Kicks Inside


Add to the examples of Mary Magdalene's enduring, modern pop-cultural clout the best album of 2019. Every time I listen to it (must be 50x-plus at this point), I hear new, strange and interesting things. I also, by turns, hear flashes of Björk, Kate Bush, Polly Jean Harvey, Tori Amos, Tricky, and EMA; Teresa, in cluing me into how fucking great this record is, suggested Kanye and Portishead, which I can sometimes hear, too. And yet, taken as a cohesive whole, played front to back (as it really should be, to an extent that few albums these days necessitate), it's finally, thrillingly sui generis––somehow huge and dramatic and, at the same time, hyperintimate, moving and tender and weird and wonderful. A gift that keeps on giving. She does it like Mary Magdalene.

Unknown Pleasures


Upon reflection, this might be my favourite movie moment of the past decade.

Last Rites


I hope Martin Scorsese lives to be 120 and makes two dozen more movies, like an American Manoel de Oliveira, confounding critics who keep approaching each new film as a de facto swansong. But if, by sad chance, Silence and The Irishman turn out to be his last two narrative features, they would arguably stand as the most stunning, and apt, one-two punch to conclude any great oeuvre. The former is, in my view, his best film; the latter is very close. Both are overwhelmingly powerful products of a true master working not only in the autumn of his career but at the peak of his talents. Silence feels like a summation of the aching, ambivalent spirituality that pervades so much of Scorsese's filmography, building and improving upon earlier works like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun. The Irishman is a meditation on the criminal culture surveyed in GoodFellas and Casino, and more broadly on the changing sociopolitical landscape of twentieth-century America.

But if GoodFellas was Stagecoach, The Irishman is Scorsese's The Searchers, or maybe Cheyenne Autumn. (Movie analogies seem like a particularly appropriate way of assessing the work of this most intensely cinephillic of filmmakers.) It's about the end of things: careers, lives, a century, a culture. Like Silence, it's a film of serious and uncomfortable questioning, of wondering whether any of it was worth it –– worth the effort, the journey, the sacrifices, the sin. These are not simply "greatest hits" films, although they do summarize much of what Scorsese does best; they are retractationes, mature reconsiderations of a life's work. More than any film since Scorsese's first masterpiece, Mean Streets, The Irishman merges together nearly all of his major themes and concerns. To be sure, he made some movies before Mean Streets and hopefully he'll make many more after The Irishman (he just turned 77; perhaps he should run for president?), but these may still be rightly read as the bookends of a singular, vital corpus.

Fuck school shooters.
Fuck guns.
Fuck gun manufacturers, who literally profit from death and the sociopathic urge to kill other living beings.
Fuck the idiotic, anachronistic 2nd Amendment.
Fuck the piece-of-shit, cowardly politicians who hide behind it as an excuse to never change anything.
Fuck the cartoonishly evil NRA.
Fuck the cartoonishly evil, cult-of-personality GOP.
Fuck the excuse that people need guns because they like to murder animals for fun.

Hidden Lives


Jojo Rabbit is so much better than I expected it to be. I mostly went to see it because it looked more or less kid-friendly and didn't involve superheroes or low-quality digital animation. The premise, though, sounded like it could make for a Life Is Beautiful–level disaster of appallingly misplaced comedy. It's not that. The comedy actually works, not only as a way of highlighting the deep absurdity of the Third Reich and its ideology, but also as one way of explaining how its methods of mass brainwashing functioned, particularly for an impressionable, naive kid whose personal conception of the Führer bore only a vague, superficial resemblance to reality. This is a genuinely great coming-of-age movie and, at the same time, a fairy tale about how sudden familiarity with the vilified Other is (sometimes) all it takes to break the spell of cultural indoctrination––a universal parable that speaks powerfully to present circumstances. Although Taika Waititi conceived of this project almost a decade ago, presumably without the aid of a crystal ball, it's especially resonant right now, with far-right, semi-fascist, and white supremacist forces having crept squarely into the mainstream of Western politics.

As a truly incisive satire, Jojo Rabbit isn't nearly as effective as, say, The Death of Stalin, mainly because it's too warm and humane. Some critics have derided the film's ultimate "conventionality," implying that it's a kind of dirty secret concealed (though not well enough) by Waititi's more radical, anarchic flourishes. But I think there's something to be said for this straightforward, poignant storytelling, even if takes some of the edge off the satire. The last scene is as classically lovely, and touching, as anything in recent cinema, even calling to mind Chaplin–––specifically, the final moments of City Lights, not The Great Dictator. Above all, Waititi's movie is a modest ode to those who summon up the courage to resist evil, those who, as the film's characters put it, did "what they could." This is not a particularly original theme, but it's a perennially important one, which it shares with the year's best film, Malick's A Hidden Life. Both are unapologetically sentimental histories; and both, under layers of artistic license and distinctively aestheticized representation, are essentially built from the stuff of "conventional" storytelling. They would make for a bizarre, yet potentially fruitful, double bill.