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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.

Mike Burdge and Reeya Banerjee team up once again to chat all things Bond, catching up on the latest rumors of casting the next bow-tied devil, discussing what makes a good Bond actually work in these movies, all while chatting about the lone Lazenby entry from 1969: On Her Majesty's Secret Service. They also cover From Russia with Love, A View to a Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies and Skyfall. They behave themselves. Listen on....

I’ve only recently discovered how common this experience was, but I grew up reading Stephen King books starting at a fairly young age. I had been pretty exclusively a TV kid until I was 10 or so. I could finish an age-appropriate book at that age, but it wasn’t something that would ever occur to me to do voluntarily, or for fun. Starting in fifth grade, though, we started having "D.E.A.R." time as part of the school day, where we had the option to either "Drop Everything And Read," or do schoolwork. Now, schoolwork was generally to be avoided at all costs, so I was strongly motivated to find something, anything, to at least pretend to read during D.E.A.R time. When I got home after that first day, I went straight to my parent's bookshelves and grabbed the biggest book I could find, which happened to be a 1,100+ page copy of Stephen King’s It. I brought that book to school with me and, rather than just sit and stare, I began to read. Unexpectedly, I deeply bonded with that book, and I’ve had close to thirty years to try and puzzle out why. To this day, I’m not otherwise a horror person. I avoid anything genuinely scary, but I plowed through It over a period of months, despite how heart-poundingly frightened it made me feel at times. What I think I’ve finally landed on is that there was something about how King writes his characters, specifically how he writes kids and teenagers, that strongly resonated with me at that time. He didn’t write generic scared little kids. He could viscerally capture what being scared, embarrassed, overwhelmed, or intimidated feels like to a kid. Early in King’s career, kid characters featured prominently in his work, with his pulling inspiration from his own childhood memories, his experiences as a father, and notably his experiences as a teacher. Horror lends itself to the school-age experience because it’s a way to engage with some of the stereotypical realities of those times - being bullied, not fitting in, being scared all the time, feeling like you’re being ignored or mistreated by adults - while allowing the tropes of the horror genre to convey how heightened and intense the lived experience of those feelings are when you’re a boiling-over hormonal adolescent or teenager with underdeveloped impulse control, feeling like you’re white-knuckling your way through life. The titular character in Carrie is Carrietta White, a sheltered and socially outcast high school senior girl, who lives alone with her unstable, ultra-religious mother. We’re led to believe that Carrie’s experiences at school are sad but unremarkable to this point. She’s already an outcast when we meet her in the first scene but in a garden-variety sense. Like the characters in King’s novella, The Body, which became the film Stand By Me, or like the kids from It, these kinds of kid characters have been King’s bread and butter, and Carrie was the first one. King often writes kids as strange in some way, or as outcasts, but ones who are enduring the way most kids manage to do with the circumstances they find themselves in. In the case of the kids from The Body or It, they largely survive the ordeals they’re confronted with because at least they have some kind of friend group to support them. What makes Carrie importantly different is that King doesn’t really give her anyone. In the first scene, we have with Carrie, we see her being mocked at the end of gym class for causing her team to lose at volleyball. We feel sorry for her, but this just feels like a kind of low-level daily trial of her life. From gym class, though, we move into the girl’s shower where the rest of the story is put into motion. In the film, it’s fascinating how Brian De Palma chooses to film this scene, and probably impossible at almost any other time. Ostensibly, we’re looking at naked, frolicking high school girls. They’re filmed in slow-motion, with soft focus, with a delicate score playing along with them. It’s artfully done, but the only thing keeping it from being skeevy is what De Palma is setting up. The camera moves through the other girls and finds Carrie in the shower. It lingers on her body in the same way as she washes. At this moment she’s the same as the other girls, right up until the moment when Carrie feels herself start to bleed. The delicate score cuts out altogether, and all we hear is running water as Carrie tries to make sense of her bloody hand. With the next cut, it’s like a spell has been broken and Carrie looks almost like someone entirely different. The way De Palma frames her makes Carrie suddenly seem small, vulnerable, and years younger. Cutting back to the other girls, they’re all dressed and feel older than Carrie and a little far away. The rest of the scene plays out like a nightmare. Carrie stumbles into the girls begging for anyone to help her. She doesn’t know what’s happening and thinks she’s hurt. The other girls think Carrie is being ridiculous, maybe even childish, and tease her with tampons, backing her into the shower, pelting her with them, and taunting her to “plug it up.” How Carrie is treated at this moment is important for how the rest of the story plays out, but it’s not everything. It’s easy to imagine that if she had any sort of friend group or any support at home, maybe things would unfold differently. Maybe the gym teacher, Miss Collins, doesn’t feel the same motivation to punish the other girls the way she does, which pushes Chris to enlist Billy and others to help her get revenge. Maybe Sue Snell doesn’t feel motivated to try and make it up to Carrie by telling her boyfriend to ask Carrie to prom. But Carrie doesn’t have anyone. When she gets home, not only does her mother not sympathize with her, but instead locks Carrie in a closet to pray because of a belief that anything as bodily or carnal as menstruation is sinful. Carrie is completely isolated, not just in her shame over this embarrassing incident and her own ignorance about the natural changes her body is undergoing, but also the supernatural changes her body is experiencing as well. The book plays this element up a bit more, that along with her first period, and all that means for the development of her body, she also feels this great and potentially destructive telekinetic power growing within her. The book takes more time than the film to show Carrie’s experiences as she is beginning to feel out and cultivate her abilities. As her power seems pretty clearly meant to be a metaphor for her growing sexuality, it seems much more empowering in the book that Carrie is consciously feeling her way through her power, rather than almost exclusively being overwhelmed by it in the film. It’s not like her control isn’t present at all in the film. We do see that she’s able to use her powers to reassemble the mirror that she breaks, but that’s not quite the same as Carrie intentionally trying to flex her power in the book by seeing what things she can lift or move, or how long she can keep an object in the air. Because of how the film ends and is viewed from our contemporary vantage point, it feels impossible to me to engage with Carrie without seeing it through a particularly dark framing: that of a school shooting. Carrie is an isolated and bullied kid with no support system; she is struggling through one of the most developmentally challenging periods in life. Unlike the typical school shooter, she makes no plan to get a weapon and hurt people - she just happens to be a weapon in the moment of her greatest humiliation. This framing seems all the more obvious to me knowing that prior to Carrie, while Stephen King was a senior in high school, he wrote a novel about a school shooting where a high school boy takes his classmates hostage, outsmarting all of the other kids and adults along the way, before finally being shot himself. That book, Rage, would be published in 1977 as the first novel published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. After King was outed as the real author behind the Richard Bachman pseudonym, it was collected in a large volume with four of the other Bachman Books, and published under his own name. King would go on to let the book go out of print during the late 90s though because it kept popping up in connection to perpetrators of actual school shootings. The problem King found in writing Rage, is that he had inadvertently created a dangerous fantasy that troubled, young men identified with and wanted to emulate. Contrarily, in the case of Carrie, King created a character that people could sympathize and identify with, but with a story so deeply rooted in humiliation and loss of control, that nobody winds up wanting to be Carrie. The opening shower scene is a bit of a bait and switch: De Palma initially depicts the young naked girls in one way, until everything changes, revealing that there was something else going on all along. The whole story of Carrie is a bit of a bait and switch as well because we are made to feel such great heartache for this young girl throughout the story, and are right there with her when she is again standing bloody in front of a room of people, but this time, instead of watching her beg for help, we watch her lock every exit to the gym and burn it down with everyone inside. It may be possible, with effort, to have compassion for a school shooter, but never sympathy. Yet, Carrie is sympathetic. Part of that may be gendered. Historically, perpetrators of mass shootings or violence are almost exclusively male, so it may not actually be intuitive to see Carrie through that framing. Part of it may be that we see her have some kind of mental break at prom that indicates that she’s not truly in control of her actions. Part of it may be that we see that she may be afraid of or intimidated by, her classmates, but we never see her exhibiting any kind of malice towards them, which makes us less inclined to hold her responsible for what happens. It’s challenging to frame how to feel about Carrie at the end of the story. The damage caused by Carrie is horrific, but her vacant eyes while it’s happening make it harder to lay specific blame for what happened at her feet. What Chris and Billy do to her is terribly cruel, but that can never actually excuse Carrie indiscriminately killing everyone in that building. On one hand, we know that in this gymnasium there are many of the kids that bullied Carrie, specifically the girls that were taunting her in the shower at the beginning of the story, but we see Carrie being treated well early in the prom and everyone there is sincerely cheering and clapping when her and Tommy are voted King and Queen. Also, with very few exceptions, specifically Chris and Billy’s co-conspirators, no one is actually laughing at what happens to Carrie. She will see it differently, but DePalma takes the time to make clear that the people in the gymnasium are on the same page as the audience of the film in being appalled by what has happened to her. From the moment Carrie is doused in pig’s blood, the tragic ending feels inevitable. De Palma makes sure that we understand there is no victory for Carrie at this moment. When she comes to her senses, she will make her way home and try to wash herself clean; she will go to her mother looking for comfort, and our hearts will break for Carrie as her mother stabs her in the back. Carrie kills her mother, giving her the martyrdom she seems to have wanted all along, but she then pulls her mother’s body close to her as she pulls the house down on top of them both because, even now, she still doesn’t have anyone else. Carrie, both as a book and a film, is a story well told, but it’s hard to watch because of how terribly cruel it is. Not just in the things that happen to Carrie, but in the way the story itself treats the audience. We know it’s not going to work out, but all we want for Carrie is to be able to live in that moment forever, crowned prom queen, standing next to the boy she likes, while all of her classmates clap and cheer for her. Being a kid is hard, especially for her, and we want her to have finally found her people, but that’s not the story we’re being told. Carrie White is a good-hearted kid who deserves better right up until the moment she isn’t. It’s brutal to see what is so cruelly taken from her, and worse still to see what she then takes from everyone else. 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.

A review of Late Night with the Devil Live television broadcasting can be a stressful, competitive, soul-crushing, and exhausting endeavor. One would even describe it as the devil’s business. This has never been more prevalent and literal than in the Cairnes Brothers found footage horror comedy Late Night with the Devil, debuting in theaters in March 2024 before streaming at home on Shudder in April. The film is a stand-out in Shudder’s catalog as a clever and playfully gruesome chiller that aesthetically emulates a certain era of 1970s late-night television and what would happen when a particularly offbeat broadcast invites dark forces into the studio, unleashing chaos and pandemonium unto its crew and audience. It is ostensibly Dick Cavett meets Pazuzu, and it is certainly refreshing to see a wild genre picture with a tiny budget receive as wide of a release as it has. Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is the host of the 1970s late-night live television show Night Owls, where on a typical night, he invites strange carnival sideshow characters to interview and exploit in front of a studio audience. However, his ratings are severely lagging behind Johnny Carson, and he is grieving over his recently deceased celebrity wife. Desperate for a ratings boost to save his show, he invites a cavalcade of oddballs onto his show for his 1977 Halloween special, including a parapsychologist and her case study, a 13-year-old cult survivor, seemingly possessed (or as the doctor describes, psychically infested) by a demon she refers to as “Mr. Wriggles” as a way to capitalize on the growing “Satanic panic” sensation occurring throughout the 70s. The film exists in a tiny subgenre of horror I like to dub “mockumentaries depicting live entertainment disrupted by a supernatural force”. It occupies a similar aesthetic space to the 1992 BBC TV movie special Ghostwatch as well as the 2013 WNUF Halloween Special. Ghostwatch incorporates real BBC broadcast talents such as Michael Parkinson and Craig Charles (shout-out to Robot Wars) to give its supernatural investigation an air of authenticity. WNUF Halloween Special utilizes a scrappy 1980s public access presentation complete with amusing fake commercials. Late Night approaches its subject as though a master tape of the fateful evening has been unearthed and shown to the public for the first time, Blair Witch style, complete with VHS artifacting and glitches, sudden cuts to commercial breaks, and mono audio mixing. While the film mostly sticks to this gimmick, it occasionally cuts to a fly-on-the-wall black and white documentary style, similar to a Maysles Brothers film, in between the interstitial commercial breaks. While these scenes do a solid job of adding narrative tension, as the cast and crew grow weary of the potential danger in the studio, it also breaks some immersion in the setting. I wish we could have seen a way for the whole episode to play out as is uninterrupted. It is a real pleasure seeing David Dastmalchian in a leading role. He's been a memorable supporting player in productions by the likes of Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, and James Gunn (Prisoners is a particular favorite of mine). Now he gets to shine as Jack Delroy, playing a charming and funny late-night host with great chemistry with his co-hosts and guests. He has just the right amount of nervous and chaotic energy where you can believe he's been hosting the show for 6 years, yet still lagging behind the likes of Johnny Carson. He's the heart of the film and I hope this leads to him being the heart of more films to come! There's an unfortunate elephant in the room which I need to address. During the interstitial cuts to commercial breaks, splash images are displayed on the screen. These images are confirmed to be AI-generated. AI art is also on display in the production design, on the backdrop. I personally do not condone the use of generative AI in commercial art. AI can be useful in the early development process to create reference points, but AI-generated art has no place in a finished piece of art, in my opinion. It’s a shame, too, since there’s so much attention to detail and love put into the presentation, the AI generation sours some of the authenticity on display. They did not need to cut corners when they put in so much effort elsewhere. If AI generation doesn’t bother you, it won’t make an impact on your viewing experience. If it does, I don’t necessarily blame you for not wanting to support this film, but there is a lot to love here in other departments. Film is a collaborative medium, I only wish real graphic designers and artists got to contribute to this collaboration in that way. For seasoned genre heads of either found footage mockumentaries or possession/exorcism films, Late Night With the Devil doesn’t exactly offer anything profound or groundbreaking. I do wish it could have gone further with its concept and committed to its bit to a stronger degree. As it is, though, it is still a thoroughly entertaining and creative horror film with a playful and sinister tone full of practical gore. It will assuredly be a staple of many Halloween marathons for years to come. Jeremy Kolodziejski Jeremy is a long-time supporter of and contributor to the Story Screen Fam, as well as the entire Hudson Valley Film community, as a writer, filmmaker, film worker, and general film fan. You can find him sifting through the most obscure corners of horror, martial arts, comedy, noir, and crime drama cinema, always on the hunt to discover something new, strange, and exciting.

Mike Burdge and Bernadette Gorman-White strap into the stretch limousine that is The Pattinson Stuff, this time taking a look at the films the actor made on the side during his Twilight years, including his ultimate attempt to immediately distance himself from that sort of type-casting: Cosmopolis. Other films discussed include Remember Me, Love & Distrust, Water for Elephants, Bel Ami and Dior: 1000 Lives. Listen on....

It's our 25th episode of Story Screen Presents! We celebrated by attending our latest movie screening in Beacon, NY at Harry's Hot Sandwiches, where Mike, Jack and Robby all watched the noir classic, Memento, with a crowd of people and then talked about it! Wanna know what they talked about? Mainly Christopher Nolan movies. #Newsletter #Podcasts #Memento #Overdrinkers #MikeBurdge #JackKolodziejski #RobertAnderson #HarrysHotSandwiches #25thAnniversary

Mike Burdge, Bernadette Gorman-White and Diana DiMuro go over all the categories for the 96th Academy Awards, discussing their predictions and hopes, as well as chatting about some truly great flicks that entered the Oscar race this year. Big movies discussed include Oppenheimer, Barbie, The Zone of Interest, Napoleon, The Eternal Memory, all the Oscar Nominated Shorts and so so so much more. Listen on....