Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Godzilla turns 70 next year, and to celebrate, his parent company Toho Studios released a very conventional Godzilla movie, one that won an academy award. The story is this: Set in 1946, “Godzilla Minus One” follows a spiritually depleted group of ex-military men as they rally to vanquish everyone’s favorite kaiju antihero. Here, Godzilla’s presence is a given, as it probably should be after dozens of movies and spinoff projects. If traumatized survivors like disgraced kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima can’t stop Godzilla, he will destroy Ginza and then stomp all over Tokyo. Koichi is motivated by survivor’s guilt. In an establishing scene on Odo Island, Koichi takes aim at Godzilla but can’t bring himself to shoot. As a result, several fellow army men die, leaving Koichi to bury their bodies. Reviving Koichi’s ultimately patriotic mojo takes priority since that sort of nationalistic passion is apparently essential to fighting Godzilla. I have to say, this was my last choice in the category that it won in, but I suspect that there is an element of nostalgia that propelled it forward in the voting. If you are a Godzilla fan, this will likely appeal, but if not, maybe not.

Y/N by Esther Yi

This is both wildly modern and strangely provincial at the same time. I read this because it was on the New York Times 100 Notable Books list for 2022, and am so glad I did. The tone is set when Masterson, one of several minor characters given excellent Dickensian names, declares, " We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year." The anonymous narrator in this book is his sort-of girlfriend, and she has become obsessed with the youngest member of a Korean boy band. He is called, with an inevitable echo of the Unification Church founder, Moon. His oldest bandmate is Sun, of course, with Jupiter, Mercury and Venus rounding out the quintet. Upon hearing that Moon is retiring and leaving his group, the narrator embarks upon a journey to Seoul to find him and ask questions that seem as impossible to answer as they are troubling to her to pose. Interspersed with scenes from the self-insert fanfiction she writes, that uses the moniker “Y/N” or “your name” (NOT yes/no, as I had assumed) to allow a fan to imagine inserting themselves into stories of romantic encounters with the idol of their choice, Yi’s book becomes a heady calibration between the surreal and the banal. This is well worth spending an afternoon reading.

The Promised Land (2023)

The Danes do dark movies best, and this is no exception. It was short listed for Best International Film for the Oscars this year, but it did not make the final cut--the movies that did make that cut are exceptionally good, and I would say that making the short list is an achievement as well. Mads Mikkelson is the lead (and doomed) character, who after an ignomious beginning (we find out toward the end of the movie that his mother was raped by the manor lord and he is the result) and an illustrious military career he turns his talents to farming in an inhospitable environment. The land is fallow, and the politcs are soul crushing. As on reviewer pointed out, this is about ten movies in one. It's a history lesson with a central figure driven by an impossible quest. There are bands of outlaws, sadistic aristocrats, and downtrodden peasants. There's a little romance, a lot of torture, as well as a feisty runaway child. Historical epics like this really aren't made anymore. There are so many different chapters of the central conflict it makes the final confrontation inevitable and therefore a little predictable. However, there's still unexpected space, and the film takes its time, allowing for character development and emotional connection. It is well worth watching, especially if you are unfamiliar with the Danes--they are well worth getting to know better.

Black Folks Could Fly by Randall Kenan

I had not heard of this man until reading this book, which was on the New York Times 100 Notable Books for 2022 (as an aside, this list may be a little New York centric in places, but it is a very reliably good list of all things published in the year that has passed, and while not the only source of recommendation I use, and I am not able to get too deeply into the list some years, but I am rarely disappointed by it). He writes in a way that is personal, leaving you with a feeling that you would recognize him if you met him--which, sadly, will never happen because he died on pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago. Kenan is very clear: he is black, he is southern, and he is gay. All of these things are important to him, and he wants the reader to remember them about him. Through a profound analysis of food, music, film and literature, he explores the many aspects of African American life in the American South. In doing so, he puts his own history up for observation; he bravely admitting that he, at times, has felt not Black enough, that there are things like prison that are common to the black American experience that he did not experience, but that he is keenly aware of the whole of black culture none-the-less. A memorable read.

Godland (2023)

The attraction for me in this Icelandic film that was short listed for Best International Film is that it is filmed in an exceptionally stark and beautiful place. An inexperienced Danish priest is sent to Iceland to establish a new church, but it turns out that he is singularly unprepared in every way to accomplish this task. Set in the late 19th century, It tracks the priest, Lucas, as he sails to Iceland, where he insults the team that will be transporting him, and they bear with him as he trudges across by horse, foot and finally stretcher. Outwardly, his mission is familiar. The church will promote the faith and provide services to the coastal flock, a commission that he undertakes with confidence, a stack of heavy books and a large, cumbersome still camera that he straps to his back. He hopes to photograph the people that he meets during his expedition, a ludicrous, paradoxical idea for a man who proves wholly incapable of seeing the world around him. Early on the physical weight of what he brings leads to a death, yet he is unable to regroup. He is a strange and quite off putting character who not only doesn’t get it but doesn’t learn. The hero of the movie is the land itself, the rough beauty of the country is central to the appeal of the story.

Chip War by Chris Miller

This is not an area that I have any expertise, and when I saw this book on Obama's reading list, I thought wow, great, an opportunity to learn more about this. Power in the modern world - military, economic, geopolitical - is built on a foundation of computer chips. America has maintained its lead as a superpower because it has dominated advances in computer chips and all the technology that chips have enabled. (Virtually everything runs on chips: cars, phones, the stock market, even the electric grid.) Now that edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by the possibly naïve assumption that globalizing the chip industry and letting players in Taiwan, Korea and Europe take over manufacturing serves America’s interests. Currently, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more on chips than any other product, is pouring billions into a chip-building Manhattan Project to catch up to the US. This book recounts in a voice that can be understood by the least informed of us, myself included, the fascinating sequence of events that led to the United States perfecting chip design, and how faster chips helped defang the Soviet Union by rendering the Russians’ arsenal of precision-guided weapons obsolete). The battle to control this industry will shape our future. China spends more money importing chips than buying oil, and they are China’s greatest external vulnerability as they are fundamentally reliant on foreign chips. But with 37 per cent of the global supply of chips being made in Taiwan, within easy range of Chinese missiles, the West’s fear is that a solution may be close at hand.

To Kill A Tiger (2023)

In 2017 a 13 year old girl is at her cousin's wedding and she is kidnapped, gang raped, and beaten--then told that she will be killed if she reveals what happened and who did it. She ignores that, tells her family, and while they go to the police and report the crime, there is intense pressure from the village to renege on the complaint, the crime is minimized, despite the physical violence that was evident on examination, and widespread in the vollage among men and women alike that she should marry one of her rapists, that it was the only way out. When she refused they were angry, not just that it brought undue scrutiny on the village, but that she needed to marry and this was the only way, she would never find someone to marry her otherwise. Not one person is angry with the boys who attacked her, no one is alarmed that boys who want to marry a girl who does not want them can just rape her and get her that way. No escape. The family wants to support their daughter, who is very damaged by this attack, and yet the odds are so stacked against them. Without the support of outside agencies, men and women who are trying to stop rape in a country where a woman is raped every 20 minutes and fears little in the way of consequences, and the documentary filming there is no doubt that they family would have caved to this intense village pressure--there are times when her father does not show up for court appearances and the family is threatened with violence, harm to property, and death by the families of the accused rapists. It is very hard to bear witness to scenes so devastating and anger-inducing that even viewers fully aware of what they are getting into may be taken aback. This is, I recognize, not exactly the kind of thing that one normally says about a film they are trying to encourage people to seek. But in this case, it seems both accurate and appropriate. "To Kill a Tiger" tells an important story in a compelling manner that makes it worth watching, but its journey is so intense at times it might prove to be too much for some. Living in a country where women are now legally not treated equally to men, this is very very chilling.

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

This is a book of leaving. The cast is small--a famous dead poet, his daughter, Carmen, and her daughter, Nell. It is a scrutiny of familial relationships – in this case the fraught love between Nell and her mother, Carmel, and the complete disregard the poet had for all things familial. A talented father does not a good father make: in this case, not even a good enough father. But it is also a meditation on this other way of connecting – or failing to connect--not just across one's life time, but also across generations. Yet another example of how trauma ripples through generations. It is also a book that contemplates what love is. Nell, when we first meet her, is convinced that love is what happens to two people who are instinctive and native speakers of the same emotional and psychological language connect. When she is 22 and just out of Trinity College Dublin, she falls madly for a big country boy, Felim, and it takes some time for her to figure out that it is not love. She is handicapped in this arena because she cannot accept the love of her family and there are no relationships in her family to show her the way. This is a tightly written volume that can be consumed in a day (I didn't, there were distractions, but I easily could have).

Perfect Days (2023)

Wim Wenders, for me, the director of Paris, Texas fame, directs this Japanese movie, which was Japan's entry into the Oscars for consideration for Best International Film, and it made the final list of nominees. There is a Japanese word, “komorebi”, which was the original title of the film. Literally translated, it means “sunlight leaking through trees”, but there’s more to it than that. It speaks of a profound connection with nature, and the necessity to pause, to take the time to absorb and appreciate the perfection of tiny, seemingly insignificant details. This theme is visited throughout the movie in dreams. Every day is the same. Hirayama, a taciturn man in his 60s, wakes in his spartan apartment to the reluctant grey light of pre-dawn. He pulls on his overalls, takes a can of coffee from a street vending machine and sets out in his modest little van to start work, diligently cleaning the public toilets of Tokyo. It’s a solitary life. Hirayama can go days saying no more than a few cursory words. If members of the public notice him, they largely view him as an inconvenience. But mostly they don’t even see him. It should be the most soul-crushingly bleak film ever made – an endless and predictable grind with banality and urinal cakes. But the zen meditation on beauty, fulfilment and simplicity is quite the opposite: it’s an achingly lovely and unexpectedly life-affirming picture. It all depends – and this is central to the film’s gently profound message – on your way of looking at things. Hirayama looks at the world with his eyes, but sees with his heart. Hirayama has not only grasped komorebi, he has made it the keystone of his essence. He sees all things, all people, as equally important, with an equal capacity for transcendence. It is both a peaceful concept and a life lesson.

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley by David Waldstreicher

I have known about Phillis Wheatley for a very long time, but there is always more to learn, even about a person or a subject. When I watched Stamped From The Beginning, I learned that people were so astounded that a black woman (really more of a child) could produce such luminous work that she was essentially put on trial to convince people that it was her own work. She also was put on the spot often in less formal situations--she was asked to produce poetry about a subject or a person in the moment. Just astoundingly weird. Going back to the beginning: Phillis Wheatley was a young Boston slave who achieved fame in 1773 for her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. She was widely known in her own time, and she hasn’t lacked for biographies in the 239 years since she died at age 31 in 1784, and it’s no wonder: her story – brought to the colonies as a child, bought by the Wheatley family in Boston and taught to read and write, brought to London in 1773 by her master’s son, emancipated there and also published to widespread acclaim, and married to a grocer named John Peters for the odd obscurity of her final decade – is not only fascinating but obviously emblematic, woven through with many of the evils, contradictions, and promise of the Revolutionary era. This version works through her story, and one interesting tidbit that came out is that Benjamin Franklin was a big fan, but Thomas Jefferson not so much. Jefferson is less and less attractive the more we know about him, and this is yet another chink in his armor because it was not that he didn't like poetry but rather that he undervalued her.

The Teacher's Lounge (2023)

This is a quiet yet an intense thriller about things that happen every day. It is very difficult to watch, but in the way that very uncomfortable things happen. The teacher at the center of this is Carla Nowak, a Polish emigre teaching math and physical education. She’s an idealist about education and the obligation of citizens to look out for each other. She’s a do-gooder, mostly in a constructive way. When one her kids gets hauled out of class to be accused of stealing, Carla has to sit in on a conference with the boy and his parents as they explain that they gave him the money so he could buy a videogame and suggest that it’s racism (they’re Turkish) that put them in this humiliating predicament. It seems like a convincing explanation. Carla believes it. But the event deepens her fear of theft. The next time she’s on break in the teachers’ lounge and has to leave it, she keeps her laptop open with the video camera secretly running. When she returns, she finds some cash missing from the wallet she left in her inside coat pocket. A check of the recording shows somebody taking money from her wallet while she was out of the room. Then things start to fall apart. Carla loses control in a lot of ways, most of which we can identify with, and the movie spirals in a very uncomfortable direction. It is a story of unintended consequences, where some have regrets and others are collateral damage.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

The author is a great story teller and this book is no exception. She has chosen real historical events and has interwoven them into a tale that takes place in the 1860's England. The first is a butcher with a shadowy past who claimed that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, the presumed-dead son of Lady Tichborne and the heir to a vast fortune. The evidence against the butcher seemed overwhelming: He could not remember his supposed classmates, could not recall basic facts of a gentleman’s education and could not even speak French, Tichborne’s first language. The second strand is Eliza Touchet, another forgotten figure. A young widow of limited resources, Eliza moved into her cousin’s house to fill an ambiguous role as hostess and housekeeper. For several years, she enjoyed — or endured — a curious position in London’s literary scene because her cousin was William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific author who on occasion outsold Charles Dickens. The syncopated arrangement of these chapters jumps back and forth in time, placing Ainsworth’s youthful popularity in contrast to his later years of panicked self-doubt. But the focus remains on the mysterious Eliza — so externally polite, so internally acute — struggling till the end of her life to divine what to believe when the human condition is essentially fraudulent.

El Conde (2023)

Pinochet, the blood thirsty past dictator of Chile, who ousted Allende in a U.S> backed coup, is at the center of this movie, and quite cleverly and successfully, is a vampire who has lived for centuries. His lust for blood and how he keeps it coming--a whole new meaning for a protein shake--is cinematically spectacular and gruesme at the same time. This is wild and weird and it will keep you thinking about it for days to come. Maybe months. An almost fairytale-like English-language voiceover (the reason for this choice will later be revealed) drives this grimly amusing account, first chronicling the malevolent escapades that Pinochet, then under a different name, enjoyed during the years leading up to the French Revolution. Moving along through history around the globe, always siding with the oppressive elite and actively destabilizing any left-leaning movements, he nourished not only his urge for blood but also his predilection for fascism. Pinochet has amassed a collection of morbid relics from his storied travels, including Napoleon’s hat and Marie Antoinette’s head. There comes a time when he decides that he is done with it, that he will cease to maraude and therefore die. News of this plan alarms Pinochet’s middle-aged children, a pack of greedy but listless individuals desperate to ensure their placid, entitled lifestyles remain undisturbed even if their patriarch wants to vanish. Concerned, they make the trek to Dad’s secret home to learn about his finances and future plans. The bulk of the movie is about this meet up, interspersed with flashbacks across his life. So good, no matter what you think about it based on this, it is well worth watching.

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

This was short listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize--which is a list that I have not read in an intentional way, and that might have been a now rectified mistake. This is short, really more of a novella than a full on book, and it is very good. The author is a poet, so maybe the length seems long from that perspective! Boulder is a horny, chain-smoking cook working on a merchant ship off the coast of southern Chile when we meet her. She is rough and tumble and not ready to settle down until she comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her her nickname and a reason to settle down. She abandons a life at sea for a small apartment in Reykjavik, where the couple move after Samsa accepts a job offer. While Samsa works 10 hours a day, Boulder struggles to acclimate to the routine of a daily life that conflicts with her consoling solitude. Then, after almost eight years together, and nearing 40, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. What happens next will be all too familiar to any couple who have gone through this, especially if one of them is all in on parenthood and the other more tepid. Everyone who is not contemplating parenthood should read this.

The Color Purple (2023)

This is a brutal story and changing it into a musical but remaining faithful to the story is a challenge that worked for me, but was not a home run. Music and The Color Purple have always had a close relationship, even before Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 novel became a hit Broadway musical in 2005. A blues singer is one of its main characters, a juke joint a key setting. Then there was the musicality of the novel’s literary style; Walker was already a published poet by the time she had written her first novel. The hit 1985 Steven Spielberg adaptation of her novel (the only version I am familiar with), was co-produced and scored by the legendary Quincy Jones, introduced the sensuous ragtime anthem “Miss Celie’s Blues,” which has been covered endlessly since. This musical expands on this idea, working its palette of blues, gospel, and jazz surprisingly seamlessly into a story that, at least on its surface, might initially seem too brutal for big, jubilant numbers--and that for me is the sticking point. I loved the music and the choreographed scenes--much more than I would have imagined--but it was hard to marry that feeling with the underlying story of men's brutality against women. On top of that, it is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. The story of Celie's brutalized life, and her eventual escapr is all too real, still happening to women across the country and around the world, and when all is said and done, not entertaining for me.

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Here is the thing that I missed about this book before I read it--the author wrote a book 20 years ago, The Piano Tuner, a historical novel set in Burma, that was breathtaking for the first 3/4 of the book. The ending was disappointing, but there was so much going on in the book, the author showed so much promise. After seeing Amy Bloom talk about the act of writing and describing how difficult it is for her to end a book and how sick of the whole thing she is by the end, I forgive a weak ending pretty quickly, and yet I forgot all about this promising writer. Fast forward twenty years and he has a book the New York Times thought was one of the 5 best works of fiction published in 2023. This book has an historical eye as well. It is set in a New England cabin where we follow the place over the people and animals that inhabit it. The location is probably Maine, which at the beginning of this book was part of Massachusetts; the cabin that two escapees from a Puritan colony and goes forward from there. The non-human characters are 100% early New England, from catamounts to the apple trees, and the people demonstrate that it is in fact true that we do not heed the lessons of history, and it therefore inevitably repeats itself.

American Fiction (2023)

What I want to say first an foremost is that this movie is way way better than the synopsis of it would lead you to believe. I practically had to twist my spouse's arm to get him to agree to watch it, and we were both very pleasantly surprised that we very much enjoyed us--it makes you think, it is multi-layered, and it was well acted and well written--three of the categories it is nominated for an Academy Award in. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an author and college professor. He is published but not famous, struggling to sell his latest work to a publisher. Prompted by his uphill climb to publish, instigated by the media attention granted to Sintara Golden, a Black author with a middle-class upbringing whose novel centers on inner city Black women, Monk decides to build a fantasy. He writes a joke novel, My Pafology (later indignantly renamed to Fuck) under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a faceless persona of a wanted fugitive. Thrown together without care for craft or attention to detail, and rife with Black stereotypes, Monk intends his book as more of a cathartic release of frustration and a middle finger to the publishing world. The manuscript, however, is met with exuberant attention by a publishing house’s insatiable desire to elevate this “genius" and an overzealous movie producer's desire to win acclaim. The more he gets irritable and obstreperous, which is kind of his baseline anyway, the more popular he is, up until he blows it up altogether.

The Barbizon by Paulina Bren

This is a story of how women were able to leave home in the 20th century and not create an out and out scandal. The hotel was built during the roaring 20s and lingering until 2007, when it was inevitably converted into multimillion-dollar condos, and it was a legend in its heyday. As the most elite of New York’s women-only hotels, it provided a tony Upper East Side address and safe harbor for generations of young women newly arrived with dreams to fulfil. It was a place to call a home away from home for Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Joan Didion – to name a varied few, along with Sylvia Plath, who later spilled its secrets in The Bell Jar. This is the first real history of the place, and it’s a treat, elegantly spinning a forgotten story of female liberation, ambition and self-invention. The fate of those who didn’t make it adds a note of melancholy complexity. One of the things that I did not know before I read this is that women came as teenagers often, and part of the allure of the hotel was not just that it was a safe place for unmarried white collar working women to stay but that it was also possible to parlay the connections that it provided into an upscale marriage if that is what was desired. Most women left within a few years, and on the arms of men who they would not have met otherwise. Grace Kelly was an example but she was not the exception. Another was that Mademoiselle created guest editorships that brought talented literary women to the Barbizon--it was not just a place to meet the right man, but also a place to launch a career.

Robot Dreams (2023)

I read a review that called this a sweetly sorrowful buddy movie, and I would agree. It is a dog and a robot, and sadly the dog does not have a person, and in fact there are no people in this slightly shabby version of New York City, so the robot becomes dog’s best friend. It is also a visual movie, one without dialog, so the action speaks for itself and for me at least that added to the sweetness of it. The audience certainly could be kids with their parents—it is not snarky at all, and at least in our house, there was rapt attention for the action contained within and more than a little of our own dialog added.

The unnamed protagonist Dog, is living a solitary life in the East Village, following a fixed and not terribly exciting routine. Late one night he is inspired by an infomercial to order a build-your-own-robot kit, and the results are life changing. From the moment of assembly, the Robot is the most expressive and attentive companion, forever fixated on his canine owner with a metallic grin and permanently wide-open eyes. It goes suddenly and somewhat predictably wrong and the rest of the story is about how each of them copes.

Of Salt And Women by Gabriela Garcia

This book takes the reader through five generations and four countries, with an up front diagrams of two matrilineal family trees; these family trees feature the first names of women. Abusive men damaged these trees and deadened their branches, but matriarchs are the root of these stories, if not the only players. It all starts back to 1866 in Camagüey, Cuba, where María Isabel becomes the first woman in her cane-cutting line to graduate to rolling cigars and, soon thereafter, to read. Subjected to harassment, lesser wages and unwanted advances in a shadowy cigar factory, she becomes enraptured by books read aloud to the workers by a lector who falls in love with her. Their union, forged during a Cuban rebellion against Spanish colonial rule and slavery, ends with blood that births a new future. Liberation is not linear — not for countries nor for women. Though María Isabel wanted to endure, not all freedoms are made possible by resilience. This is the author's first book, and it is a promising start.

Zone of Interest (2023)

This is a harrowing movie. My spouse, who was reluctantly dragged to watch this with me in a theater, likened this to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. She described Adolph Eichmann as an ordinary, rather bland bureaucrat, who, in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’ but ‘terrifyingly normal’ . She contends that he acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. This seems to fit this movie like a glove. We watch the Rudolf Hoss family go about their lives literally next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Their back fence is the wall around the camp, and throughout the movie, the sounds of those who meet their death there provide the backdrop against which they live. And live they do—they go to school, horseback ride, entertain guests—all with the help of what are essentially enslaved Jews who will then be killed—but not only do they thrive in this environment, they feel lucky to have elevated themselves in such a way. It is thoroughly disgusting and terrifyingly obvious that this is what white supremacy looks like, both then and now.

Blackouts by Justin Torres

I liked but did not love this book--what is great about it is the use of multiple forms of media to emphasize specific points about gay culture, censorship, and the acts of suppression that lead to misunderstanding and forgetting. There is, as one review I read pointed out, a little bit of The Kiss of the Spiderwoman about it, in the most appealing sense of storytelling that book evokes. The framework of the story is this: a nameless young man and his elderly, dying companion, Juan Gay, recount memories and stories of other people as if they were movies. Our narrator and Juan met years ago in an asylum; now the narrator is Juan’s companion through his last days in a ramshackle building called The Palace, somewhere in a western desert. The narrator spins tales of his family and his experiences as a hustler, a partner in older men’s sexual fantasies. Juan tells of his relationship with a lesbian couple, Zhenya and Jan Gay. He was a lost eight-year-old boy when Zhenya found him and used him as the model for drawings for the children’s books she and her partner created. The couple accompanied Juan on the long journey from Puerto Rico where he would live with relatives. They were so important to him that he took their name. Throughout the book, it is impossible to delineate between fact and fiction, but suffice it to say that while the book begins with a blackout following a loss of consciousness, the real backing out is every and all attempts to conceal and erase gay stories and gay culture. This won the National Book Award in 2023, do the cutting edge style was rewarded with recognition.

Napoleon (2023)

I am going to stand out here, because I thought this was a great epic film that I really enjoyed for both it’s sumptuous production design and costumes, and how it, however briefly, covers the major events of Napoleon’s life. Bonaparte was born on the island of Corsica in 1769—he was acutely aware of his lowly birth, and from the beginning sought to erase that part of his past. He championed the French Revolution in 1789 and rising from the military ranks, he came to rule France from 1799 to 1804, then as a self-anointed emperor from 1804-1814. He was a battle-hungry brilliant military strategist who invaded and then ruled all of Europe. He made the same mistake that others before and since have made, which is that invading and conquering Russia, especially Russia in winter, is just not a winning strategy. He paid dearly for that mistake, and the film takes us all the way to his end. The battlefield is beautifully rendered, but the more intimate side of Napoleon’s life is light on details and long on judgement. I would recommend watching the 1954 film Désirée (which stars Marlon Brando as Napoleon) for a more sympathetic view. And it is perhaps easier to follow this if you have a bit of background about Napoleon. I recently read—and loved—War and Peace, which delineates the Russian side of the story, as an example. When all is said and done, Napoleon was a megastar in French history and deserves the Ridley Scott treatment.

The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

This is an interesting if somewhat harrowing story of a first generation American. There are two parallel stories, one of Mina, who immigrated to Los Angeles after she lost her husband and daughter in a traffic accident. She had very limited resources--no money, spoke no English, and had only one acquaintance in the US. She was at risk of being taken advantage of, and she narrowly escapes that fate. The second story is that of her daughter Margot--Margot never knew her father, grew up in poverty with her mother, and after leaving for college did not much return home. She is helping a friend move to LA and when she stops at her mother's place, shockingly she finds her dead. There is a question of whether foul play was involved and Margot goes about unraveling both her mother's present and her past. This is an enjoyable story that highlights the stumbling blocks that immigrants who come without the support of either people in the US or their country of origin. My one wish is that it raise fewer issues, and to go more into depth related to feelings. There is a superficiality there that I wish the surface had been scratched more deeply.

The Creator (2023)

This was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Visual Effects, which are often the lightest movies from an emotional and intellectual standpoint. In my house, we save these to watch once we get fatigued by the more challenging films. In this case, it is a timely addressing of the booming and more visible role of AI in real life. Our hero is Joshua, who as a human is supposed to be all for fighting for humans against simulants, but for a variety of reasons, he is torn. The US government is calling a young simulant a weapon, whereas the New Asian simulants call her their savior. He is not convinced by wither of them, but the more he gets to know about her the more empathy he feels for her and then the New Asians as well. This is at heart not a story about a war between humans and AI, it’s actually a redemption arc for a man who lost everything as a result of his loyalty to a government that is using fear as a means to control its citizenry. Sound familiar? Vote in November to avoid that recurring. It is less about the dangers of artificial intelligence and more about the growing lack of empathy in the US for those that are deemed foreign.

The Measure by Nikki Erlick

I had taken this book out as an audiobook on Hoopla in advance of a trip to the Galapagos, where I was going to spend much of a 2 weeks period without cellular connections, and didn’t get very far into it. Then within a month of getting home I had a detached retina and was instructed to lie of my left side and keep my eyes closed to prevent further progression in the 24 hour time period between diagnosis and surgery, so I rechecked it out to help be compliant with that mandate. The hook here is that on one day world wide everyone aged 22 and older receives a box with a string inside that tells you exactly how long your life will be. While no one gets out of here alive, we are all on a course with death throughout our lives, but we don’t know the when of it—this takes all the guess work out of it. The book has lots of scenarios within to help the reader process how they themselves might respond—there is a couple who have widely divergent string lengths who stay together and another that breaks up. There are people who use the knowledge to live for today and others who are so anxious they cannot enjoy the time that they have. There are people who have potentially fatal illnesses who have long strings, so what the quality of the life is remains unknown, but that there is quantity of life remaining. It is serious stuff dealt with in a lighter and enjoyable way.

Flamin' Hot (2023)

We watched this because it was nominated in the category of Original Song, and in the past movies nominated only in this category have been much more light-hearted and fun than other big time, multiple category nominees and as we get deep into what is usually our three months of watching serious and high quality films, it is nice to have a bit of a break, and this movie provided that. This is the origin story of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, which might veer slightly off the straight and narrow of the facts in order to provide a better story. It follows sometimes unreliable narrator and main character Richard Montañez from a rough, impoverished childhood, a mistake-filled adolescence, to an adulthood with some regrets. In the 1980s, he’s a desperate man looking for a second chance to provide for his family. He catches a break with the help of his adoring wife, Judy, and lands a job on the janitorial staff of a Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga. Not only does Richard work hard, but he also pays close attention to the machines and what all goes in to producing the products. Over time, he learns how they work with the help of a reluctant mentor, Clarence C. Baker, and he has higher ambitions for both of them. He gets to thinking about how Frito Lay might make a product Richard’s hard work and tenacity lead him to invent a new spicy blend of snacks based on the flavors of his childhood. He then jumps the corporate ladder to pitch it to Frito Lay’s parent company president, Roger Enrico and the rest is his tasty history. The thing that was least believable for me was that Frito Lay acknowledged his intellectual property and idea and rewarded him for it. The song is good but not my first or second choice in that category.

Humanly Possible by Sarah Blackwell

This book covers a concept more than a time period, and is about a world view, more or less. Humanism is traced over seven centuries in Europe. It runs from medieval umanisti (students of humanity) to today’s (more secular) self-declared humanists. Along with intellectual developments across centuries, the author gives us their material background – books, book-selling, printing, corpse dissection, plagues and sprezzatura (courtly nonchalance). Among figures covered--some well known and and others not-- are Christine de Pisan, with her redoubtable defense of women’s worth; Erasmus, praising the “folly” of love; the erudite Montaigne, wondering what on earth he knew; Spinoza, challenging the accuracy of biblical narratives; Voltaire, lampooning “the best of all possible worlds” and ridiculing the notion that “whatever is, is right”; Thomas Paine, who deemed religion “irreligious” in its claustrophobic gloom; John Stuart Mill, with his incisive analysis of the oppression of women; and Bertrand Russell, sent to prison for opposing war. The idea has a lot of potential, but for me, it wasn't illuminating. However, it was on Obama's 2023 Reading List, so maybe I am wrong about that. He is usually consistently great in his choices.

Nimona (2023)

I very much enjoyed this surprise Oscar nominee. Our hero is Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), who is about to rise up to the rank of knight in a futuristic medieval world —he is the first commoner to have this honor bestowed on him, and there are some who are disgruntled about a “commoner” rising to such heights, the usual preoccupation with bloodlines, which are prejudices that have morphed into white supremacy in some cultures. Ballister is framed for a crime he didn't commit, and the only one who can help him prove his innocence is Nimona, a mischievous teen with a taste for mayhem -- who also happens to be a shapeshifting creature Ballister has been trained to destroy. And with the entire kingdom out to get him, Nimona's the best (or technically the only) aide de camp that he can hope for. And as the lines between heroes, villains, and monsters start to blur, the two of them set out to wreak serious havoc -- for Ballister to clear his name once and for all, and for Nimona to just make trouble. As a side note, it seems that in the future vision of this and many other visualizations there is more totalitarianism and less personal freedom. The message as I see it is to vote while you still can.

The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar

I thought this was an amazing literary rendition of all of the unromantic but very real parts of first time motherhood--in preparing to write this review, I find that it did not strike the same chord with other reviewers. One thought it was not compelling--wrong! Another thought it was less about motherhood and more about the loneliness of motherhood--also wrong! Another said it "paints an honest, frightening and claustrophobic picture of new motherhood"--much closer to how I felt. I would day that if you are a parent, and a mother in particular, this will resonate for you. It has been 35 years since I had my first child, and yet everything about this book feels real and like it happened yesterday. It is so raw and graphic about every aspect of change that happens, and in the most unromantic terms possible. This particular mother is left alone at home to cope with her baby whilst her husband returns to work--which is often the reality of modern day motherhood. There is no community to gather around and support the new mother, teaching her how to breastfeed, caring for the newborn while she gets some rest, helping with household chores so things don't fall apart, and reassuring her that all this will pass and become rhythmic and normal. In the absence of that, it is hard to combat the isolation and sense that you have absolutely no idea what you are doing. Then there is the post-partum mental illness aspect of this, with depression versus psychosis, flirting with true disaster and the lack of support for what might be going terribly wrong inside this new mother's mind from her spouse. So the story goes from relatable to all to relatable for some, but even the most stable amongst us has had moments of completely understanding how someone could think that throwing the baby out the window, or fantasize about walking away and never coming back . It is one of the least talked about yet hardest thing a couple undertakes to keep a baby alive and well that first year of life, and this book lays it all out there with an insouciant tone that I found both alarming and charming. I must warn you though, do not read this if you are childless, and definitely not if you are on the fence about breeding. It is painfully and frighteningly true to life.

May December (2023)

This is a present day depiction of the Mary Kay Letourneau case, which depicts the Mary Kay character (Julianne Moore) and the twelve-year old boy she raped, and got impregnated by. The names have been changed but the story remains the same. In the movie, twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, Gracie Atherton-Yu and her husband Joe (twenty-three years her junior) are getting ready for their twins to graduate from high school. Hollywood decides to do a movie about them as this vast change is occurring. Actress Elizabeth Berry comes to spend very up close and intimate time with the family to better understand Gracie, who she will be playing in a film, and as a result, the family dynamics unravel under the pressure of the outside gaze. Joe, never having processed what happened in his youth, starts to confront the reality of life as an empty-nester at thirty-six. Elizabeth and Gracie study each other, the similarities and differences between the two women begin to ebb and flow. Gracie is without remorse, and Joe has let her live that way for a very long time, something that may not remain once the kids leave home. Set in picturesque and comfortable Savannah, Georgia, May December is both a fairly cringe worthy and bracing exploration of truth, storytelling, and the difficulties (or impossibility) of fully understanding of what lies below the surface in any situation.