Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

We watched this amidst the run-up to the Oscar nominees, and we were guessing what animated movies might make the cut--on the one hand, we did not think this was up to the task, but on the other, my spouse was hoping for something less emotionally complex, and in that scenario, this definitely fit the bill. It is not a good movie, but it is also not at all taxing in any way. This is a reboot of the teenage mutant turtles of yore--in this permutation the Turtles meet and befriend April O’Neal (voiced by Ayo Edebiri, of The Bear fame), an aspiring journalist and an outcast at her high school. She agrees to help them with a plan to win the human’s acceptance. Together they will track down a local menace named Superfly (a literal housefly mutated by the same green ooze). The Turtles will apprehend him and turn him over to the police. April will chronicle their feat and report it, leading the city to love and embrace them. This predictably goes awry, but these conflicts lead to some pretty creative action scenes, highlighted by some eye-popping animation and some clever cinematic effects. Not all of the action works, and the dialogue could use some help as well--disappointing as Seth Rogen is a co-writer. All in all, I would not recommend this.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

I have not read the author's memoir, but apparently she regrets her first book, feeling like she did not look the reality of being black in the American South squarely in the eye, that she was too lenient, and therefore not true to the struggles her characters faced, and vowed to be an Old Testament God. This book goes back to the beginnings of the reality Ward has lived and written about, to the arrival of the slave ships, and the plantations where those slaves were put to work; a reality so dark it is like being taken by the hand and led into hell. Annis is the mixed-race daughter conceived through rape; she and her mother are slaves in the rapist’s house. Her grandmother, born in west Africa and given to the king of Dahomey for his army of warrior wives, was herself sold into slavery by that king when she fell in love with someone else. Annis, in between dodging the attentions of her father; she learns of Aristotle and his bees, and listens to their tutor read The Divine Comedy. Then her mother, in punishment for trying to protect her budding daughter, is sold on; then Annis, for having the temerity to love another slave, a woman, is sold on, too. She has to walk, chained to others, to get to New Orleans where she will be sold again. During the journey Annis is attended to by spirits of slaves past, including a guide who likes to take the form of Annis’s grandmother but is not her. It is a horror, but an excellent read, which I could not put down and read in a day.

Tatanka Tavern, Driggs, Idaho

The view here is spectacular--sitting on the third floor gives one a spectacular view of the valley, and while that is not enough to bring you here, it is a nice perk. This has some interesting beer on tap and a limited but enjoyable menu. We have tried the stuffed mushroom appetizer and it is very goos, and the salad selections are good, and my favorite is that you can get them small for yourself or large to share with the table. But the pizza is the star of the show. There is another pizza place that can contend for the best pizza place in the neighborhood, but having tried them both this is our favorite. The wood fired oven is a plus, but the toppings are interesting and the crust is thin but not too thin, and both times we have eaten here we have left happy. You can build your own, but the combinations on offer are quite good.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

This is a classic, and one (of many) that I somehow missed along the way. It was the author's debut novel, published when she was just 23 years old. She and her husband Reeves McCullers were penniless, awaiting the last portion of the advance on the book so that they, both aspiring writers, could move to New York City. Reeves had gone off to work on a boat on Nantucket island and McCullers had little premonition of the literary sensation the book would become – or how completely it would transform her life. It was published in the summer of 1940. Despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, the depredations of the Great Depression had sucked hope from America’s bones, birthed a generation that had only known want and that was skeptical of the possibility of change and the United States was on the cusp of entering the war raging in Europe and Asia. The book is set in the time it was written in a poor Georgia mill town. The cast of characters is: There is Mick, tomboyish, dreaming of taking lessons so that she may learn to compose music. There is Jake, labor agitator, often seeking and never finding, in between bouts of drunkenness. There is Doctor Copeland, dignified and well-read, who engrosses himself in Black liberation through his studies and finds that he can no longer understand his children, his people. There is Biff, owner of the New York Café, always watchful and worried. They each struggle with feelings of isolation, the sense that no one shares their concern and yet none of them connect with each other. Instead they reach out to John Singer, a deaf man who works understands speech by reading lips. Because he does not speak, Singer rarely interrupts, and the others—rather ironically it turns out—come to view him as a good listener. It is a sad story about a sad time that we hope not to return to.

American Symphony (2023)

I am sorry that this movie did not make the cut from the short list of Best Documentary to the nominated list this past year, but it is a very good documentary. It follows Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s band leader and the Oscar winner for the movie "soul", for a year. I think to start it was to see the creative process unfold, which does happen, but what also happens is that the musician's long time partner, Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms about her diagnosis and recovery from leukemia, marries him and then her cancer relapses. So there is the creation and the pain, the growth and the contraction of their lives. Batiste comes across as both visionary and very human. I read a review that knocked this as not going deeply enough into either the creative process that went into Batiste's American Symphony nor into the fear and grief that cancer begets, but having walked on the path of the later, both personally and with a loved one, this is pretty evocative of that process, and how to do it authentically but also to survive it. I really enjoyed this.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Lots of people found this to be an immersive satirical novel takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the eyes of a writer who struggles to make her own way in the cut-throat world of publishing. It was the reader's fiction choise for Goodreads, and the New York Times put is on their Notable Books list for 2023; it found critical acclaim elsewhere as well. I, on the other hand, did not care for it. I am not much for satire, of course, and that could be the heart of my problem with it, but I just found it cringe worthy, not eye opening. The plot it this: a young white author who steals the manuscript of her dead Asian friend, finishes it, and publishes it as her own. She works to maintain the lie that her first big hit novel The Last Front, a story about Chinese workers in the British Army during WWI, is indeed her work and her work only--she is convincing both the reader and herself. The irony is that not only does she face accusations of theft and plagiarism, but the optics of a white woman writing about and therefore profiting off the work of an Asian event, which creates a platform for accusations of racism. The issues with who can write about what being taken to an extreme are well presented, but I struggled with the unfortunate series of events and where the story landed as a result.

New Taste of India, West Liberty Iowa

This is another roadside attraction on I-80--the availability of Indian food close to the highway and adjacent to a gas station is something we have done in Nebraska but this is a first for us in Iowa. It is not much to look at on the outside--it looks like it is closed! And it is a little hard to find, even. The decor is decidedly unchanged from the last inhabitants, and it is geared more to those picking up takout than wanting the dine in option. That said, it is friendly and very accomodating of our party of 9 which included four generations and ranged in age from 1 to almost 90.

There were some great options on the menu. Starting with the rice, which was fluffy and perfectly cooked. That and the garlic naan were real highlights, because they are something you are going to eat no matter what you order. The vegetable samosas were similarly good, nothing special exactly, but very good--we were less thrilled with the samosa chat and would skip it next time. The butter chicken and the chicken korma were both exceptionally good--we ordered more to take home to help finish off the the other dishes we had leftover. I enjoyed this meal more than any I have had recently in Iowa City, and it is well worth a stop if you are traveling through.

The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

The first book that I read by this author was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (which I admit is an award I have been remiss in not reading the nominees for, but started righting that this year and there is some truly great literature to be found in it)--he is Chilean and someone who not only writes but thinks deeply. This is a fictionalized portrait of the visionary Hungarian scientist, John von Neumann, who contributed to the Manhattan Project and laid the foundations of modern computing is a darkly intelligent and yet propulsive novel. It is basically a triptych of sorts--what came before von Neumann, his part in the story, and then what comes after. The first part is the (mostly true) story of Paul Ehrenfest, a brilliant Austrian physicist who descends into madness, murdering his fifteen-year-old son and then taking his own life. Ehrenfest feared what he saw was coming in the 20th century: the rise of fascism, the atomic bomb, the blurring lines between human and machine consciousnesses, and speaks to the reader, who is already living in a world of AI and returning totalitarianism. We move on to von Neumann, who in addition to working with Oppenheimer and being the father of Game Theory, also laid the foundations of modern computing (MANIAC is the acronym for a computer he developed) and foresaw the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Then we flash forward to the rise of AI, whose promises enrapture its developers even as they fret over its apocalyptic potential. It is excellent and kind of terrifying at the same time.

Dream Scenario (2023)

Nicolas Cage, who has navigated a lot of diverse and funny lead character portrayals in middle age, plays a nondescript evolutionary biology professor named Paul Matthews, who suddenly appears in the dreams of his students, daughters, and people he does not know. He doesn't do anything in their recurring dreams. He more or less just strolls through the background in his sweater and glasses, sometimes flashing his dopey, pleasant smile. Paul soon becomes a phenomenon, with people who are strangers stopping him on the street to tell him that he was in their dreams. He initially is puzzled by the attention, and then as people try to commercialize the event (inevitable) he starts to feel like he himself is important because of something that he isn’t doing and cannot control. The dreams are changing over time, which everyone could see coming, and they go from him observing to him interacting, both socially and sexually, and then the dreams turn quite graphically violent. Once you suspend belief, there are a lot of funny moments, some cringe worthy moments, and some opportunities to put yourself in Paul’s shoes and contemplate what you yourselves would do should you find yourself suddenly and for no good reason to be world famous. Do you dream of Tik Tok fame? What would that look like?

Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy

I loved this. It is a saucy Huda who is an average teenager living within a traditional Muslim family in America. She wants to blend in but she sticks out. Here is her origin story: for much of her life, Huda Fahmy, a Muslim American born and raised near Detroit, was dogged by questions about her hijab. Later, as an adult living in Houston, she was frequently asked, “Aren’t you hot in that?” The answer became the name of her comic strip, “Yes I’m Hot in This,” which Fahmy began posting on Instagram. It also became the title of her first book, a graphic novel for adults published in 2018. In this she and her family travel to Disney World--by car--and somehow manage to both survive and have fun. They are trying to adapt to a world where they stick out and are cause for concern, all while being typical teenaged girls. It is frisky and serious at the same time.

Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2023)

I had never heard of Nikki Giovanni but this documentary, which has great footage of her back in the 1960's as an early 20's as she is being interviewed by James Balwin, entirely confident and contained within herself, and he clearly enjoys the interchange. The filmmakers carefully synthesize a combination of new and archival footage of Giovanni, discussing and sometimes embodying her work in her typically direct, unsentimental, and deeply moving style. The end result, for me, was to fall in love with someone who was previously unknown to me. She was one of the luminaries of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s into the 1970s, and she is now a 79-year-old who continues to address the pain and joys, the anger and resilience of the descendants of the Middle Passage, who know much about uncertain and dangerous journeys. The title of the documentary comes from something she saud, that if they want to populate outer space they need to send black women, because they have been getting it done for centuries. It’s genuinely refreshing to see Giovanni celebrated for having a personality that extends beyond her youth into her elder years. Yes, she’s rightfully shown speaking to and lighting up auditoriums full of fans, many of whom are Black women, but not just because they presumably share similar experiences or skin color. Rather,the filmmakers show and contextualize scenes of Giovanni’s public appearances, some televised and others filmed at recent speaking engagements, as proof of her animating presence. It’s one thing to hail Giovanni as an iconic presence and another to show her talk about and exemplify the qualities that have made her and her work so indispensable. The scenes where she reads her poetry are particularly good, and this is well worth watching.

The Sharper Your Knives, The Less You Cry by Kathleen Finn

This memoir claims to be about chronicles the author’s journey to fulfill her dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, the world’s most famous cooking school. Unfortunately, to my ear, it isn't so much about that as it was about her personal life, which included not being happy in her job, struggling with intimacy, and not being able to relax and enjoy living in a foreign country where she did not speak the language. She also went to Le Cordon Bleu, but other than a recipe at the end of each chapter, there really isn't much in the way of details or reflection on that experience. That disappointed me because while I do not share the dream of attending cooking school in Paris, I did pick up the book to figure out what that was all about. I did pretty quickly figure out that this would not go on to my bucket list of things to do--I was pretty sure it wouldn't, because while I would love to live in France, I do not want to live in Paris, and cooking school would be enough of a struggle for me, I would want that to be in English. The only thing that surprised me from this is that there is a translator, so you can actually do it as a non-French speaker--no, that did not change my already made up mind. The parts of this book that are not about cooking were, for me, unsatisfying, a little melodramatic, and a lot like things I do not relate to and don't need to dig further into. So on the whole, I would not recommend this.

Mantra, Davenport, Iowa

We had an Indian meal along I-80 a bit back and our kids in the Quad City wanted us to compare and contrast the two, so we met them at his place, which is right around the corner from the Figge Museam, a favorite destination of ours in downtown Davenport. We brough my mother along and while she doesn't have a lot of experience with Indian food, she was with us at the previous restaurant. Our kids favorite dish is butter chicken, which was good, but the New Taste of India's was the definite winner for us, as is their Chicken Korma, their rice, and their naan. The samosa's were about evenly matched, but the tamarind and mint chutneys here were better. The Saag Channa was very good, and definitely better than the spinach dish we got at the other restaurant. The one thing I would get again if we were to go back is the Tandoori Chicken--it was flavorful and moist, and we managed to make quite the dent in the whole one that we ordered. The parking was easy on the street, and it is open 7 days a week, which is a real plus. We very much enjoyed eating with four generations, and any time we get to do that we appreciate it!

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

This is a really interesting story--the book itself and then what happened to it when it became the most banned book from school libraries. This is a memoir. The author came out as bisexual in high school describes it as relatively uneventful: they lived in the Bay Area, which is so open and welcoming that if I were trans I might never travel it is so great, and they had supportive classmates and parents. But coming out as nonbinary years later was far more complicated--at the time there wasn't much of a vocabulary for it, and so they wrote this--which was released in 2019 by a comic book and graphic novel publisher. The print run was small — 5,000 copies — and the author even worried that the book wouldn’t find much readership. Then, last year, the book’s frank grappling with gender identity and sexuality began generating headlines around the country. Dozens of schools pulled it from library shelves. Republican officials in North and South Carolina, Texas and Virginia called for the book’s removal, sometimes labeling it “pornographic.” Silver lining--as a result, lots of people discovered and read this book, so it's banning was a key ingredient in bringing it out into the light. I would definitely recommend this.

Totem (2023)

This is a movie about culture in modern day Mexico, with one foot in the 21st century and one firmly in the land of their ancestors. It is also about family and anticipatory grief. The movie opens with a mother and daughter driving across a bridge. THe seven-year-old Sol and her mother engage in a rite of superstition, holding their breath and making a wish. Sol declares that her wish is for her father to live; her mother focuses on the road ahead. The movie goes on to follow a day in the life of Sol and her family as they prepare a birthday party for her sick father-—an event that’s gravity sets in as the hours pass—both a celebration of another year and a preemptive, heartfelt sending off. Presented largely from the point of view of two children, this film immerses the audience in a boisterous family gathering, where a handful of adult siblings have gathered to celebrate the birthday of their brother, a painter named Tonatiuh. Tona is barely seen for most of the movie, confined to a back room where he refuses visitors. Naturally, this confuses his daughter, who spends the day wandering the house alone, building a pillow fort in the living room or collecting snails in the garden, and wondering why her father doesn't love her. There are several things that sink in as you watch this calm and collected depiction of "A Day In The Live" of Sol. One is that this family will remember Toma after he is gone and his memory will be a blessing--but that Sol is not being prepared for the death of her father, and that will be a trauma to unpack later. The other is that a culture that revolves around food, family, and friends has a lot to recommend it. This is quietly lovely and well worth watching.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

This won the Booker Prize and while it wasn't my favorite of the long listed books (I still have three left to read, but of all of the ones I have, The Bee Sting is my pick for the top prize), this is really quite good. It is yet another horrifying look into what the near future could look like. Since we already have had Catch-22 in the United States, and are quickly devolving into The Handmaid's Tale, neither of which I thought were plausible when I read them as a young adult and now seem all too real, so I no longer dismiss anything as too far fetched. Eilish Stack is a respected microbiologist, a mother and the wife of a union leader. After a long day of work, she craves only a spot of peace and renewal. Spoiler alert--it doesn't come--instead there is a knocking on the door and two plainclothes men who ask Eilish about her husband, Larry, are polite and solicitous. Since the Emergency Powers Act was passed, the whole country has been thrumming with anxiety. But Larry imagines that his work with the teachers union can’t possibly be labeled seditious. “There are still constitutional rights in this country,” he insists. And yet the next labor demonstration is violently broken up by police. Larry is detained without access to counsel or visitors — and then he’s disappeared. And so it goes, in an entirely believable way. This is not to be missed.

King Sushi, Driggs, Idaho

There are some good places to eat out in the Teton Valley, but this is our favorite so far. It is an innovative sushi place that serves a number of Asian inspired dishes to keep the members of your party that are not all in on the raw fish. This is what we have--we get there while it is still happy hour, and we have some of the handrolls that are discounted for the early birds. Then we get the Imperial Shrimp, which is a battered shrimp that is deep fried, tossed with some sweet chili sauce and served atop some spiralized diakon--this is my favorite. The pork buns are more pork than bun, which makes then a favorite of my spouse (my son prefers the opposite ratio, and he would skip next time as a result. I like the Citrus Tako while the rest of my party focused more heavily on the sashimi, and we all enjoyed a house roll or two. It is a lively place, they take reservations, and we make it a point to go when we are in the Teton Valley00which is often, but not often enough.

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

I watched the Oscar nominated short documentary "The ABC's of Book Banning", which I loved, and from which I got a list of books to read that have been banned in school districts. This Young Adult book is about growing up Black and queer, and always feeling different but not having the words to express it. Over the past couple of years, at least 29 school districts have banned the book because of its LGBTQ content and for being sexually explicit. It is both sad and ironic because part of what he is writing about is how hard it was for him to come to terms with himself, at least partly because there wasn't much in the way of information about people like him, and how he suffered for it. The goal is less to protect than it is to further ignorance, to perpetuate prejudice, and to augment suffering. Oh, but you probably already knew that. The book opens with a prologue that warns there is some disturbing and explicit material contained within. That is true, but it is mostly about his growing up experience; the challenges he faced due to growing up in poverty, being black, figuring out he was gay, and how to inhabit himself in a comfortable way. None of these are straightforward tasks, and he does have a loving family around him, but mostly he has to figure it out on his own, and he does, and then he shares that journey with the rest of us.

Fallen Leaves (2023)

This film has been submitted by Finland for the Best International Film category and was shortlisted for that back in December. I do not have a lot of experience with Finnish films, but this seems very much related to the Scandinavian film school, where even humor can be dark. I read a review which posited that this is a perfect film, which is defined as: A perfect film knows what it’s about, knows what it wants to say, and knows that even when what it has to say is unusually simple, what it says can’t be reduced to words or any form of description apart from the thing itself, and that a perfect film has to be seen in order for its perfection to be appreciated. There is a lot going on in this sparse movie, most of it without much in the way of dialogue. The movie is a muted romance that goes through conventional narrative paces. A man, Jussi, and woman, Ansa, both shrouded in loneliness, almost meet, then do meet, then can’t meet, then meet again, then come to an understanding that unites them. The complications are familiar ones. There’s booze, there are bad jobs, there’s an encroaching outside world full of troubles. This are a lot of socially conscious aspects of this, down to Ansa’s evening radio broadcasts delineating the Russian invasion of Mariupol deliberate bombing of civilians, ending with a report of the loss of life at a maternity hospital. I had just watched the documentary of this, and the radio reports accurately reflected those atrocities. Finland shares a 830 miles border, so it is quite relevant to them what their neighbors consider standard operating procedures if they think it is theirs to take.

Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger by Lisa Donovan

The restaurant business has hours like the health care profession but with less compensation and worse benefits. And even though women perform 80% of the meal preparation within their households, fewer than 7% of American restaurants are led by female chefs. The author has a pretty big chip on her shoulder about that and she is pretty direct, sometimes vulgar, sometimes passionate about those disconnects. About a year ago my spouse and I embarked on a food memoir reading journey together that started while on long road trips in the car and has extended beyond that, I have come to see that most chefs who write memoirs have circuitous foodway journeys, and she is no exception. She grew up in the South in a lower-middle class military family, with a father who dumped the anger and frustration he was powerless to control in his life outside the house onto the women inside his house. She did not come naturally by the wherewithal to leave that all behind, and she recapitulated that with a bad boyfriend, and looking for a way to support herself and the child she had left that relationship with, she turned to food. She is now a James Beard Award-winning author who worked as the pastry chef to Tandy Wilson and Sean Brock, two of the South's most influential contemporary chefs, and — in part thanks to her famed Buttermilk Road pop-up suppers — developed a following in her own right for her bold inclusion of such traditional and often overlooked fare as Church Cakes and pies as the finishing flourishes to fine dining experiences. This is a chronicle of that journey and how it led her away from working in restaurants, at least for the time being. I liked this, but I did not love it.

Super Mario Brothers Movie (2023)

Nobody in my family thought this was a good movie, but I staunchly defended it as an enjoyable watch. At the time we watched it we were feeling a bit overwhelmed with the heavier things on offer for Oscar potential nominees and needed some lighter fare. We passed on Nimona as being a longer shot than this for a nomination (which turned out to be both wrong—it did get nominated—and wrong because it is a much stronger movie than we anticipated), and settled on this. This is a visually packed movie, which I am sure has a lot of references to Mario and Luigi and video games over the years—how could they avoid it? Staying power is something to celebrate, surely, and while I did not get any of it, you can tell it is there amidst the clutter. The story line is that Mario and Luigi are trying to get their plumbing business off the ground in Brooklyn. For reasons that escape me, other than that they are about to embark on a great adventure and that it has to start somewhere, find a massive chamber of pipes under Brooklyn, get sucked into one, and end up in the Mushroom Kingdom, which is being threatened by the villainous Bowser (Jack Black). The notorious bad guy has found the Super Star he needs to make his final assault on Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and the residents of her kingdom, including Toad (Keegan-Michael Key). Bowser doesn't just want power; he wants to make the Princess his bride. So, creepy stalker stuff that Mario does an intervention and he and Luigi work on cementing their goofy hero status.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

The author has once again set a fictional story in the midst of an historical event. As is her fashion in writing, we are plunked down into the action, and the rest of the story unfolds piecemeal across the story. The setting is the doomed settlement of Jamestown, Va. at the start of the 17th century. Our heroine, a young servant girl, has slipped out of the fort where her English companions are starving, freezing and suffering from smallpox — or already dead. She chose to flee and left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known. The reasons beyond this for her flight are pretty consistent with the situation many young servants faced in the homes of what were essentially their masters. On so many levels they were not at all safe there, and it was a situation that encouraged malevolence rather than prevent it. So while the girl has fled with nothing and no one, and the wilderness is not safe or forgiving either, the reader is left to contemplate what fate is the harder to survive.

Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (2023)

After more than our share of movies with heavy messages and long running times, we were ready to take a break and watch some high end quality animation, and this did not disappoint. One review summed it up nicely: “The Great Escape” meets Colonel Sanders". If you are familiar with the previous Chicken Run, or you have seen claymation coming out of this studio in the past, you will not be disappointed by this. It is the usual story, chickens against the evil master, this one aiming to raise clueless chickens who unbeknownst to them are about to be turned into chicken nuggets. Still, even without Wallace and Gromit, most of the trademark joys are here: the compound of squashy creatures and heavy machinery, the wide, open-ended rictus of a toothy smile,the knowledge that no matter how bad it gets, our heroes will prevail, and the desceptively uncomplicated animation that defines claymation. Very enjoyable.

The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl

The author presents this as a literary devotional of sorts: there are fifty-two chapters, one for each week of the year, that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard each and every week,, with each chapter coupled with an illustration that the author's brother provided. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of highs and lows: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where the author raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires both hope and commitment. I wanted to love this, and I did love the illustrations quite a lot, but found this to be a little too superficial emotionally for me to think deeply about what the author presented.

Apolonia, Apolonia (2023)

This documentary is both quirky and strangely thorough. It was short listed for Best Documentary, but did not make the final list of nominees—I try to watch quite a few of these because for the three to four months between the ten categories that produce a short list are announced and when the Oscars occur is the only time that I actively and intentionally watch, talk, and think about documentaries. This is an intricate portrait of Apolonia Sokol, the on-the-rise French figurative painter whom Danish documentary filmmaker Lea Glob met in 2009 and filmed for 13 years, is full of such details. Sokol’s story of trying to find her artistic groove is a captivating one, but it is Glob’s own presence in the film that makes an equally memorable point about womanhood and artistry, and helps to double down on the film’s multifaceted thesis. The result is something deeply reflective about femininity, culture, commerce, friendship, sexuality and the various souls who dwell in the impossible intersection of it all. I know nothing about the nuts and bolts of being and becoming an artist. This walks the viewer through some pretty gritty realities of that world, all the while being true to it’s subject. Very well done.

How To Build A Boat by Elaine Feeney

I came to read this book because it was it was long listed for the 2023 Booker Prize, which is a list that I more or less read top to bottom each year. A motherless, neuro-divergent boy, Jamie, bonds with his childless teacher, Tess. Very few people connect with Jamie in a way that works for him, and not is Tess able to do so, she appears to get him when so many people around him do not. Jamie’s first day of secondary school was a complete catastrophe, except that he met Tess, an English teacher who treats him with kindness. Tess, like Jamie, never got to know her mother. Each feels lost in their own way. Tess and Jamie spend the school term getting to know each other and themselves. They learn to find their own places in the world, away from the expectations of others. Along the way, Tess, who’s struggling with infertility and a crumbling marriage, develops an attraction to the school’s woodworking teacher, who helps Jamie with a boat-building project that may allow him to process his mother’s death at last. Much like I found to be the case in The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night, scenes depicting Jamie’s challenges are made all the more upsetting by the fact that he cannot understand the full danger of the bullying he faces or of the bigotry being planted in the students’ minds by school staff members. His inborn rationality proves both a help and a hindrance, serving as a barrier to adults’ bad intentions and to more flexible ways of viewing the world that could help him better deal with his overwhelming emotions. This is ultimately a sweeter look at living with autism.

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.