found himself being haunted, stalked even, by a creepy ghost he never asked for. But, he was ultimately able to outsmart the ghost, trapping it somewhere it couldn’t bother him anymore. What makes the film play out differently than that for us is that we like Whit, feeling bad for what happened to him, both in his life and death; and we kind of think Clay is a douchebag. All of our empathy is with the ghost in this case, because our understanding of what he is going through is all familiar to us as experiences from our own lives: feelings of invisibility, isolation, loneliness, and embarrassment. But even all that said, Clay never consented to being haunted, and doesn’t owe Whit companionship. Clay may be a pretty garbage person otherwise, but it gets really complicated to say what he did was wrong. The way that Jethica plays out is almost the inverse of what happens with Clay and Whit. What we discover that Elena and Jessica have in common is that they are both haunted by men that they killed. In Elena’s case, she was driving down the road, got distracted, and hit a guy walking down the side of the road named Benny. (Andy Faulkner). After he is killed, Benny’s ghost mostly just keeps walking up and down the stretch of highway where he died, and we see Elena sometimes pick him up and talk to him, as a way to make peace with what she did. It’s only towards the end of the film that we learn it wasn’t an accident that Elena hit Benny. She happened to be distracted, and maybe she could have avoided him if she hadn’t been, but he deliberately jumped in front of her car. He was ready to end it all, and she just happened to be the one passing by. The shared theme between Elena and Jessica ends up being women whose lives were derailed by sad and selfish men, but what’s so surprising about where the film decides to go with that is how much empathy it still chooses to have for those two men. Kevin and Benny are undoubtedly the villains of the story, but after Benny absentmindedly reveals to Elena what he did, and Jessica gets Kevin to realize that what he has been doing, in both life and death, has been hurting her, the resolution to the story of the two ghosts is that they stop haunting these women, but also find a friend in one another before finally disappearing. The film doesn’t need to do that, and neither Benny nor Kevin is really owed such grace, but the empathy extended to them is still moving because we can’t help but hope that, even at our worst, such kindness might be extended to us. Neither film does, or really even could, tell us anything definitive about death, but both stories do contextualize something important for us about how we should treat others while we’re alive. How Clay treats Whit isn’t unambiguously wrong, but we still judge him harshly for how little empathy he has for Whit, also seeing it as an extension of the general selfishness with which we already saw him treat others. Clay may not have owed Whit companionship, but it was a choice to be such a dick about it. Conversely, the care that Elena and Jessica showed Kevin and Benny was probably excessive. No one owes kindness to an abuser, but, in general, anyone willing to extend empathy to others tends to receive ours. Such is the esteem with which we hold empathy that we always prefer the one who shows too much to the one that shows too little. And that’s part of why we love films, not because they are empathy machines, but because we are, and a good film reflects that back to us. 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.

Shortly after the final episode of Ted Lasso aired, Brendan Hunt, who played Coach Beard, hosted a Reddit AMA to answer fan questions about the show, the finale, and the rumored plans for the future of AFC Richmond’s coaching staff. One of the questions he was asked concerned something I had noticed and long wondered about myself: The musical theater references throughout the run of Ted were plentiful, and frequently significant parts of the story. Notably, in the finale, the team says goodbye to Ted and Coach Beard after their last team practice, by breaking into a fully choreographed rendition of “So Long, Farewell” from the Sound of Music. This itself is a call back to an early practice where Ted and the coaching staff were drilling a slightly more incredulous team through the dance steps of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” to say goodbye to the departing Dr. Sharon, the team’s sports psychologist. The performance of “So Long, Farewell” is mostly filmed as a direct address to the camera, so it perfectly doubles as both a story point and as the show itself singing farewell to its audience. That said, as fun and fitting as this rendition of “So Long, Farewell” may be, I think what may actually be the real capstone musical reference for the show comes one episode earlier, in the penultimate episode of the series, in a scene between Coach Beard and Nate that I think is the culmination of one of the most important themes the show was trying to develop. Part of the arc of the show’s last season, a point that audience and critic response seemed to struggle with, was the gradual reclamation of Nate after his heel turn to end season two. Nate began the series as the team’s equipment manager - their kit man - before being elevated by Ted to become part of the coaching staff, but Nate’s jealousy and insecurity got the better of him, and he finished the second season by taking the head coach job with a rival team. The dynamics of Nate’s story were always a little odd in the context of the show to that point. We were introduced to one clear-seeming villain in the pilot of the show - philandering billionaire Rupert Mannion, whose high-profile divorce led to his wife taking control of his beloved team, AFC Richmond. Rupert was presented as an unambiguous bad guy, and he largely stays the same bad guy throughout the run of the show. In terms of storytelling, a major benefit of Nate joining up with Rupert’s rival team is that it allows one of the show’s core characters to be able to interact with Rupert on a regular basis. In the lead-up to the end of the series, this gives the writers a way to spend more time getting to know Rupert, ahead of the inevitable comeuppance he’s to receive in the series finale. This development for Nate always felt odd, though, because it was a bit out of step with almost all of Ted’s other relationships with people during the early run of the show. The first season of the series is all about people who seem like rivals or antagonists to Ted, gradually being won over by his earnest open-heartedness. In the first season, he wins over the new head of AFC Richmond, Rebecca Welton, even though she had only hired Ted with the hope that he would make a laughingstock of her ex-husband’s favorite team. By the series' end, Ted and Rebecca will have grown so close that she questions whether or not she would even want to own the team without Ted as its coach. Ted works this same magic with journalist Trent Crimm of The Independent , who initially wants to take down Ted as a foreign interloper, but by the series end, Trent has become a member of Ted and the team's inner circle, writing a book about the team’s culture. Again and again, Ted does the same with skeptical players, fans, and broadcasters; and even with his therapist. Ted approaches antagonism with openness and curiosity, so it feels discordant to see Nate’s heel turn in the face of Ted’s kindness. Why would a show so rooted in winning people over, have such a prominent character go in the other direction, despite Ted’s obvious continued affection and approval? What becomes clear though, having seen how the rest of the series played out, Nate was never really meant to be a villain. And for that matter, it’s not entirely clear that Rupert is even a villain in the show’s eyes either. Ted Lasso , both the show and the person, are not interested in carving the world up into heroes and villains. Ted says repeatedly about coaching that it’s not about wins and losses for him, and that bears out in the series with the team winning their last match, while still falling short of the league title. Winning would be nice, but Ted always saw his job as making the players on his teams the best people they can be. And the finale of the series lands as well as it does, despite the team falling short of the league title, because the players, along with everyone involved with the team, wind up as better versions of themselves thanks to Ted’s influence; and this seems especially so with Nate. Nate’s character arc also becomes especially important in the series once you realize that Ted doesn’t really have one. It ends up being fairly core to what the show is trying to say, that, aside from having made some new friends and collected new experiences, Ted ends the series largely the same person he began it. We see him struggle with panic attacks, become better about examining his own feelings and make some peace with the divorce that prompted him to take a job so far from home, to begin with, but Ted is basically the same person in the finale that he was in the pilot. For the show, Ted, as a character, represents something larger about the possibility of just being a good and open-hearted person, regardless of what life throws your way. The characters around him in the show go through major life changes, guided for the better by Ted’s influence, while Ted just stays a steadfastly good person. Continued goodness and strength of character are hard to dramatize, though, which finally brings us to the scene between Nate and Coach Beard that I wanted to discuss. At this point in the final season, we’ve seen Nate gradually coming to terms with his having been wrong to leave Ted and the team in the way that he did; prompted in part by Ted’s public goodwill towards him whenever he was asked a question about Nate during a press conference, and in part by seeing how much different being in the world of Rupert Mannion is from being in the world of Ted Lasso. Nate is ready to reconcile with Ted and ask forgiveness, but the resolution to that with Ted wouldn’t be that dramatically satisfying, because we never get the sense that Ted ever felt betrayed by Nate, to begin with. Ted seems at times confused, or disappointed, by Nate's behavior, but never really betrayed. Ted saw something in Nate when he promoted him, and Ted’s continued faith in Nate makes their eventual reconciliation feel inevitable. In Coach Beard, we get someone who does actually feel betrayed by Nate, both personally and on behalf of his best friend, Ted. And, throughout the final season, we see Beard struggling to accept that Ted is not more angry with Nate for what he did. This (along with Coach Beard’s generally more volatile seeming nature) creates a great deal of tension when he unexpectedly shows up on Nate’s doorstep to confront him right before the series finale. The scene we get between Nate and Coach Beard plays out like this: Nate: Are you here to kill me? Beard: Ted and I met playing college football. He was the backup punter and I was the backup kicker. We never got into a game, but we spent a lot of time together jogging; doing box jumps. After school, we went our separate ways. He was dating Michelle and got into coaching, and I got into prison. When I got paroled, I had no money. Family didn’t want me. I had nowhere to go. I looked up Ted. He took me in. Fed me. Let me crash on his couch. And in return, I stole his car. Now I didn’t get far, and I would have gone straight back to prison, if Ted didn’t come down there and convince those cops that he gave me the car. Nate: Just like in Les Miz. Beard: Our story is very similar to Les Miz, yes. Nate: You went to prison? Beard: Yes, for stealing a loaf of meth. And then I stole from my friend. Who forgave me. And gave me a job. And a life. So, to honor that, I forgive you. I offer you a job. Nate: Thank you. You sure you don’t want to head-butt me? I think it might make us feel better. Beard: (Turns his hat around, but rather than head butting him, he just touches his head to Nate’s head.) Monday. 9 AM. (Beard hugs Nate). If you don’t know the story of Les Misérables , the musical that Nate and Coach Beard are referencing, or the original novel by Victor Hugo, it’s an expansive story: mostly centered on an ex-convict named Jean Valjean. Valjean’s story is very much like what Coach Beard described for himself; Valjean was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. And, thanks to his numerous attempts to escape, he ended up serving 19 years in prison before finally being paroled. Parole brings its own disappointments for Valjean, though, because the identification papers he was required to carry with him at all times identify him as an ex-convict, and Valjean discovers that nobody wants an ex-convict in their inn, tavern, or home. Exhausted and starving after days of walking, someone does take enough pity on Valjean to tell him to try the house of the local clergyman, Bishop Bienvenu. Valjean is tired and angry when he knocks on the Bishop’s door, but he is readily taken in and offered dinner along with a bed for the night. The bishop treats Valjean like an honored guest, having the table set with the one luxury the Bishop still permits himself, his silver cutlery and candlesticks. And, that night, after the house had gone to bed, Valjean steals the silverware and attempts a getaway. Like with Coach Beard, Valjean didn’t get far before being apprehended. And, like with Ted, the Bishop not only convinces the police that he gave Valjean the silverware, but he also gives Valjean his silver candlesticks, too; instructing him, once the police leave, to use them to start a new life. A point that the book takes more time than the musical to make clear is that the Bishop is an unusually saintly figure and a model for how everyone really ought to live in the world. Jean Valjean spends the rest of his life trying to live up to that example, and we see Coach Beard trying to live up to Ted’s saintly example in this scene with Nate. It’s harder for him to get there, but Coach Beard’s acceptance and forgiveness of Nate are unconditional because that’s what Ted would do. Coach Beard doesn’t tell Nate that he’s on probation, or has to earn his forgiveness, because, in the eyes of the show, that’s not what forgiveness is, or should be. For Ted Lasso , forgiveness is what we extend to anyone who sincerely wants to be better; and we do so both for the benefit of others, as well as for our own. This is about more than just forgiveness but about the show’s general thesis about how we help one another be better. In a scene in the locker room during the finale, we see Ted’s inner circle discussing the idea of whether or not people can change. To which Leslie Higgins offers, “Human beings are never going to be perfect... The best we can do is keep asking for help and accepting it when we can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better.” These ideas are all tied together. This is what coaching, and life, are about for Ted Lasso; Not the wins and losses, but helping people along who are trying to be better, aware that perfection isn’t on the table for anyone. Part of that means accepting people when they’re not better yet and forgiving them for their shortcomings as long as they’re trying. Ted, or the saintly Bishop Bienvenu, might be an impossible standard for anyone to actually live up to, but, like Jean Valjean, or Coach Beard with Nate, we can always try to be better, and do what we can to help others be the best versions of themselves, too. 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.

This headline doesn’t make sense to me: “Paul Reubens, best known as Pee-wee Herman, dead at the age of 70, after a private 6-year battle with cancer.” Paul Reubens, 70? Impossible. How can that eternal man-child have grown so old when I wasn’t looking? How can he still feel like my peer, while almost being the same age as my father? A private 6-year battle with cancer? How could someone so important to so many people be sick for that long and not get the victory lap he deserves while he was still with us? And Pee-wee Herman dead? Paul Reubens, maybe, but Pee-wee? Incomprehensible. I have been thrilled and surprised by the scale of affection people have been sharing for Reubens and his work. He has always been important to me and the people I knew, but, 7 years removed from the last direct-to-streaming Pee-wee movie, I was unprepared for how culturally relevant he remains. What I share with more people than I realized is that I can chart the most formative years of my life by Paul Reubens’ career. I was born the same year as that first HBO special that broke Pee-wee into the mainstream. The Pee-wee Herman Show was a filmed stage performance of the show that Paul developed at the Groundlings Theater & School after he was passed over for the 6th season of Saturday Night Live. I remember seeing the special in reruns as a very young kid, presumably in between episodes of Fraggle Rock , and it stuck with me. I surely didn’t understand most of what I was seeing and hearing; but, because the show was riffing on the structure of a kids' show, there was enough to hold my young attention, and I still remember the lo-fi ending where Pee-wee gets his wish to fly and says he’s the luckiest boy in the world. For as rude and oddly adult as the character was at that point, that moment still landed for little kid me. Chronologically, Paul was able to move from the success of his stage show and TV special toward getting a deal with Warner Brothers Studios to make a Pee-wee movie, but that isn’t what I saw next. Long before I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure , I was a fan of his children’s show, the adaptation of his stage show: Pee-wee’s Playhouse . As great as that first Pee-wee movie is, Playhouse is how I best remember the character. Similar to what Jim Henson did with The Muppet Show , Paul and his team found a way to preserve much of the anarchic energy from the stage show that appealed to adults, while creating a show that was more inclusive for a children’s audience. Though overtly much more of a kids' show than The Muppet Show ever was, or wanted to be, Pee-wee’s Playhouse held just as much appeal for audiences of all ages. Looking back, you can particularly see how much both the stage show and children’s show would go on to become major influences for children’s cartoons for decades to come. Right from their opening credits, you can see how much a show like SpongeBob SquarePants aggressively borrowed from Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure didn’t have quite the same influence on me that it had on others, because it’s what I came to last with the character, but, it was kind of the perfect capstone for me, radically expanding what the character of Pee-wee could be by taking him out into the world. To invoke Jim Henson and The Muppets again, this isn’t that dissimilar from what happened with the jump from The Muppet Show to The Muppet Movie. The trajectories of The Muppets and Pee-wee were different, but they touched a lot of the same bases along the way. We mentioned above how Pee-wee was born from Paul being passed over for Saturday Night Live . A critical step towards the development of The Muppet Show was Jim Henson and his creation, The Land of Gorch, flaming out on the first season of SNL because the writers didn’t know what to do with characters that were meant to be for adults while looking like they were for kids. A place where Paul and Jim’s trajectories differed is that Jim began in children’s television and spent most of his career trying to get out of that box so he could pursue more avant-garde interests. Paul Reubens started out working in sketch comedy, performing in front of hip adult audiences, before making Big Adventure, one of the more “out there” mainstream films of the 80s, but ultimately, settled into a long run in children’s television. Both Paul and Jim were also notably much more than just their most famous creations. Jim eventually got to branch out from The Muppets to make films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth before his passing in 1990. Also in 1990, after Pee-wee’s Playhouse went off the air, Reubens reinvented himself in the 90s and 2000s as a character actor and in-demand voice artist. Despite some very high-profile speed bumps to his career, Reubens was a major part of projects like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mystery Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more. Now, I don’t really want to go too far comparing Jim Henson and Paul Reubens because the mountain of differences between the two of them surely outpaces their similarities, but these coincidental resemblances do help underscore for me a comparison that I do want to dig in on; that, as creations, The Muppets and Pee-wee Herman are of comparable importance and resonance. When I said at the beginning that the idea of Pee-wee Herman being dead was something incomprehensible to me, this is what I had in mind. Despite Paul Reubens’ obviously inseparable relationship with the character, Pee-wee feels like an inviolable part of the fabric of pop culture. The death of Pee-wee Herman feels as impossible to me as the death of Kermit the Frog did after Jim Henson passed. That thought has led me to realize that I would love nothing more than to see further stories with Pee-wee even if Paul can’t be with us to see them. He left behind a number of unmade Pee-wee scripts before finally getting 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday made. He even approached Johnny Depp around 2009 about the possibility of playing Pee-wee in a film Paul was trying to convince Tim Burton to direct. The idea of someone else playing Pee-wee doesn’t seem that absurd to me considering that the ending of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is Pee-wee giddily watching someone else play him in the movie of the story we had just finished watching. I suspect nothing like this will ever happen, though. It’s a shame because of how much I love Pee-wee as a character and the kind of stories you could tell with him. From all the various iterations over the years, we can see that he can be quite childlike and quite dark; he can be quite sweet and quite rude; he can be bold, imaginative, and entirely his own person. Pee-wee just exudes an infectious enthusiasm, delight, and a childish joy that doesn’t let up. Something indomitable. Like with The Muppets, Pee-wee can both be identifiably himself and yet, plugged into almost any story. I would happily watch a “Pee-wee’s Christmas Carol,” or “Pee-wee Treasure Island.” For all these reasons, I would love nothing more than to see creatives come up with fun things to do with a character like Pee-wee Herman, but at the same time, looking at the rather lackluster results of what has been attempted since Jim Henson’s passing, also maybe I don’t. I think I want these things, but maybe they would all just be a proxy for the thing I really want; to get to experience a performer like Paul Reubens imbue a character like Pee-wee with all of those qualities again. And that might also be impossible. Paul was something special, both on screen and in life, and, however much I don’t want to believe it, it’s probable that we’ll never see his like again. 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.

This is going to be one of those film articles where I jump straight into talking about the ending, so consider yourself warned if you haven’t gotten around to seeing Searching for Bobby Fischer at some point in the last 30 years. I’ve long thought of this as my favorite sports movie, even if it is debatable whether chess should actually be classified as a sport. Either way, Searching for Bobby Fischer is unambiguously formatted like a sports movie. We get all the hallmarks of the genre: montages, mentors, winning streaks, losing streaks, rivalries, a crisis of confidence going into the final act, an inspirational pep talk, and finally, a climactic contest between two well-matched opponents. This film, however, because it is specifically about youth chess, has an unexpected relationship towards winning and losing that I find fascinating for the genre. The film walks a fine line between wanting to provide a typical sports movie catharsis displaying some kind of final victory, and trying not to push an agenda on the kids depicted in the film that winning should ever be thought of as the only measure of success. Most of the early portion of the film is working towards establishing two points: first, that our young protagonist, Josh Waitkin (Max Pomeranc), has a preternatural intuition for the game of chess, and second, that he will have to push himself incredibly hard if he wants to develop that aptitude into something on par with the very best players his age. Towards the end of the film we get increasing emphasis on the idea that chess is a game and, particularly for kids, is supposed to be fun. There’s a clear tension here, and how well the film works for you, particularly its ending, may strongly depend on how well you think it navigates these opposing ideas. The film’s story builds towards the final match of the 1986 National Primary Championship, where Josh Waitzkin faces off against a kid who has been set up to be something of a nemesis for him: Jonathan Poe. The character of Jonathan is interesting in that he’s younger than Josh and he’s presented like a pint-sized Ivan Drago. He’s been trained to be a very serious-minded chess machine, pulled out of grade school by his father so that he could focus on chess full-time. This sounds like a Hollywood invention, but it isn’t. Jonathan is actually based on Josh’s real-life opponent for this tournament, Jeff Sarwar, who would go on to win the under-10 World Championship that same year. A very important context here though is that, not too long after the events depicted in this film, and in part due to the notoriety that Jeff’s success brought him and his unconventional family, he and his sister would be taken into protective custody by the Children’s Aid Society of Ontario, because of their father’s abusive behavior towards them. There’s an untold cautionary tale here about what it can look like when a parent’s only interest in their child is vicarious glory. Both Jonathan Poe and Jeff Sarwar are meant to offer a contrast to where Josh is at by the end of the film. While Josh isn’t depicted as being pushed in quite the same way that Jonathan and Jeff are, he does feel pressure from his sportswriter father, Fred (Joe Mantegna), who doesn’t do much to hide that he is happiest with Josh when he wins. From his chess teacher, Bruce Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley), Josh feels a constant pressure to always be learning the neverending minutia of the game, so he can one day fulfill his highest potential. Part of the crisis that Josh ends up experiencing heading towards the final tournament is because all of this pushing does actually work. Through his hard work and training, Josh has continued to improve as a player, but he’s now gotten to the point where he’s so highly rated that he’s the runaway favorite to win any match he plays against the kids in his age group. There’s no joy in winning for him anymore because it’s what’s expected of him. All that’s left for him is a fear of losing and letting down his dad and Bruce. And, for a time, that fear turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Part of how Josh breaks out of his funk comes when his mother (Joan Allen) starts pushing back against what his father and Bruce have been asking of him. She starts pushing them to let Josh go back to playing speed games of chess for fun against the men in the park, like Vinny (Lawrence Fishburn), even if it might mean risking picking up some bad chess habits. And, maybe most importantly for Josh’s well-being, the family decides to go on a chess-free vacation right before the tournament to give Josh a chance to relax and just be a kid for a while. This works, too. Taking this kind of step back is just what Josh needs, and he does ultimately win the tournament. That’s not the film’s ending, though. The story continues after Josh’s win, watching him comforting a friend who was also playing in the tournament but lost a key match earlier on. The film never loses sight of it still being a children’s chess tournament, and that for Josh to have his happy ending, every other kid competing has to have their heart broken. It is heartwarming to see Josh be able to empathize with his friend, but, the more you look at it, the clearer it becomes that this isn’t the kind of unambiguous happy ending you expect to get from most sports films. Part of what woke me up to the more bittersweet notes of this ending was learning more about the rest of the lives of the people in this story. The film, and the book it was based on, is called Searching for Bobby Fischer for at least two reasons. First, and most obviously, because of how chess parents and chess teachers obsess over whether their kids might follow in Fischer’s footsteps to become the next great American chess player. But, second, it also refers to people quite literally searching for the reclusive Fisher. As we learn in the opening narration from Josh, Bobby Fischer went into seclusion after winning the 1972 World Chess Championship against Boris Spassky. Josh describes how erratic Fischer’s behavior was leading up to the tournament. Fischer complained about just about every single arrangement related to the match. He insulted what he saw as the backwardness of Iceland, where the tournament was taking place. And he frequently spoke unkindly about the people of Iceland. Most dramatically, Bobby was also constantly threatening to blow off the match altogether. When Fred Waitzkin wrote the book this film is based on, Fischer had been living in seclusion for well over a decade. In what must have seemed like a bit of happy synergy for the film, in 1992, around the time the film was in production, Fischer emerged from hiding to play Spassky in a 20th-anniversary rematch of their 1972 contest. The match caused a bit of a sensation only for Fischer to mostly disappear from view again after handily winning the rematch. Perhaps a less happy revelation for the legacy of the film, though, is learning about Fischer’s pathological paranoia and virulent antisemitism. While Fischer had once seemed to just be the colorful enfant terrible of the chess world, the more we learn about him, the more unstable he appears to have been. Shortly before he died in Iceland in 2008, he was recognizable out in the street by his rotten teeth, after having had all of his fillings removed to avoid radio signals being sent to his brain by the Russians and Americans. He ultimately died of kidney failure caused by a bladder infection he didn’t trust any doctor to treat. The film is called Searching for Bobby Fischer , but aside from Bobby’s chess prowess, he wasn’t remotely someone any parent should want their child to emulate. In fact, looking beyond Bobby to all of the other characters involved, it’s not entirely clear that any parent should really want their child to pursue something like competitive chess. What’s more clear in the book is that Fred Waitzkin pursued competitive chess when he was younger, having caught chess fever along with the rest of America around the time of that Fischer-Spassky World Championship. Fred bought chess books and memorized openings, only to discover how far behind his nascent ability was compared to people who had already been playing their entire lives. He abandoned playing himself, but he’s honest in the book that part of him pushing Josh was to see his own dream fulfilled by his son. Something hinted at in the movie is Bruce Pandolfini’s aversion to tournament play, but what’s made much more clear in the book is that the reason he doesn’t play in competitions anymore is because of what he feared publicly losing might cost his reputation professionally as a chess teacher, writer, and commentator. His fear was very much the same one that Josh would have to overcome heading into the finals. Vinny, who is based on a real person, but also stands in for all the men who played with and mentored Josh in Washington Square Park, is still an active competitive player when we meet him, but what’s abundantly clear in the book is that his isn’t meant to be any kind of life for Josh to want to mimic. It’s never said straight out whether or not Vinny is homeless, but it is strongly implied, which is true for a lot of the players in the park. In the book, we meet master-level players that have been ruined for anything else in life by their obsession with chess, and now spend their nights sleeping in the park under their chess tables all year round. Funnily enough, you know who else doesn’t play competitive chess anymore? Josh Waitzkin. At the time this film was made, the real Josh was about 16 years old. You can see him playing chess at the table next to the film’s Josh toward the end of the movie when he returns to play speed chess with Vinny. By this point, real-life Josh was an international chess master who had won the National Junior High Championship, the High School Championship, and the U.S. Junior Championship. At the point when we see him in his blink-and-you-’ll-miss-it cameo, Josh Waitzkin was someone for whom you could make a credible argument that he was well along the path to becoming the next Fischer. However, just a few years later, he completely gave up playing chess competitively, shortly after he started college. Josh just couldn’t maintain his affection for the game, or for what the game asks of people for them to keep developing as a player. This is the thing I’ve now come to find to be the most fascinating about Searching for Bobby Fischer . At the end of the film, we got the sports movie happy ending of Josh winning the final match, but the impact of that win, his agreeing not to push himself so hard, and his decision to be more ok with just being a kid, looks like the seed of him eventually leaving the game altogether. The film celebrates Josh’s win, but in the final shot of him comforting his friend that lost, we also get something of the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be doing this to kids. So, I’ve come to learn that this is my hot take about Searching for Bobby Fischer : It is a great youth sports movie, but one that also manages to suggest that maybe we would be better off just letting kids be kids. For Josh Waitzkin, his happy ending doesn’t really come from winning that final match, but rather, from when he starts to let go of the idea that he has to win all of the time, and when he stops trying to be the next Bobby Fischer. 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.

I think of E.T. first and foremost as a film about what it’s like being a kid , especially a kid in a particular time and place; But what’s interesting to me about that is how that feeling persists despite how fantastical the actual story of the film is. In E.T. , a boy discovers an alien in his backyard, and spends the final act of the film with his friends, evading government agents, trying to help that alien get back to his home planet; but what I remember most from the film is the smaller character moments: Elliott faking being sick so he can stay home and play with the alien he just met, Elliott spending the morning enthusiastically introducing that alien to all of his action figures, and explaining things like what soda is and how a Pez dispenser works. All the action and adventure elements make the story more thrilling, and many of those moments like the bicycles taking flight are iconic, but what a lot of the later E.T. knockoffs got wrong is that what earns all of those thrilling moments is having first said something real about the characters and their lives. The elevator pitch for Jules (2023) might have been something like E.T. for the senior set, and it does play with a number of the same story beats, but the film is using those elements to do something more, telling what ends up being a fascinating story about aging. In Jules , Ben Kingsley plays Milton, a 78-year-old widower, who lives by himself in the house he raised his family in. He’s a bit of a crank, known for showing up to every town board meeting to make the same two proposals: that a crosswalk is needed in the part of town where he keeps getting tickets for jaywalking, and that the town needs to change their slogan to something less grammatically ambiguous. He has a strained relationship with his children, and his daughter, Denise (Zoë Winter), has started to worry about how forgetful he’s been of late. She becomes especially concerned when she learns that Milton has started telling people about an alien spacecraft that crash-landed in his backyard and is crushing his azaleas. She’s right to be worried about his forgetfulness, it’s a real problem and seems to be getting worse, but Milton’s right about the alien; there is a spacecraft in his backyard, and it is crushing his azaleas. When we meet Milton at the start of the film, he hasn’t accepted yet that his memory is failing. He’s worried enough about the possibility that, when he initially sees the spaceship in his backyard, he knows he could be imagining it. When it’s still there the next morning, though, he accepts that it’s real and is a problem in need of a solution. A problem that becomes all the more pressing a couple of days later when he looks outside and sees that an alien has now emerged from the ship and is sprawled out on the ground by his backdoor. There’s a not-too-subtle metaphor at work here. At a time when Milton is starting to feel like the sky is falling, the sky literally starts falling; at a time when Milton is finding the world more difficult to navigate and comprehend, something shows up to upend his whole understanding of the universe. The comparative virtue of the problem of having a spacecraft and alien land in his backyard, though, is that this ends up being something that feels less scary and more manageable to Milton than his own cognitive decline. Milton’s initial impulse to solve his problem is to treat it like the problems of the crosswalk and town slogan; he decides to just bring it up at the next town hall meeting. So, he goes to the next meeting, waits his turn to speak, and tells the town board about his visitor. They of course don’t believe him, but how they do that is a little heartbreaking. They don’t argue with him or mock him. They don’t say anything at all. They see an old man with declining faculties and are embarrassed on his behalf. They let Milton take his seat again, not knowing what to say, and not wanting whatever it is he needs at the moment to become their problem. Milton isn’t completely ignored by everyone in that room, though. Two older acquaintances of his who also come to these meetings to make their own recommendations to the board, are concerned about him and approach him afterwards. One is Joyce, played brilliantly by Jane Curtain, who initially chastises Milton because of his saying something kooky like that makes them all look bad. She will soften, though, when she eventually learns firsthand that he was telling the truth. The other is Sandy (Harriet Harris), who is more sympathetic from the start because she has lived through the cognitive decline of her late husband. She accompanies Milton back to his house to make sure that he’s ok, but winds up getting quite the surprise when she gets there. The three of them, Milton, Sandy, and Joyce, are each contending with their own challenges that come with aging, but for a time at least, they will have some company to face those things with, all while taking part in a grand adventure. Some of the trappings of this story may make it seem like it’s some dour affair, but it’s not. It’s occasionally poignant, but more than anything it’s a light and funny ride. How the film actually plays out is worth seeing for yourself. If you have seen E.T., then you can imagine some of the shape of the story for yourself, but Jules isn’t trying to be a ripoff. It doesn’t regurgitate anything from E.T. but it deliberately echoes that movie at times to be upfront about what it’s trying to say. As E.T. is an adventure story that is principally about what it’s like being a kid, Jules is an adventure story that’s principally built around the kids we all still are even when we’re growing old. 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.

The Case for Remaking Breakfast at Tiffany’s For a while now, I’ve had an ongoing text thread with friends of mine where we play the daily internet movie games, like Framed and Movie Grid . Framed in particular ends up being a fun game to play with others because, even when none of us can guess what the day’s movie is, it’s rarely ever anything so obscure that it doesn’t spark some kind of conversation for the group. An especially interesting one to me from a little while ago was Blake Edwards’ 1961 film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s . It’s a film with a peculiar kind of stature. It features one of the more iconic performances ever put on film in Audrey Hepburn’s turn as Holly Golightly, while also being a film that hardly ever seems to get screened or discussed anymore because it also includes one of the most egregious instances of yellow face you’ll ever see, with Mickey Rooney’s performance as Mr. Yunioshi. Though the film’s seemingly growing obscurity may be deserved, it is a shame because of how much I think the worthwhile parts of the film and its story still have to offer audiences. One of the more enduring images of the 60’s film is a 31-year-old Hepburn from this film: her hair up, wearing the definitive little black dress, bejeweled, and wielding her foot-long cigarette holder. I saw more than a few people dressed as her just this past Halloween. And yet, I don’t know what fraction of people who know that image could tell you anything about the film's plot. This iconic image is much better known as representing Audrey Hepburn than it is for her character, Holly Golightly. And yet, it’s hard to recommend to such people that they go back and watch this film, because Rooney’s performance isn’t just racist through a modern lens, it ought to have been seen as out of bounds even for the time. The performance also isn’t something that pops up just once that you can fast forward through but rather is a “running gag” that shows up repeatedly throughout the film. I’ve talked to people on both sides of the issue. Some folks have never made it past Rooney’s first appearance, and some folks have been watching the film for so long that they have gotten used to living with Rooney’s scenes as the cost of getting to enjoy the rest of one of their favorite films. I can see how Breakfast at Tiffany’s could be someone’s favorite film, too. Beyond Hepburn’s performance, she has spectacular chemistry with her co-star, George Peppard, as Paul Varjak, the aspiring novelist who has just moved in upstairs from Holly and reminds her of her brother Fred. Blake Edwards' direction sparkles at times, particularly in the party scenes in Holly’s apartment and during Holly and Paul’s day of new adventures in the city. Henry Mancini’s score is also an endless pleasure, deservedly winning Oscars for Best Score and Best Original Song, “Moon River.” All that said, because of Rooney’s performance, it’s still a film I can never really feel comfortable recommending; So, I’ve concluded that it’s time to remake Breakfast at Tiffany’s . Remakes are a dicey proposition, especially with films that are regarded as classics. It’s generally going to be ill-advised to try to remake some beloved favorite with an enduring legacy, like Singing in the Rain or It’s a Wonderful Life. But, as we recently saw with Spielberg and Kushner’s update of West Side Story, even an accepted classic can be reinvigorated in the right hands. I’m especially keen on the idea of a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s because I’ve always been more fond of Truman Capote’s original novella than the film it was based on anyway, and the story is one that, if told faithfully, may have even more salience now than when the film was made. The film and the novel manage to largely depict the same events while also telling fundamentally different stories. The film, with its happy ending, is something of a romantic comedy. With this framing, it makes sense that it was one of the touchstones when Nathan Rabin was first outlining the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Set in the mid-20th century, a young writer, notably unnamed in the novella, moves into a building in New York City, where he comes into contact with his vivacious and charismatic upstairs neighbor, Holly Golightly. The nature of Holly’s life is ambiguous in both the film and novella, but she supports herself on the gifts and money she gets from socializing with men, and from money she is paid to make weekly visits to a former crime boss in Sing Sing. While much of Holly’s life is shaped by men pursuing her, she is the one who interjects herself into her neighbor’s life one night when she comes down the fire escape to get away from a bothersome man she had brought home to her apartment that night. She’s somewhat taken with her neighbor because of how much he reminds her of her beloved brother Fred, and she even takes to calling him ‘Fred’ for most of the rest of the story. The handling of this connection between Holly’s neighbor and her brother marks what might be the biggest point of departure between the film and the novella. In both, it’s this connection that allows Holly to be more vulnerable with her neighbor than she is with others, particularly other men. But, while in the film, this connection is the seed of the romantic tension between them, in the novella, this is what allows Holly to give her neighbor access to her life in a way she wouldn’t for all the men that are sexually interested in her. In the novella, she calls her neighbor by her brother's name and singles him out as what she hopes is a safe harbor, something she is greatly in need of as she’s trying to make a way for herself in the world. The other most significant change between the novella and the film is never made explicit, but there is a very apparent difference in Holly’s age. Audrey Hepburn was 31 when she played Holly Golightly, while the character is only 19 in the novella. That difference has always underlined for me the degree to which men’s relationship towards the young Holly of the novella was more overtly predatory. We learn the same backstory for Holly in both the film and the novella. Her real name is Lulamae Barnes. She and her brother Fred were orphans who had run away from cruel foster parents. They end up surviving in part because when they are caught stealing from the farm of a local veterinarian, named Doc Golightly, he takes pity on them and brings them into his home. At the time, Lulamae was only 13. She would be 14 when Doc married her, making her the mother to his 4 children. Later, when talking about this with Fred, after Doc finds her in New York and tries to talk her into coming back home, she doesn’t look back with any regret about her time as a child bride but recognizes it wasn’t a real marriage. She did love Doc, and in the novella even sleeps with him again before being sent back to Texas. But she ran away because it wasn’t the life she wanted. This pattern would repeat in LA where she would be taken in by another older man, O.J. Berman, a talent agent who wanted to turn her into a movie star. It’s in running away from that life that she finds herself in NY. Holly Golightly who is only 19 wears these experiences differently than the 31-year-old Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s Holly is chic, sophisticated, and self-assured. This Holly is the one that fits the mold of Rabin’s original idea of the manic pixie dream girl. She confidently lets herself in through the window of her sensitive writer neighbor, she assuredly presents him with a different worldview than the one he’s known, and she coaxes him into new adventurous experiences, before ultimately settling down with him for a happily ever after. In the novella, not only do they not wind up together, but much of the point of the story is that, despite her numerous messy shortcomings, Holly remains fiercely, maybe pathologically, independent, despite the many efforts of the men in her life to put her into particular boxes or social cages. The very framing device of the novella is that Holly’s story is explicitly told through the male gaze. The character that Mickey Rooney plays in the film is actually important to the novella, because Holly’s upstairs neighbor, I.Y. Yunioshi, is a photographer who regularly travels internationally on assignment, and it’s a photograph that he takes that sparks the narrator to tell the story. Yunioshi, while traveling in Africa, is shown a small carved idol of a woman’s head that looks so much like his former neighbor, Miss Golightly, that he takes a picture of it, and sends it back to a barkeep in NY that shows it to our narrator. So, at this point, everything in the story we’re about to read has already happened, and Holly is long gone. In the novella, this isn’t the love story the film makes it out to be, but rather a story about a barkeep and unnamed writer hung up on the literal graven image of a woman they loved, who left them behind on her way to bigger and better things. For all the strengths of the original film, it’s themes and ideas like these that I would love to see a new film explore. 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.

Miklós László’s 1937 play, Parfumerie , has been adapted into films three separate times. First, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner  in 1940, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan; Next, In the Good Old Summertime in 1949, starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson; and, most recently, Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail  in 1998, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. As I’m writing this, You’ve Got Mail is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and The Shop Around the Corner has long been a seasonal classic as the whole story builds to a climax on Christmas Eve. There is one of these stories that I think works much better than the others, but we’ll get to that. A lot of the plot details shift between the various versions of the story, but the core is the same for all of them: there is a man and woman who have been anonymously corresponding with one another, and they are each starting to realize that they are falling in love with their pen pal. Unbeknownst to either of them, it turns out they already do know each other in real life, and they can’t stand one another. At one point the man discovers his pen pal is the very same woman who became his kind of nemesis, and he spends the remainder of the story trying to get her to feel as warm towards him in real life as she seems in her letters. There’s something classic about the structure of this story. It’s not a perfect analogy, but Beatrice and Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing  make this kind of transition from enemies to lovers with just a little bit of dishonest nudging from their friends. In their case, rather than finding out it’s their enemy they were unknowingly in love with, Beatrice and Benedict are each told that it’s their enemy that has secretly been in love with them, and this ‘discovery’ gradually softens them towards one another until genuine affection begins to develop.  Beatrice and Benedict’s relationship is founded on a deception, but importantly the deception doesn’t originate from either one of them. They are both sincere throughout, both in their initial antipathy towards one another, and in their later affection. The relationships in the adaptations of Parfumerie aren’t quite the same. In each case, after the man learns the true identity of his pen pal, he engages in some degree of deception to get her to think of him in real life the way she does in her letters, but the degree of deception differs in scale with each of the adaptations. The least regarded of these three films is In the Good Old Summertime.  Released only 9 years after The Shop Around the Corner , it does come across as a weaker version of that earlier film. One where some of the more transgressive edges to the original story have been sanded down, and where a few musical numbers have been shoehorned in. It’s still worth being discussed alongside the other two more beloved adaptations, as Judy Garland is truly a joy here in one of the rare instances of a happy film production for her. And, since this adaptation is so directly centered on her character, she may actually get to play the richest version of the female love interest out of the three films.  In this version, Garland plays Veronica Fisher, a young woman who comes to Otto Oberkugen’s music store looking for a job. The virtue of this setting is that, in addition to instruments, the store also sells sheet music that the staff is expected to be able to perform for customers upon request, providing us with multiple opportunities to hear Garland sing. Her antagonist in the shop is the lead salesman, Mr Andrew Delby Larkin (Van Johnson); and the source of their conflict is that, when Miss Fisher first came in looking for a job, Mr. Larkin didn’t think the store could afford another salesperson during the slow season. Miss Fisher was able to go over Mr. Larkin’s head to convince the store owner to hire her anyway. The mutual bitterness between them over this leads to that kind of “merry war” that initially existed between Beatrice and Benedict. The difference in this case was that, unbeknownst to either of them, Miss Fisher and Mr Larkin had each replied to the same ad with a dating service, and had already been anonymously and affectionately corresponding with one another for weeks before their first meeting.  In every version of the story, we see the same contrast. In this case, when they are face to face, Miss Fisher and Mr Larkin can’t help but needle one another at every opportunity. Having gotten off on the wrong foot to start, they now bring out the worst in each other. Yet, all the while, they’re still engaged in a correspondence that brings out the very best in each other. Within the safety of their letters, they’re able to be poetic and bold in a way that few of us are encouraged to in our daily lives. They don’t just love the person they’re writing to, but also the person they get to be when they’re writing to them. In every version we also see the story turn on the same key scene. In this case, Mr Larkin has agreed to meet his pen pal at a restaurant. She will know him by a flower in his lapel, and he will know her by the book of poetry she’ll have on her table with a flower in it. Larkin has a friend come with him to the restaurant for moral support and he nervously asks his friend to look through the restaurant window first. Larkin’s friend spies the woman, recognizing who it is right away. He tries to break the news to Larkin gently and in stages. Yes, the woman is pretty. Very pretty. “I would say she looks like…she has something of the coloring of Miss Fisher…” Larkin is bewildered why his friend would be bringing up Miss Fisher at a time like this, to which his friend replies, with the line that every adaptation retains from the play, “I can tell you right now, if you don’t like Miss Fisher, you won’t like this girl.”  It’s a funny kind of line because it happens to stay true even as their relationship changes throughout the story. At that moment, we know that Miss Fisher and ‘this girl’ are the same person, so it has the form of a logical truth. But also, from Larkin’s point of view, he thinks these are two different people. And his view of one will come to determine his view of the other. It turns out that as soon as he finds out that Miss Fisher, who he hates, and ‘this girl’, who he is ready to propose to, are the same person, all his feelings for ‘this girl’ briefly vanish, temporarily replaced by his feelings of antipathy towards Miss Fisher. His disdain for his coworker supersedes any image he had of his pen pal, and he leaves the restaurant without going inside.  Mr. Larkin’s curiosity gets the better of him, though, and he returns to the restaurant just a little later that same night. Pretending he just happened to wander in, he attempts to strike up what is clearly an unwelcome conversation with Miss Fisher. Mr. Larkin has started softening a bit towards Miss Fisher, his affection for his pen pal gradually overtaking his antipathy. Still, Miss Fisher has had no reason for her opinion of Mr Larkin to have changed, and she is especially anxious to see him go away because she’s still expecting to meet her pen pal any minute. This makes her unusually savage towards Mr. Larkin. So much so that, after making the start of a real effort to build some kind of rapport between them, he gives up and goes home without ever letting on to Miss Fisher that he is, in fact, the man she has been waiting for.  Larkin finds that he can’t just go back to hating Miss Fisher, though. If he loves his pen pal, he must also love Miss Fisher. He begins a project to try to win her over, but without telling her that he knows her true identity. He stops fighting back when she needles him at work, which in turn, does begin to thaw her towards him as well. It’s in this third act that In the Good Old Summertime  starts to fall apart because of how convoluted the story becomes. In this version, Larkin isn’t just deceiving Miss Fisher, but also his boss, Mr. Oberkugen, and a violinist friend of his, all to set up a farcical finale for the film. In the end, Mr. Larkin and Miss Fisher do wind up together, but Mr Larkin has proved to be a person so comfortable lying, that it can be a little unclear how happy an ending for Miss Fisher this should actually be.  In Nora Ephron’s adaptation of the story, she modernizes things for the then-new, computer age, by replacing the couple’s letters to one another with email. Ephron also scales up the characters from retail clerks by making them rival bookstore owners, instead. Meg Ryan plays Kathleen Kelly, the second-generation owner of a famed Children’s bookstore in NYC, The Shop Around the Corner. Tom Hanks plays Joe Fox, the third-generation owner, along with his father and grandfather, of the bookstore chain, Fox Books - a stand-in of the real-life chain, Barnes & Noble. At the time, this was the third romantic comedy pairing of Hanks and Ryan, following Joe Versus the Volcano and Sleepless in Seattle , and probably the film that cemented their place in the romantic comedy hall of fame. Their chemistry here is unreal, which is important because it helps paper over a number of the more peculiar elements of the story.  Notably, unlike the other adaptations, Joe and Kathleen both have partners they’re living with when they stumble into their online relationship. At the outset of the film, they’re each already to the point in their correspondence of waiting for their partner to leave for the day to check their email in private. Before any of the events of the film unfold, both of our romantic leads are sneaking about because they each know what they are doing is something out of bounds for their current relationship. Both Joe and Kathleen will eventually break up amicably - weirdly amicably - with their partners before their relationship with one another really takes off, but it does change the dynamic of the story that they’re not two lonely hearts looking for connection, but rather just two people in largely happy relationships that want something different and new.  It’s also hard to overstate how big an effect Ephron’s change to the characters’ social status has on the story. In the older adaptations, part of the antipathy between the two leads is how deeply they both need their jobs, while it turns out there are hardly any stakes at all to the David and Goliath battle between Joe and Kathleen. Joe and Fox Books are in no danger from The Shop Around the Corner, and they barely benefit in any measurable way when the smaller store closes. And Kathleen it turns out has her pick of fulfilling jobs when the store closes. It’s genuinely impressive how elegantly Ephron can keep the audience from hating Joe for putting Kathleen’s small family-owned store out of business, and it’s equally impressive how thoroughly Ephron is able to get the audience to forgive Joe his even more prolonged and deliberate deception of Kathleen in the final act of the film. Joe orchestrates numerous, seemingly happenstance, encounters with Kathleen, at least five quasi-platonic dates, in which he coaches her on her relationship with the pen pal he’s gotten her to admit to having. At the same time, he’s similarly masterminding things in his role as that pen pal, organizing their final in-person meetup. If you really unpack what Joe is doing, it does start to seem a little icky, but Hanks is just so charming that it’s hard not to forgive him everything if it gets us the happy ending we want. You can’t help but feel happy to see Joe and Lathleen wind up together, even if it’s not entirely clear if Joe is all that decent a guy. All this said, I think the best version of this story is the first one, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner. If this film has any shortcomings, it’s that Margaret Sullivan can’t really compete with Meg Ryan or Judy Garland as the female lead. She’s perfectly fine as Klara Novak, but she’s written a little one note, while Jimmy Stewart gets a much wider variety of notes to play as Alfred Kralik. As much as You’ve Got Mail works because of Tom Hanks’s charm, Jimmy Stewart carries this film with ease, having none of the same character or plot shortcomings to overcome.  In The Shop Around the Corner , Jimmy Stewart is the lead salesman at a leather goods shop in Budapest owned by Mr. Matuschek. Margaret Sullivan’s Miss Novak manages to get herself hired as a salesperson by Mr. Matuschek over the objection of Mr. Karlic. Otherwise, their story unfolds the same as the other versions. The two of them resent each other and quarrel at work, all while unknowingly writing each other the most lovely letters. They have the same encounter at the restaurant, where the pen pals are about to meet for the first time, but Mr. Kralik realizes it’s Miss Novak he’s meeting before she sees him. Here though, Stewart seems to manage something that neither Hanks nor Johnson can. He goes in like the others, also pretending he just wandered in, but Stewart’s Mr. Kralik feels like he’s trying to build up to telling Miss Novak who he really is, but keeps being stopped by her understandable irritation towards him for continuing to interrupt her date.  This is what this version of the story does better than all the rest, even if it comes a bit at the expense of Miss Novak as a character. Mr. Kralik isn’t exactly straightforward with Miss Novak, but when he is dishonest, it is mostly for her benefit. Where the men in the other films come off as more overtly manipulative, Stewart’s Mr. Kralik is usually just trying to spare Miss Novak’s feelings. He does write her one final letter to apologize for standing her up and to new plans to meet up on the next night for Christmas Eve. In that letter, he doesn’t admit who he is or confess to knowing who she is, but I think that can be forgiven since that’s what he intends to do as soon as they are alone together the next evening.  This is the key difference for me from the other stories and the reason why this version works better than the others. Mr. Kralik’s and Miss Novak’s eventual relationship feels more satisfying and credible because Mr. Kralik is never trying to manipulatively deceive Miss Novak. The only thing he is trying to orchestrate in the end is a private moment to tell her who he is and how he really feels about her. In this sense, Mr. Kralik and Miss Novak feel the most like Beatrice and Benedict because their relationship doesn’t feel defined by deception, but rather confession. Like the letters they wrote to one another, you can believe that theirs is a relationship that will bring out the best versions of one another, which doesn’t feel as true of the other adaptations. Theirs is the relationship that feels the most like the one I want for myself.  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.

2023 was an interesting film year. The studios’ needless prolonging of the guild strikes very likely put a dent in how this list turned out. Among the notable omissions, the release of Poor Things got pushed back from September, to what turned out to be the day before my son was born, so I haven’t caught it yet. And my presumptive favorite film of this year,  Dune: Part 2, got pushed to 2024.  Despite that, I still had plenty to pick from for my list this year. One thing that I have found, is that I feel a little out of step with a lot of the top ten lists I’ve read here at year’s end. I think that might be because, in a year with a number of huge capital ‘F’ Films, it was the much smaller and more intimate stories that connected for me. I’m not opposed to a good spectacle, but out of my list of 11, I realize that all but three of them would probably work just about as well on stage as they do on film.  Because of the more personal feel of this year's list, I’ve opted to structure it this time around as a mix tape . I have paired each film with a song that I think draws out something worth highlighting in the film. So, read and listen along as we take a look back at the year that was.  Just outside the list (20-12): 20. Little Richard: I am Everything  19. Eileen  18. Showing Up  17. The Monkey King  16. Past Lives  15. The Adults 14. The Civil Dead 13. Sisu   12. Reality Honorable Mention (11): The Starling Girl Palehound - Independence Day Laurel Parmet’s film, The Starling Girl , is about a 17-year-old girl who is gradually outgrowing the ultra-conservative Christian community she was raised in. She’s a young girl on a track for the rest of her life, about to start the chaperoned courting of the young man her parents have chosen for her to marry, but she is starting to feel urges that nothing in her upbringing has given her the tools she needs to cope with, while also discovering that she’s not the only person in her life feeling so confined.  Eliza Scanlen, who I’ve loved since first seeing her in 2019’s Babyteeth , plays Jem. What she captures so perfectly is the sense in which Jem isn’t initially at all unhappy in her little life. She loves her faith, her church, her family, her community, and her faith-based dance troupe. She just runs into a wall when she wants just the littlest bit more than the narrow path laid out for her, and her unwillingness to stay in her assigned box winds up destabilizing her family and community. I would especially recommend this if you liked 2019’s Yes, God, Yes. 10. Flora and Son The Dropkick Murphys - My Eyes Are Gonna Shine I’ve had some complicated feelings about Flora and Son  since I first saw it. I went into it with certain expectations because I’m such a fan of John Carney’s other films, Sing Street  and Once, but it was an adjustment to realize that this film is trying to capture something a little bit different than those films were. Once and Sing Street  are both structured more like musicals, with a whole bunch of great polished songs sprinkled throughout, while Flora and Son is more about that first impulse to express yourself through music and the path to writing your first song. Its songs, like its characters, feel pretty unfinished until the film’s finale. This doesn’t make for as much of a fist-pumping experience as Carney's other films, in terms of scratching that musical itch, but this approach works much better for the particular story this film is trying to tell. The relationship between Flora and her son is also one I’ve never quite seen before. Flora is initially a hard-partying screw-up of a single mom, with a tense relationship with a teenage son she feels she barely knows anymore, and sometimes she resents having had in the first place. Her son, Max, has behavioral issues, repeatedly getting into trouble with the police for petty theft. In theory, they love each other if they could only get outside the unhappiness in their individual lives. Flora makes an effort to try and find Max a hobby that will keep him out of trouble by giving him a guitar she found in the trash and had refurbished. The gesture doesn’t work, but having the guitar in her house unlocks something in herself that will ultimately go a long way to saving them both.  9. May December khai dreams - Panic Attack May December  is aware of how salacious and exploitative its story is. The names and places are changed, but it’s aware that any audience for this film very likely knows going in that it’s taking its inspiration from the story of Mary Kay Letourneau - the teacher who "had an affair” with her 12-year-old student and later married him after completing the prison sentence she received for their relationship. The film elegantly manages to tell that story in a way that also interrogates the impulse to want to tell and watch such a story in the first place.    The format of every poster I’ve seen for this film features the faces of Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. Moore plays Gracie, the stand-in for Letourneau, and Portman plays Elizabeth, an actress about to portray Gracie in a film about the scandal. Both are truly spectacular in their roles, but what the promotion and film are coy about is the degree to which this becomes the rightful story of Joe (Charles Melton), the child in that scandal, who is now married, in his 40s, and grappling with having three adult children with his abuser, who each got to have the childhood that he never did.   8. Biosphere Juliet Ivy - were all eating each other Biosphere perfectly captures the spirit of what I’m always hoping to experience when I sit down to watch something. Surprising throughout, there is no single tone or genre it’s trying to fit into. It defies categorization or synopsis in the best possible way. The gist of the story is that two men find themselves living in a (hopefully) self-sustaining biosphere after an event that seems a lot like the end of the world. What exactly that disastrous event was is never made explicit, but it wasn’t just man-made, it was specifically caused by one of the two men in this habitat.  One of those men is the former president of the United States, Billy, played by Mark Duplass, and the other is his much smarter advisor and the builder of the biosphere, Ray, played by Sterling K. Brown. Sometimes playful, and sometimes discomfiting, the film ends up being a delightfully strange look at gender, masculinity, race, and mortality. It would be an understatement to say that I was not at all prepared for where this story goes, and deeply surprised by how gripped I was by where it winds up.   7. The Artifice Girl Islands - Headlines This is a challenging film to talk about in a way that doesn’t spoil it. The story is told as three interconnected one-act plays, spaced out over several years, at an organization that is using the latest technologies to fight child pornography and child sex trafficking. What the film is interested in, mostly, is the toll that kind of work can take on those doing it, and the corners we can talk ourselves into cutting in the pursuit of saving children. Tatum Matthews absolutely shines as Cherry, the young girl at the heart of the story.  6. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Cheekface - Largest Muscle This is the representative of big ‘dumb’ fun and spectacle on my list, but with a script as smart and sharp as anything else I saw this year. Written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes the world of Dungeons and Dragons and manages to deliver a satisfying fantasy action film that fully captures the fun of sitting around a table rolling dice with friends.  Something of this underlying concept of this story lends it a meta quality for me that helps protect it from feeling too formulaic. Yes, It is a mission-oriented story where a group of ‘heroes’ have to come together to do a thing, ultimately defeating a big bad villain, saving the day, and learning something about themselves along the way. It’s so straightforward in some ways that you could teach story structure from this script. And yet, because I’m spending the whole run time thinking of it like a gaming session, I have an easier time embracing the formula. If they wanted to make one of these movies every other year, I would be the first person in line for it. 5. Nimona Bleachers - Modern Girl Gay knight befriends thousand-year-old preteen shapeshifter as they team up to try to clear his name in this retro-futuristic tale.  There is so much to love about this. Nimona may be my favorite character in anything for ages. She reminds me of Monster Girl from Invincible - a mix of gruff punk maniacal destruction (often) in the package of a young girl who just wants to be accepted.  There are some bits in the story where the plot machinery gets a little strained, and some of the characters’ motivations get muddy, but overall this is fun and lively from beginning to end. 4. The Killer Half Moon Run - You Can Let Go I expect to write something longer on this film in the near future. My academic specialty is the philosophy and moral psychology of empathy, so my ears pricked up more than a little when I heard the titular killer espouse the ethos: “Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability.” The notion is obviously wrongheaded and the film plays with that throughout the story, but I’m most fascinated by the higher-order sense in which the film plays with the audience’s empathy.  Films are inherently empathy machines, taking advantage of the reflexive human impulse to empathize with anyone reasonably similar to ourselves. So much so that we’re enthralled by this story about an assassin on a revenge mission, rooting for and identifying with him on his investigative murder spree, while he is at no point the hero of this story. He doesn’t even fit a forgiving definition of an antihero. He’s just a bad guy doing bad things, due to circumstances that are entirely his own fault. He has the means to opt out of what he’s doing at any point, and, given his means, the ending of his story would be identical to what it ends up being even if he had skipped all of the vengeful actions he takes. And yet, The Killer works. I shouldn’t love it, but I do. David Fincher pulls off a narrative magic trick here and I’m going to spend a long time trying to puzzle out just how he pulls it off. 3. Sanctuary Alice Merton - Waste My Life What I find I love most in a film is being surprised by its story. I often find myself checking out of films when I can feel the story machinery at work, particularly when I clock that something is being overtly introduced just so that it can be paid off in a predictable way later in the story. A desire to surprise an audience can be carried too far, though. If you make a story overly twisty just for its own sake, what you’re making can start to feel like it’s just random, not giving the audience anything to hang onto. Sanctuary may be the best film I’ve ever seen at navigating this. This is a script where, almost sentence to sentence, I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Moreover, upon reflection, and even on rewatch, all the twists and turns feel like they are a part of one coherent story that builds to a killer final moment.  As much as I love the script, I can also imagine a garbage 90s erotic thriller version of this film if you didn’t have two leads as dynamite as Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott. Sharing every scene, Abbott and Qualley perfectly trade the spotlight back and forth as each moment needs, while navigating an ever-shifting power dynamic, and playing the multiple layers of characters who are behaving performatively for one another in the reality of the story. 2. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial Young Fathers - Sink or Swim It’s interesting watching The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial having seen A Few Good Men as many times as I have. The story behind A Few Good Men  is that Aaron Sorkin got the idea for that story from his sister, who was a Navy Judge Advocate General. But the similarities between the two movies are so striking that it gets hard to believe that Sorkin wasn’t cribbing deeply, either from the 1953 play or the original 1954 film. That may be unfair, as two military courtroom dramas can only be so different, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial feels like a very similar story but with the temperaments of the enlisted men and their commanding officer being flipped.   This was William Friedkin’s final film before passing and it’s not overtly the work of a master filmmaker. Filmed in only 14 days and set in just two rooms and a hallway, it can feel a bit like you’re watching a made-for-TV movie, but there is a simple elegance that makes the whole film feel perfectly executed. This goes down so easily that I suspect it will be the film from this year that I revisit the most.  Beyond that though, I also find it a more satisfying film than A Few Good Men. There is a musicality to Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue that I’m a sucker for, but what his stories often lack is any kind of ambiguity. By his own proud admission, what Sorkin generally writes are melodramas with clear and explicit takeaways for the audience. Conversely, I’ve watched The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial four times already and I’m still chewing over the underlying tension at the heart of the case. 1. Linoleum Let’s Eat Grandma - From the Morning Bonus Track: Watching the Credits - The Beths My number one is the perfect example of why this is a list of my favorite films rather than what I think the objectively best films of the year are. I wrote about Linoleum   back in May, and it’s spent most of this year as the film that was so perfectly tailored to me that nothing ever came close to moving it from my top spot. In that time, I haven’t figured out a way to say all the things I would like to about this film without spoiling it, but I knew back when I was writing that initial review that there was going to be a way for me to have it both ways. So, I leave it to the reader to choose their own adventure. If you want to avoid spoilers, I direct you to the link above; if you’ve seen the film, or want to know everything about a film before checking it out, read on.  Linoleum doesn’t let on to this for a while, but the story is actually a collage of one person’s life, that they are experiencing through a prism of dementia in their final days. The main character we’re following in the story is Cameron (Jim Gaffigan), the Bill Nye-esque host of a little-watched kids science show called, Above and Beyond . He used to host the show with his wife, Erin (Rhea Seehorn), but she left the show, and, though they still live together, she is in the process of getting a divorce from him. They live with their two children, Nora (Katelyn Nacon) and Sam (who is played by six different actors, including two of Gaffigan’s actual kids). Nora is a senior in high school who is still working out who she is and wants to be. She’s still figuring things out, but happily so. Also in Cameron’s life is his father, Mac, a former NASA engineer, who is living in a nursing home while contending with the effects of worsening dementia. Cameron enjoys his show, but the dream he still hangs on to is going to work for NASA to build, and maybe even fly, the things he only gets to talk about on his show. When we meet Cameron, he’s about to have his show taken away from him, with him being replaced by the kind of person he always thought he wanted to be, a retired astronaut, named Kent Armstrong (also played by Gaffigan). Kent moves into a house next door to Cameron with his teenage son, Marc (Gabriel Rush), who winds up being in the same grade as Nora.  Now, having given all of these character introductions, Cameron, Mac, and Marc are actually all the same person. The older man, Mac, looks back at the fragmented details of his life with Marc as his teenage self, and Cameron as his middle-aged self. Erin and Nora are also the same person, both the young girl he met as a teenager and the woman she grew up into that he married. Their son Sam has no dialogue in the film and is played by multiple actors because he’s actually the stillborn child they lost. In the story we’re watching, Cameron and Erin are getting divorced, but that may just be how Mac is processing his wife’s seeming absence in his life because of his worsening dementia; Erin (Elisabeth Henry) is actually there at the hospital bedside with him, helping him through what appear to be his final days.  The culmination of the film is Cameron, with help from Marc and Erin, building a rocket in his backyard from the crash-landed debris of a previous NASA mission. While older Erin is helping load Mac into an ambulance, younger Erin is helping Cameron get into the capsule of his rocket to blast into the unknown.  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.

Mike Burdge is joined by Scotty Arnold on a glorious day to chat about George A Romero's unsung 1981 batshit bananas film, Knightriders . Topics of discussion include artistic passion vs real world business, bikes vs horsies, Ed Harris being a madman and the reveal of a brand new podcast coming to this very channel. Listen on....

Japan has one of the world’s oldest populations, along with one of the world’s lowest birth rates. In one sense, this can be viewed as a tremendous societal accomplishment. Thanks to advances in medical science, along with widely adopted healthy lifestyle habits, people in Japan are leading longer and more productive lives than anywhere else in the world. Similarly, education and advances in family planning have allowed people much greater control over the kinds of lives they want to lead. An obvious downside though is that such a situation will eventually lead to there being decreasingly fewer young people to take care of an ever-expanding elderly population.   Chie Hayakawa’s film, Plan 75 , posits a near-future Japan with a novel solution to this problem: Plan 75 is legislation that permits the elderly to voluntarily terminate their life after they reach the age of 75. That is to say, not permission to terminate their life because of some existing condition or illness, but just a general allowance to do so for anyone 75 or older. The public framing around the legislation is that, by choosing to participate in the program, the elderly can gain some measure of control over how their lives will end, while also performing a public service to their country. Additionally, to further incentivize people to make this cost-saving choice, the government will give money to anyone who agrees to participate in the program. When I was younger, I remember the ethics around euthanasia seeming quite a bit more contentious than it does nowadays. Some form of passive euthanasia is legal in every state, whether it’s allowance for a patient to proactively decline to be resuscitated should they experience a future cardiac or respiratory event, or allowing someone to decide to decline life support for a loved one or to remove them from life support. We broadly accept that there is no moral obligation to force people to remain alive for as long as science allows. In this sense, there has long been established at least this minimum right to die. In recent years, that right has expanded to allow some versions of voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide in a number of places around the world - though generally, this is just in cases where someone has some deteriorating health condition that is expected to eventually erode their quality of life to an intolerable point. In all of these cases, the common thread is that, however precious one’s life might be, it’s sometimes acceptable to deliberately end it. What makes Plan 75 so interesting to me is how it explores the limits and implications of that idea.  The film follows five people. Our main character is a 78-year-old widow named Michi Kakutani (Baishô Chieko). From all outward appearances, Michi is leading a very active and fulfilling life for her age. She lives alone in her own apartment and has no children, but she does have a circle of friends she sees regularly and a job cleaning hotel rooms that she enjoys. At her age. Michi could go on government assistance if she needed to, but she’s happy to work. She’s the exact person that Plan 75 is not intended for. She can support herself without assistance and she has no serious health issues that require expensive or time-consuming care. Or, at least that’s how things look for her until her circumstances start to change.  Some of the friends in Michi’s social circle have started deciding to opt for Plan 75. The public relations around the Plan 75 legislation presents it as a public service that the elderly can offer to the youth of their country, and for some of her friends that’s motivation enough. It also helps that anyone opting into the program can take the compensation they receive for participating and use it for their family, or to give themselves a lavish send-off. For some, the personal calculus is, “If I’m going to die anyway, why not get something out of it?”  For Michi, it’s only when she loses her job that she begins to consider Plan 75 as an option. A fellow elderly employee at her job collapses during their shift, and the hotel decides to eliminate all of their elderly workers rather than risk the potential bad press they might get if one of their elderly workers dies while on the job. Michi is left scrambling for work as there aren’t many job opportunities for a 78-year-old woman. She eventually finds something, but it’s directing nighttime highway traffic. It’s work, but it’s cold and lonely work. Three of the other characters that we follow are involved with the private business that has popped up to handle the implementation of Plan 75. The unfortunately perverse incentive structure created by this legislation has created companies whose sole purpose is to convince elderly people to end their lives while carrying out those terminations in the most cost-effective way possible. We even overhear a news broadcast at one point discussing the $10 billion in revenue the Plan 75 legislation has generated for the economy and how discussions have begun to expand the program to those 65 and older.  Hiromu (Isomura Hayata) is a young man who works as a salesman for one of the Plan 75 companies. We mostly see him manning an outdoor information table where it’s his job to recruit people to die. Yôko (Kawai Yûmi) is a young woman who works as a contact for people after they sign up for Plan 75, someone to be there for people throughout the process, but she’s also charged with making sure people don’t change their minds and back out of the program. Finally, there’s Maria (Sutefanî Arian), a single mom who had been working as a nurse until she learned how much more money she could make taking care of the bodies and personal effects of people after they’ve died at one of the private Plan 75 facilities. None of these three people are especially happy doing their jobs, but to this point, the money has been just good enough to keep them from walking away.  The fifth character we follow is Hiromu’s elderly estranged uncle, Yukio. We’re introduced to him when he shows up at Hiromu’s table looking to volunteer for Plan 75. Hiromu hasn’t seen his uncle in twenty years and today is Yukio’s 75th birthday. Because of how closely related they are, Hiromu’s company won’t allow him to handle his uncle’s case, so he passes his uncle off to someone else at the company. But, having reconnected with his uncle in this way, Hiromu decides to keep his uncle company during his final days.  In some ways, Yukio may quietly be the most important figure in this story. With everyone else, the film is mainly interested in exploring how corrosive the intersection of elder care and capitalism can be, and how dehumanizing our view of the elderly can become as they become less ‘productive’ to society. Yukio is something of a counterpoint to all that. He has legitimately reached the end of a long life that he’s ready to be over. The film doesn’t make it easy on the audience by giving him some terminal illness or other obstacle to an otherwise happy life; he’s simply old, tired, and ready to be done.  How all of these threads play out is worth seeing for yourself. Plan 75  is a deeply thoughtful film about our relationship to aging and mortality, both in our own lives and the lives of the people we’re close to. It’s a timely story because these demographic issues are living concerns for every Western society, but it’s also a timeless story in that, on a personal level, these are ideas we all will have to navigate over and over again in all of our relationships.  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.

The new Netflix film, Orion and the Dark, is an animated adaptation of the 2014 children’s book of the same name, by writer and illustrator Emma Yarlett. In the book, Orion is a young boy who is defined by his many fears: dogs, wasps, the ocean, girls, space, grandma, etc. But, what he’s more frightened of than anything else is the dark. We meet him on the night when that finally changes for him.  In the book, on the night in question, Orion is in bed, too scared to sleep. He ultimately grows so frustrated with his own fears that he yells out to the darkness, telling it to just go away. And, to Orion’s surprise, the darkness hears him. Orion watches as the night and shadows take shape in his room to talk to him about his request.  If you’ve ever read any children’s book, you can probably work out how the rest of the story unfolds. This personification of darkness convinces Orion to accompany it for an evening to explore the dark places in his family’s home, along with those outside his window, to see how these places don’t need to feel as scary as they seem. This exposure therapy works, and by the next morning, Orion is so attached to Dark that he’s now sorry to see it go. And to this Dark tells Orion not to worry because, wherever he might go, it will never be far away from him. Very touching.  The book is a perfect little gem of a story. It’s not trying to do too much. It’s 25 pages of pictures that can be knocked out in 5 minutes at bedtime while delivering an easily digested message for kids about facing your fears. What it isn’t, though, is an obvious candidate for a feature-length film adaptation, particularly not one penned by Oscar-winning screenwriter and experimental filmmaker, Charlie Kaufman.  Charlie Kaufman is no stranger to adaptation, of course. Of his nine screenplays that have been turned into films, Orion and the Dark  is the fourth to be adapted from someone else’s book. What all of these adaptations share with Kaufman’s original stories is a generally bleak view of the human condition, typically conveyed through the perspective of some lonely creative who shares many of the same fears and flaws that Kaufman sees in himself. Even when adapting someone else’s work, Kaufman always finds an approach that allows him to fit that story into his own strange voice.  Orion and the Dark  is so tonally out of step with the rest of Kaufman’s work, though, that it feels like a wild departure. But, in terms of actual content, this children’s film overlaps with the rest of his projects more than you might think. Orion shares many of the hallmarks of a typical Kaufman protagonist; he’s smart and terrified of the world, painfully aware of how close at hand the life he wishes he was living would be were he not so incapacitated by his own fears. The key difference in this story, though, is that Orion is still young enough for his life to turn out differently.  Kaufman makes two big changes to the book to expand the story into something that could be stretched to feature length. The first big difference is that he radically expands the world that Dark shows to Orion. They still spend the night together, but Kaufman’s cast of nighttime entities expands to include other personifications like Insomnia, Unexplained Noises, Sleep, Quiet, and Sweet Dreams. All of these are friends with Dark, and become friends with Orion, too. Kaufman also creates a character that works as a foil to the darkness, Light. Light isn’t exactly an adversary for Dark, but rather just that better-liked part of the natural order that works in opposition to darkness. A dynamic Dark is aware of and self-conscious about. In Charlie Kaufman’s imagination, even the constituent elements of the universe have their own neurosis to work through.  The other big change Kaufman makes is the structure of how the story is being told. While he largely follows the children’s book in how he initially sets up the plot, he makes a big departure right when Orion first agrees to accompany Dark for the night. Just as they are about to head out on their predictable nighttime adventure, the story breaks for a moment, and we learn that everything we’re experiencing is actually a story that an adult Orion is telling to his daughter, Hypatia, as she navigates her own fear of the dark. This little reveal was the moment when I fully got on board with what Kaufman was doing with this story. Similar to how this same conceit functions in The Princess Bride , this move creates a meta-commentary on storytelling within the story being told. In The Princess Bride , what’s being drawn out has more to do with that interactive element of telling and being told a story. We watch the grandfather tweak and massage the story based on the reactions of his audience of one: A little less kissing, a little more sword fighting, and maybe we’ll skip that bit about the shrieking eels this time. We’re seeing that, rather than a story being something fixed and rigid, it’s ideally a live experience shared between the teller and the audience.  Kaufman is doing this, too, but he’s also using this conceit to say something about how we use stories to pass important knowledge between generations over time. Fear of the dark and the unknown are primal fears that have been with people for as long as there have been people. (In the unexpected words of Werner Herzog, for almost as long as there have been light-sensitive proteins.) Orion begins to tell his daughter this fanciful tale about how he overcame his fear of the dark, and then one day she’ll tell her version of that story to her child, with each new generation adding what they’ve learned from their own unique experience along the way.  Without going into details, the ending of Orion and the Dark is hopeful, happy, tidy, and family-friendly. Not at all Charlie Kaufman’s usual, but appropriate here because of the kind of story being told. Kaufman is approaching the same issues he normally does - human fears in a foreboding natural world - but from the opposite direction, from the standpoint of the child who still has their life ahead of them. This makes Orion and the Dark  less of a departure for Kaufman, than an entry point for his ideas tailored for younger viewers. Exactly the kind of film I wish I had when I was a kid.  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.

While watching Adam Sandler’s new Netflix movie, Spaceman , I was repeatedly struck by something oddly familiar about the story. The film is based on Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 book, Spaceman of Bohemia. Sandler plays Jakub Prochazka, a Czech astronaut on a solo mission to investigate an astronomical anomaly that unexpectedly appeared in our solar system four years ago. When Jakub’s mission begins, all we know about the anomaly - now called Chopra - is that it is a cloud made of some kind of space dust created by a passing comet past the orbit of Jupiter.  When we meet Jakub, he’s six months into his mission and just days away from reaching the anomaly. His only substantive tether to Earth is his principal handler within the Space Agency, Peter (Kunal Nayyar). Jakub does have a direct line of communication set up at home with his pregnant wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), but he hasn’t been able to reach her for some time. Unbeknownst to Jakub, this is because the Space Agency has intercepted a message from Lenka telling Jakub that she’s leaving him.  The film is explicitly about loneliness, which is not unusual for a story about a singular figure traveling alone in space; but it’s a particular kind of loneliness at play here. Jakub’s feelings of estrangement are of his own making. Even if he isn’t aware that his wife has already left him, he is beginning to realize what prioritizing his ambitions over his wife’s needs (and their nascent family) has cost him. He is in the midst of all he ever thought he wanted - he’s a cosmonaut in space, on the verge of a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the universe - but he feels further away than ever from what might actually make him happy.  The film is an odd mix -  the tone, themes, and performances are all serious and grounded, but many of the story’s elements are heightened or fantastical. The core of the story is this relationship drama between two people who aren’t talking to one another, but the film’s setting is this odd alternate universe where the Czech Republic has its own space program, and its nearest rival in this historic mission is the equally unlikely South Korean space program. There are numerous elements like these throughout the film that signal to the audience that, while the story is meant to be emotionally grounded, some of the story’s details are going to get a little far out there. So, it isn’t as much of a surprise as you might expect it to be when a giant telepathic spider (voiced by Paul Dano) appears on Jakub’s ship just as its making its final approach to Chopra.  Here, despite the film’s hard sci-fi aesthetics, we realize we’re dealing with a much more abstract story. We learn that this spider-like creature was drawn to Jakub and his vessel, having been vaguely aware of humans as a thing, but curious to see one up close. The spider, which Jakub will come to name Hanuš, takes a specific interest in Jakub and his loneliness. And, through some combination of its telepathic abilities along with the amplification of that ability by its proximity to the Chopra cloud, Hanuš can show Jakub memories of his time with Lenka in order to try and see where their relationship went wrong. It’s when Hanuš starts to explain to Jakub what the Chopra cloud is that I began to feel like I had seen a version of this story before. Hanuš describes Chopra as a ribbon of particles left over from the beginning of the universe, a temporal anomaly traveling through space, where past, present, and future intermingle. This would also be a fair description of the Nexus from 1994’s Star Trek: Generations.  Now, that by itself would just be an interesting coincidence, but as Jakub’s story unfolds I realize that Star Trek: Generations is also principally about two people, specifically two men, grappling with late-in-life realizations that their career-minded drive to explore the universe cost them the chance of having a stable family life back on Earth.  Star Trek: Generations  was the first Star Trek film to feature the characters from the ‘90s series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. There was some concern at the time that there wouldn’t be an audience for such a film, so it was structured as a crossover event with the cast from the original Star Trek, who had already made six films of their own at this point. The combined cast would be too large to give everyone their own storyline, so the decision was made to focus on just the two captains, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart).  In their respective time periods, both Kirk and Picard find themselves on missions that bring them in contact with The Nexus. In the case of Captain Kirk, he’s merely a visiting dignitary from Starfleet Command present for the launch of a new starship, the U.S.S. Enterprise-B, when it gets unexpectedly summoned to rescue a pair of ships that had become trapped by the energy ribbon.  When we meet Kirk, he has come back out of retirement because he couldn’t handle civilian life on Earth. We’ll also learn that his return to Starfleet was the breaking point in a relationship with  Antonia, a woman he was seeing on Earth. To hammer the theme home, while Kirk is first touring the Enterprise-B, he’ll meet Demora Sulu, the daughter of one of the original series characters. Kirk will even say out loud, “When did Sulu find time to have a family?” To which he is pointedly reminded of having said himself, when something is important to you, you make the time. It won’t be too long after this exchange that, during the rescue mission, an explosion will pull Kirk out of the ship and, we will later learn, into the Nexus.  We meet Picard, some 80 years later, having just learned that his only remaining living relatives - his brother Robert, and his young nephew René - both died in a fire back on Earth. He’ll eventually confide to a crewmate that part of his solace in never having had a family was knowing that at least the family would live on through his nephew. With that loss, he finds himself mourning, not only his brother and his nephew but also the family he never made for himself.  How Picard winds up in the Nexus is kind of needlessly complicated to get into, since it’s really just a mechanism to get him and Kirk into the same story, but one of the people who was rescued by the Enterprise-B all those years ago, an El-Aurian named Soran (Malcolm McDowell), was actually pulled out of the Nexus, and has been working to get back there ever since, no matter the cost. Soran’s evil plan works, an entire solar system is destroyed, but Picard is also pulled into the Nexus.  Now, we’re pretty far afield from Spaceman at this point, but I assure you this is building to a point about how these two films end, and what I believe they’re trying to say about narratives around men and families. What we’re meant to take the Nexus to be is some kind of space-time anomaly that can create for anyone held within it the exact reality they always wanted. That is the endless experience of all of your dreams coming true, which is apparently so seductive that we accept that Soran would be willing to destroy millions of lives in order to get back to it.  Not so for our two captains, though. Picard and Kirk each find themselves in their idea of Heaven - Picard in a Victorian house about to have Christmas dinner with his wife and children, and Kirk at his ranch making breakfast in bed for Antonia. Just as in life, neither of them has trouble walking away from this dream, though. Using the temporal powers of the Nexus, Picard finds Kirk, and they both return to the moment when they can stop Soran. They’re both making the right call, but it’s again rejecting all of the experiences of family life for another space adventure as if part of the moral of the story is that this is what heroic men are expected to do.  It’s with this idea in mind that we come back to Jakub and Hanuš. Hanuš shows Jakub where he went wrong in his relationship with Lenka. It wasn’t just that he left his pregnant wife back on Earth while he went off to space for a year. Hanuš shows Jakub all the ways he hadn’t been present for  Lenka during his career, including, when she miscarried a previous pregnancy. Jakub has this breakthrough. He manages to get Peter to bring a phone to Lenka so she can at least hear him say that he’s realized just how he’s let her down. Jakub seems like he’s recommitted to putting Lenka first from now on if she’ll have him. And yet, we find he’s almost immediately willing to throw it away for one more space adventure.  Having shown Jakub all these things, we learn that Hanuš is dying. Part of why he stumbled across Jakub in the first place was he was on his way to Chopra to die. Hanuš leaves the ship so he can spend his last moment among the particles from the origin of the universe. And Jakub puts on his spacesuit and follows him into the cloud. Having just committed himself to his family, he willingly consigns himself to what should be certain doom by leaving his spaceship to follow the giant telepathic space spider he’s just met into an as-yet unstudied energy cloud. And to do what, exactly? To give Hanuš some un-asked-for company for a few more minutes before they both die? Jakub and Hanuš share their moment, but Jakub lives just the same. He’s rescued by that South Korean spaceship that was right behind him. He’s even able to call Lenka from their ship where they have a final bittersweet exchange that leaves the story open-ended regarding whether they’ll get back together when he returns to Earth. For our purposes, this mirrors the endings of Kirk and Picard. Kirk dies stopping Soran, never to return to Earth to try and make things right with Antonia. And although Picard successfully saves millions of families, all he is left with of his family in the end is a half-burnt photo album.  It’s hard not to come away feeling that the ending of each of these stories echoes the mindsets that led each character to their unhappy circumstances. Each narrative begins with a man unsatisfied with his life, having foregone the experience of having a family in favor of space adventures, and each narrative ends with a man foregoing the experience of having a family for another space adventure. It’s almost like the idea is that having a family is incompatible with adventure, and it’s probably an idea like that which led each of these characters to their unhappy circumstances in the first place. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three 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.