Furiosa (2024)

I watched this on the way home from South India, which at the rate we were going was a 2-day journey in real time, with lengthy layovers, longer plane flights, and several of them. If I had been more attentive to detail, I would have noticed that anything this might be nominated for an Oscar for already had an available shortlist published for (admittedly just a couple days ahead of time, but still, it was knowable information) and this was not on it. Still, having watched every single one of the Mad Max ouevre going back decades, it was probably in the cards that I would watch this one as well. It is another apocalyptic epic western, this one a prequel to “Mad Max: Fury Road”. It is all about the stunts--the film is here to give you more: more gravity-defying chases, more high-flying stunts, more deeply felt pathos, and, somehow, an even greater spirit to push the limits of what the frame can seemingly hold. It leaves you with a feeling that there is more happening just outside our viewing window. It also shamelessly employs Christian iconography and Arthurian legend to craft an entrancing story that still manages to surprise, even if we already know of the bleak future its guiding us toward. So even though it did not get an Oscar nod as of yet, it is one of the best prequels to be had, should you follow this sort of thing.

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

The author is s professor at a well respected university, and this is his story. As memoirs go, this is a well told story , but it is very hard to read. It is chock full of unwelcome truths about what it is to grow up black in America. Violence is the everything everywhere all at once. His father’s mother was raped by a sheriff in Enterprise, Mississippi. His own mother goes to bed with a gun beneath her pillow. Laymon understands violence as a social system in the most memorable quote of the book: “Parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.” He was sexually and physically abused as a child, often by people who either loved or took care of him. You can see how hard it would be to move beyond it, even though his mother was a highly educated professional and wanted the same for him. This emphasis is on truth telling rather than sugar coating – turning it into a kind of guiding principle –and it is a heavy burden. And heaviness is at the center of his autobiography. He himself is heavy: the book begins with the 11-year-old Laymon weighing 208lb. Later he will get bigger, at one point reaching 319lb. and he struggles with his weight throughout his childhood and young adulthood. But the title also refers to history, to the unfinished legacies of slavery, to the burden black Americans have to bear from living in a country that distrusts, demonizes and all too often destroys them. Who would want to face up to that heaviness?

Emilia Pérez (2024)

This was short listed for Best International Feature Film, but it is not a submission from Mexico, but rather from France. It has none of the charms of the best movies that come out of Mexico, nor is it's portrayal of the country in any way flattering. Its writer-director Jacques Audiard is French, but it is also not Mexican because it was almost entirely shot on Parisian soundstages where the streets of Mexico City were recreated for scenes with an international cast. Even its source material—a chapter in Boris Razon‘s 2018 novel Écoute— is foreign. The result from all these layers that remove it from Mexico is a hyper-curated, phantasmagorical melodramatic narco-opera from the mind of an artist with no direct ties to the land in which he’s chosen to set his fiction. What it is exactly is a bit hard to pin down--it is a crime thriller that boils over into melodrama, laced with violent action. Zoe Saldaña gives an excellent performance as a lawyer who has become bored with her work, making her a perfect choice to take on a formidable and dangerous assignment: to help a brutal Mexican drug kingpin disappear from sight—even from his wife and two children—and live the rest of his life as a woman. Both iterations of that character are played by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who gives the breakthrough performance of the year. Love it or hate it, it is a unique portrayal and story line and I very much enjoyed it.

The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry

This is an "it goes from bad to worse" kind of a story. Tom Rourke is an Irishman haphazardly subsisting in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in the 1890s. He has a poor excuse for a job as assistant to a poor excuse for a photographer, and earns drink money by writing letters for illiterate men luring brides from the east. Tom has two fateful meetings, both involving love at first sight. The first is with a palomino horse, which he stumbles upon while coming down from opium. He’s no horseman, and yet the animal calls to him. The second is with Polly Gillespie, a newly arrived mail-order bride who walks into his photography studio with her God-obsessed stick of a husband, Long Anthony Harrington. The three of them take off on the run and it goes very very poorly.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

I just do not get the Marvel Universe, and in my defense, there is a lot of material there to keep up with. The sheer volume of spin off TV shows that are required watching or you just cannot keep up with what is going on and it jsut gets even more confusing. Deadpool is the exception to the rule though. Hw seemed like the anti-superhero, the one who could poke fun at himself. Now, 8 years on from his first appearance, Ryan Reynolds’ sweary superhero has evolved from plucky insurgent to the cornerstone of a potential Marvel revival, which I hear is much needed. So when he refers to himself as ‘Marvel Jesus’ in this splashy, extremely violent, timeline-traversing quest to protect his friends and beloved ex (Morena Baccarin, barely in it) from erasure, he’s not kidding. Deadpool Wolverine is a franchise resurrection dressed as an odd-couple bromance, with a new version of Hugh Jackman’s grizzled Wolverine along for the ride. And it’s altogether too much heavy lifting for a character who lives to snark from the sidelines to be for naught. This was strangely entertaining, despite it's over the top gore, but it puts me no closer to understand ing where Marvel is headed.

When The Clock Broke by John Gantz

This is the long story of how we in the United States got to where we are today, which is a country where the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 was an avowed white supremacist fascist who advocated the violent overthrow of the government if he couldn't win legitimately and the race was literally too closed to call. That does not, however, capture what the book is about--it is largely a political recapitulation of 1992 in the U.S. The author's angle is that the populist resentments of today’s MAGA America were present in that late-recessionary year, in which the country, having emerged triumphant in the Cold War, turned in on itself. It is an interesting proposition to contemplate--and for me, it was a lot interesting to read in such detail. I was, after all, alive and well during this period, and (apparently inappropriately relieved) to have a third candidate break the stranglehold that Reagan had on beefing up the wealthy and gutting the middle class. He places the origins of the current distemper earlier than most others do--although some trace them all the way to Andrew Jackson in 1828, or at least to the Civil War. Some people never got over having a caste system whereby as a white person, no matter how poor and uneducated, you are not at the absolute bottom of the ladder. The Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992 and the related crack-up of the Reagan Republican Party under George H.W. Bush is a major flag for Ganz’s argument, and he mines the period for other useful omens--Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern, to name a few.

Daughters (2024)

I wondered where the idea for this documentary came from, and I read that review that explained it. In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TED Talk that got lot of mileage. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded to other prisons. This movie is co-directed by her and is a documentary about the first of these dances in a Washington D.C. prison. To qualify for the program, the fathers have to complete a 10-week program to strengthen their fathering skills, which means sharing some painful experiences, regrets, and fears. One man says it is the first time he has ever been in an environment where men talk about feelings. As the title indicates, Patton and co-director Natalie Rae make the girls the center of the story, with four as the focus. They all miss their fathers to varying degrees, and while the reasons they are in prison are never discussed, but the daughters are aware of the time they have left and the things that they are missing because of it. There are dozens of carefully observed and touching moments in “Daughters,” which won both the Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance. Watching the fathers change out of their orange prison uniforms into jackets and ties is extremely powerful. And then it becomes even more meaningful as we see some of the fathers teaching others how to tie a tie, a skill we associate with tended bonding moments between father and son, then with occasions like graduation, dates, and interviews for office jobs that these men never had. It is a movie well worth watching.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Ok, the truth be told, there is a lot about satire that I am pretty sure that I do not get, it just goes over my head, and then there is the part where I just don't think it is as funny as other people do. This book is all about racial identity, and in an election cycle that saw a clearly babbling and incoherent candidate who not only questioned the other candidate's racial identity, but he also called her a B---- and a C---, denigrated people of color, simulated oral sex with his mic, and talked about someone else's massive penis, and yes, he is the one who won. So if you are looking at something to laugh about in all that, this might suit you. It has nothing to do with politics, except that it has everything to do with politics. It’s an exceptionally assured novel about trying to find a home and a job in a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (2024)

Let me start out by saying that while I do write a fair number of reviews of movies, I am a mere amateur when it comes to movie viewing, and all the opinions offered up are mine alone--which seems important to point out in a movie like this, which is the sequel to a classic original, albeit 35 years in the making but one that picks up seemingly right where the other left off. The Maitlands have since departed, and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has harnessed her abilities into a blossoming Ghost Hunters-esque reality TV show that comes off as fake, but maybe it is because her manager ramps up the commercial aspects of the enterprise. Her influence has made her something of a town legend, causing a significant rift between Deetz and her teenage daughter, Astrid. She sees her mom as an out and out fake and doesn't much care who knows it. A tragedy sends Lydia, Astrid, and Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) back to their home, where a chance encounter leads them on a twisted path involving rogue demons, demonic possessions, sham marriages, ghost cops, and ultimately into the clutches of the Ghost with the Most, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton)--who is in fine form and every bit as enjoyable as in the original (or annoying, I guess, if you didn't much care for him the first time around). I’m pretty comfortable saying that this film would not be anywhere near as good if it hadn’t been directed by Tim Burton. Burton is most famous for his gothic horror aesthetic and use of practical effects, which often personify a cartoonishly grotesque world, and while I suspect the whole thing is computer generated effects, it has the feel of old school Tim Burton. If you like that,t hen you should not miss this.

Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen

I read this as part of a leadership training course, and it was kind of surprising to me that I had not been assigned to read it before--I have had some very high quality leadership training over the years, and this is a pretty widely used book. A difficult conversation is one that you find hard to start and/or stay in, and that is a good place to start, how do you make such an interaction go well. It starts with trying to be what they call "the third story", meaning that there are three points of view in any conversation that involves controversy--your story, the other party's story, and the independent mediator's story--try to start with the third story. That helps to avoid some aspects of the three conversations you could be having if you start with your story. They are: The “What Happened?” Conversation The Feelings Conversation The Identity Conversation Far better to start from a neutral point, and keep feelings and challenging your and the other person's identity. I think this is very good advice, and can be used in personal conversations with loved ones and in work conversations that involve delivering bad news, or information that will not be well received. One example in the book that I thought was fraught with challenges is one where friends do business together, and they have a falling out over what happened, why it happened, and who played what role. I came away feeling that it was far better to avoid business arrangements with friends if it involves money or prestige. This is well worth reading, especially if you are one to avoid such conversations. It really could help.