2023 Movie Round-Up!! Part 3

Oh hello!

Since I appear to finally be moved to write my long-overdue annual round-up from the now-distant 2023, let's economize on that special special combination of no shame and semi-adequate amounts of time and ability to concentrate and wrap this up in a messy little bow with Part 3: The Best Movies!

The surprisingly extensive highest-rated movies I watched in 2023 were:

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Emily the Criminal (2022)

Spirited Away (2001)***

Norma Rae (1979)

Persona (1966)***

Late Spring (1949)

Early Summer (1951)

Rome, Open City (1945)

Broadcast News (1987)

Die Hard (1988)***

The Lego Movie (2014)***

Palm Springs (2020)***

Autumn Sonata (1978)

Le Samouraï (1967)***

Wish Dragon (2021)

Stutz (2022)

Plus One (2019)

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Dancing with the Birds (2019)***

Barbie (2023)

Running with Speed (2023)

The Lego Movie (2014)***

What a gift that there were so many 5-rated movies in one year!

It seems that I'll need to apply the same approach I used in my Part 2 post, given that I don't have the same clarity and intensity of memory for each of these movies, which may in and of itself be a way in which the most positively impactful movies rise to the top.

I'll start by acknowledging the multiple beloved movies that were rewatches: Miyazaki's "Spirited Away", Bergman's "Persona", "Die Hard", "The Lego Movie", "Palm Springs", the French New Wave jewel "Le Samouraï", "Dancing with the Birds", and "The Lego Movie" again. Each of these films are such treasures in their own right, and I'm so grateful to have revisited them (although that re-visitation was disconcertingly yet fittingly unintentional with "Persona").  Even within that relatively crowded field, some of my most deeply beloved movies that I've returned to over and over again stand out for me, like "The Lego Movie" and "Dancing with the Birds".  So many of those rewatched movies are so freaking fun, in addition to having a lovely depth and deftness of execution.  

On the other hand, while not exactly fun, Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samouraï" was such a rich text I wrote extensive notes on it for a post that unfortunately has yet to materialize.  And on that note, I similarly responded to watching "Broadcast News" for the first time. I still hope to sort through all my thoughts and feelings in a post.  The notes are still on hand for both of those movies, so maybe one day they'll come to fruition.

As you can see, the movies I watched for the first time in this year's top movies list are all over the map in terms of release date.  I went through phases in 2023 where I wanted to devour as many classics and major cultural touchstones as I could, like "Norma Rae", "Autumn Sonata", and "Rome, Open City".  Then I had other phases where I was on the hunt for child-friendly movies that might be values-consistent for our family, like with "Wish Dragon" and "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse".  And then there were one or two times where I fell down a little rabbit hole with a single artist, like with Yasujirō Ozu's "Late Spring" and "Early Summer".

So how to decide which, of all of these wonderful movies, is 2023's favorite?

To make this choice, I'm going with my gut, which has continued to hold deep warmth and love for this movie.  I'm also guided by the fact that this film has continued to reveal new layers and themes upon a second glance, and I therefore expect to return to it many times in the future.  It's funny, inventive, thoughtful, and ultimately hopeful.  It's also about a theme that, now that I think about it, always manages to keep a strong hold on me: the nature of love and what love looks like in practice.

My favorite move in 2023 is therefore, at long last:

With that, let's get on with 2025.  With gusto.

{Heart}

2023 Movie Round-Up!! Part 2 (lol)

Hey friends,

Long ago yet still managing to be late, I announced I would be doing the year-end round-up post a little differently.  Instead of the usual massive round-up post, I planned to write it in three installments:

• Part 1: Overview
  
• Part 2: The Worst Movies
• Part 3: The Best Movies

A hilariously long duration later, I'm BACK to actually finish what I started.  And by finish, I mean write part 2 of 3.

So TONIGHT ONLY (or whatever time of day it is when you're reading this), let's review the worst movies I watched over a year ago.... to whatever extent I remember them at this point!!!

Seriously though I will be making modifications to this usual format by only highlighting the lowest-scored movies that I have retained animus for over a year later AND for which I actually remember the reasons I didn't like them.  Which means I will not remotely be highlighting all of them.

That sad, sad list includes:

For being a bafflingly beloved romcom despite being about 
two people who don't actually seem to even like each other:
Notting Hill (1999)

For still making my heart hurt over how Katharine Hepburn's character
was treated in this movie when her character was truly a badass,
seriously what the hell:
Woman of the Year (1942)

For making me feel icky and confused while watching a Studio Ghibli movie:
From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

For having no business being so boring given its lovely, inspiring subject:
Audrey (2020)

For not remotely being "The Lego Movie" (2014) despite capitalizing
on millennial nostalgia and featuring Charlie Day:
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

For just being bad (lol),
including but not limited to feeling like the whole movie was just the
first costumed off-book run-through of a bad, bad script:
Best. Christmas. Ever! (2023)

I'm facing a bit of a dilemma here, because some of the movies that still provoke the strongest negative reactions in me are not the lowest-scored movies.  The only movies on the ignominious list above that received a 1 are "Notting Hill" and "Best. Christmas. Ever!", with the remaining films all being scored a 2.  

It admittedly doesn't feel right to name a movie worst movie of the year when others earned lower scores, but the 2-rated movies on this list are there precisely because they had really promising elements that the movies as a whole betrayed.  It shouldn't be possible to make a boring movie about Audrey Hepburn.  No one--least of all Spencer Tracy--should be mean to Katharine Hepburn!  Studio Ghibli should be beautiful, poignant, cosy, and NOT about romantic love between possible half-siblings (??????????). 

Alternatively, I'm not all that surprised that the year's 1-rated movies were bad.  I basically watched "Best. Christmas. Ever!" explicitly because it looked ridiculously bad, so I certainly don't have terribly strong feelings that it delivered.  And am I surprised that a '90's-era romcom was obtuse about relationship dynamics?  Not exactly. 

There's just something I can't look past in those movies that held so much potential and squandered it.

So, as a perhaps weird call, 2023's most maligned movie was:

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

I know this film isn't responsible for my deep, protective love toward Charlie Day and my assumption that it would be comparable to "The Lego Movie", but I feel deeply, nauseatingly betrayed all the same.  Good lord this movie was tedious and uninspired.

Next up: The extra special long overdue Part 3, hopefully before 2026!

Oh and also, the round-up for 2024, and maybe some chats about the movies I've already seen this year.

{Heart}

Closing 2024: Resolutions Edition

Hi team,

2024 was a lot.

I don't know where to begin in trying to distill down everything this past year held.  Which probably means this is a valuable opportunity to take some time just to reflect on its events.

Personally, there was so much good in this year, including a lot of growth.  It is such an awe-inspiring delight to see my kids grow and for their personalities to emerge more and more.  I'm so proud of how our family is evolving, and I'm so grateful for the partnership I have with my husband.  My work, as always, is really rewarding.  Since our youngest child finally enrolled in daycare midway through the year, I've re-expanded my hours at work in a way that still feels sustainable, in part because I got to feel what it's like to do less than the maximum I'm capable of professionally for some time.  Our family got to take an absolutely incredible trip abroad, and I got to travel to see some of my favorite people.  It's been a really rich, fruitful year.

Globally, it's hard to feel anything other than heaviness.  I've been wrestling with this dichotomy between the micro and macro levels of my life, and I still don't really know how to hold it all at the same time, how to make sense of how one very different little world is nestled within the other.

This seems like as good an opening as any to look back at the resolutions I made for 2024, and to set goals for the new year.  My resolutions last year were:

1. Prioritize the things that make savoring life possible.

2. Watch at least 30 movies.

1. Prioritize the things that make savoring life possible.

My two-part version of what might be the most cringily-worded resolution I've ever made was to a) stay committed to recovery and self-care stuff, and b) prioritize my hobbies.  In all honesty, for the first half of the year, this was pretty much impossible.  Lack of childcare is just a crushingly immovable barrier for these kinds of endeavors, and unfortunately it took months longer than expected for a place to become available for our second child at the daycare our first child attends.

Once that was in place, it definitely made a lot of day-to-day life and work stuff easier, but it still wasn't enough for there to be space for any "bonus" stuff.  Recognizing that reality is what finally pushed me to find and commit to having a babysitter come for a few hours every weekend, long after a neighbor with young children recommended doing so.  Having guilt-free free time--self-determination time that doesn't come at the cost of my partner doing double duty for the duration--has made a huge difference in my overall mental health and the range of things I'm able to do on a semi-regular basis.  It's been such a life-changing gift.

And so, in the past 6 months or so, I've actually made significant progress toward this goal.  I've gone to see movies, met up with friends, started attending a book club with other parents in our neighborhood, read for fun, had quality time with Husband, and had some more time for writing.  I've also finally taken meaningful steps in deepening my recovery work and committed to doing that regularly, which feels so good.  There are still additional steps I want to take in that domain, but it's a huge relief, honestly, to finally start breaking through the emotional log jam that was stymieing my progress.

While I knew I desperately needed to fulfill this resolution when I made it, I wasn't confident I would actually be able to.  I'm so grateful to be able to say that I really did succeed with this resolution.  My life feels measurably brighter because of it--there have been many days when I've noticed that my ambient emotional state is just content, happy.  

Recently I've been recognizing that so much of that is a consequence of discipline; quiet, consistent, reasonably flexible yet generally unwavering commitment to doing what needs to be done, over and over.  Just as this is why there are flowers and wildlife to watch in my backyard, it's why I feel emotionally healthier now than I did just a few years ago.  It's why my kids are growing in all sorts of beautiful ways and my marriage is strong.  I'm just so genuinely grateful to feel the benefit of this routine, committed labor, and to know that that felt benefit is proof of not only my ability to improve my own life but also my interconnectedness with the greater world.

2. Watch at least 30 movies.

I'm pretty chagrined to say I *just* barely hit this target.  I saw some great movies this year, but I definitely did not have the stamina or time to watch one every week.  I'm glad I had the self-attunement and reality contact needed to set a movie-watching goal that was actually achievable, because I would have felt so crappy if I'd insisted on the usual 52 movies resolution and either fell way short or stressed myself out over something so ultimately arbitrary.  I do hope I'll be able to reinstate the one-movie-a-week goal at some point in the next few years, but I don't think that's going to happen soon.

I also didn't write nearly as much as I'd hoped.  In a way, the dramatic shift from writing the most posts I'd ever written in 2023 to the least in 2024 stings way more than the reduced number of movies I watched.  I never even finished writing the 2024 round-up post!  Even as I plan to retain the same movie-watching goal for the new year, I hope to write more in 2025.

So let's talk about goals for this year.

My resolutions for 2025 are:

1. Do sustainable, consistent, values-congruent things with my free time.

This includes doing things I enjoy, like building local friendships, connecting with long-distance friends, reading, writing, doing photography stuff, baking and cooking, taking walks, taking care of plants and animals, decorating our home, and I really do want to start playing VR again because I miss my cute minigolf game!  It also includes doing self-care and recovery work, including reading, attending meetings, meeting with other people involved in recovery, and hopefully beefing up my recovery work through further connecting with other people also involved in recovery.

Finally, I also want to take my own advice by participating in regular activism centered on the things I care most about using a collaborative approach and, where possible, continuing to engage in mutual aid.

Taken altogether, I know fulfilling this resolution will actively contribute to my overall wellbeing.

2. Watch at least 30 movies, and write at least 15 posts.

I think I would feel really good about meeting this resolution, which based on how this year went seems reasonable yet still like a bit of a reach.  Writing about movies is so grounding and enjoyable for me--I love being able to think deeply about what I've watched and share what I liked about them.  Doing even a little bit more of that would mean a lot to me.

And with that, as my oldest child busts into my office to blast me with my hair dryer (who knows why writing regularly is such a challenge??), I will sign off.

Happy New Year, dear friends.

{Heart}

The Arc of the Moral Universe: What's Next?

Hello beloveds, and Happy New Year,

Well things with the election have obviously turned out badly.  Let's talk about it, and what we do next.

I've heard a lot of reactions to the election, but a few are particularly dominant, in my little corner of the universe at least.  Most prominent of all is a numb, defeatist (or defeated?) apathy, bordering on dissociation and nihilism.  There's also grim acceptance and lack of surprise, especially among younger people whose whole conscious political life has been dominated by the election's victor.  It's pretty impossible to harbor any idealistic beliefs about what this country is when it has so consistently and clearly shown its true character for your whole adult life, after all.  Less often, there's the tinny and frankly clueless "we just have to get through the next 4 years" camp, so divorced from reality and/or loudly telegraphing privilege as to be offensive.  Of course there's a broad range of human reactions to such a calamitous turn of political events, so this isn't exhaustive--this is just what I'm hearing and observing in those around me.

To some degree or other, these are all understandable reactions.  To some degree or other, they're also all attempts--deeply faulty attempts, but still--to self-regulate in intentionally dysregulating times.  Evil can only achieve its aims with the consent, tacit or otherwise, of well-intentioned people.  Each of those three mindsets is offering consent to evil through its inaction.  They simply are not tenable.

I say this from a place of absolutely experiencing a lot of those feelings, especially the grim acceptance and numb dissociation-y bits.  I'm hardly up to speed on the developments in the incoming administration's appointments or whatever "policy" they've been drum-beating about (is it racist?  I'm guessing it's racist).  I'm not actively trying to picture what the next however many years will look like in this country, in part because I'm not interested in helping the incoming administration terrorize me but also because I can't really take the ramped-up cortisol.  I'm hardly coping or emotionally processing any of this perfectly, whatever that could possibly mean.

And, as I said in my last post, it is absolutely crucial, now more than ever, that we get off our asses, snap out of fatalism, despair, and defeat, and start fighting like hell, like the world depends on it, like every decent, beautiful thing we care about will not survive without it.  With relentless, deep, abiding love.

What does that look like?  Above all, it must be:

1) Sustainable
2) Important to you
3) Humble
4) With others, and
5) Imperfect

Sustainability is possibly the most important active ingredient.  With an incoming regime that is explicitly built to at a minimum psychologically terrorize you and demoralize you, our energy will be under constant undermining assault.  It might not be remotely realistic to do as much as you wish you could do, but better to consistently persist in whatever work you can do than to burn yourself out by doing too much in the first ~8 weeks of the next administration.  Consistent, reliable work is vitally necessary, so be realistic and self-attuned in asking yourself how much time and effort you can dedicate to taking action.

Personal importance is perhaps the trickiest ingredient, as we are tragically spoiled for choices in this moment.  You will not be able to contribute to every cause that matters to you without burning yourself out.  You won't.  Take some time to accept that.

No seriously.  Take a moment, at least, to take that in.  You can't help with everything that matters to you.

Instead, choose 1-3 things that matter the most to you.  What most grabs your heart?  That is your thing.  Those are the hills you stake your flag on.

But what of the other things you care about?  The reason sustainability is so crucial is that if we all do sustainable work, there will hopefully be enough of us to tackle everything.

Which brings us to humility.  We are not the heroes of this story, our movements are.  We are one little ant building a massive anthill, one little cog in a beautiful, messy, yet purposeful machine.  As individuals, we will likely not accomplish much that is visible or monumental.  Of course, that's because we're up against a lot, but also because it's hard to measure the catastrophes that don't occur because of communal effort.  If we are in this in a contingent way, only insofar as we're guaranteed clear and shining moments of victory, we are prioritizing our own egoistic needs to be rewarded or to feel special over the needs of the causes and communities that matter to us.  It's understandable to want to be the main character in the story, but as best we can we need to put that wish aside for the greater good.

We also need humility in order to collaborate with others who have been doing activism and organizing way longer than we have, with people who have wisdom, experience, and insight well beyond ours.  It is much more effective to join a pre-existing organization or group dedicated to the causes you care about than it is to build something from scratch, because the latter means duplicating and thereby wasting precious energy that could be more efficiently utilized elsewhere, doing work alone is isolating and more likely to lead to burnout, and it risks all the pitfalls of being an activist-turned-savior.  We all have such an exciting opportunity to learn from the people who have been organizing for years, and we must take it.  Our job is to place ourselves at the ready in community with like-minded, like-hearted people and go where we're pointed.

And finally, we must radically embrace that our work will be imperfect.  We can't accomplish everything we want to.  We can't do as much as we wish we could.  We'll get tired, distracted, and dragged into the demands of our personal and professional lives.  We'll get things wrong and need to learn to do things differently and better.  We'll have so much to learn.  We can't see the future, and we don't know exactly what the best next step is.  In accepting all of this, we are better prepared to nevertheless continue the beautiful, necessary, shared struggle.

So with all this in mind, what's next for you?  What grabs your heart, and how will you fight like hell for it, and with who?

I can't wait to hear all about it.  I'll see you out there in the fight.

Glad we're in it together.

{Heart}

The Arc of the Moral Universe

Hi everyone,

I've found myself so much more irritable, emotional, and ill-at-ease as the election draws forebodingly nearer.  Despite dramatically reducing my consumption of the news and how much I'm even talking about it in recent months, even when it isn't in my conscious awareness it is a hulking omnipresence.

Honestly, we've lived through too much in the past decade or so.  From the nauseating and terrifying results of the 2016 election, to the endless indignities, abuses, and outrages of the years of Trump's presidency, to the unimaginable surreality, fear, and isolation of a years-long pandemic, to a now year-old US-funded social media-streamed genocide, all mercilessly back to back to back, it's too much.  It feels like we're all entitled to a bloodcurdling, lung-emptying existential scream no one has made space for.  It feels like that scream would never end if it ever started.

I used to be so comforted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement about the arc of the moral universe.  It articulated my worldview for years, encapsulating my optimism and willingness to engage in ongoing, persistent struggle.

The trouble is, I was so naive about how long that struggle would take.  I thought Obama's election in 2008 and 2012 would naturally lead to the immediate election of our first woman President, that liberal political leadership would become more or less the norm in this country, and that steady progress would continue for the rest of my lifetime and beyond--with considerable labor, but also with heartening consistency.  It was so encouraging, so inspiring to imagine I would get to see the elegant unspooling of the moral universe toward a justice that would shine its light on everyone.  It seemed like such an easy roadmap to follow, just a gentle slope climbing ever upward.

In retrospect, I realize I almost felt a sense of unwitting entitlement to things just continuing in what seemed like a logical, relatively orderly direction.

At first, I saw the outcome of the 2016 election as an albeit gigantic bump in the road, or perhaps like the messiness and agony of childbirth; something beautiful and new coming into the world often necessitates pain, effort, strength, and a period of recovery.  I thought a bunch of dinosaurs were throwing one last racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic temper tantrum before finally succumbing to their powerless irrelevancy, after which we could return to our steady progression toward a better world, perhaps further strengthened and emboldened because of what we'd just endured.

As time went on, however, it got harder and harder to hold onto my original assumptions about the world and the future.  The more horrific bullshit Trump did, and the more impunity with which he did that horrific bullshit--the more court cases and impeachments he evaded essentially scot-free, the more judges he appointed, the more people he got killed with his unconscionable anti-science nonsense, the more ugliness he said and did and thereby empowered his followers to say and do--the more my belief that the world was moving toward something better shriveled.  

By the time his followers faced hardly any commensurate consequences for launching an attempted coup and Trump himself fully evaded accountability for overtly attempting to upend American democracy, not to mention as people lost federal protection for abortion rights and the bloodthirsty war against trans people continued to escalate unabated despite having a Democrat for a President, I'd numbly accepted defeat.  Maybe pessimists are right: maybe history simply repeats itself, over and over, until the end of time.  Maybe what looks like "progress" is just a fleeting, ephemeral period of relief, an eye in the unending storm of inherently self-destructive human cruelty.  Maybe the moral universe isn't traveling on an arc at all, but instead it's simply stuck in place, spinning in a circle we're doomed to always be rotating around.

I don't want this to be the truth.  I don't really know how to make sense of living in a world in which that's the truth.  I certainly don't understand how to parent--like, big picture parent--in a world that's just going to get worse for my children and everyone around them.  I don't know how to square the deep joy I get from caring for my children and my home with the despair I feel for the world around us.  The dissonance feels impossible to resolve.  It's miserable.

In trying to work through all this, I've had conversations with people I trust, I've sought guidance through the words of thought leaders I respect, and I've done a lot of thinking.  I don't want to sacrifice my innate optimism for people and the world at large.  I don't want to give up on my belief in people's inherent goodness.  I also refuse to blind myself to the realities of what horrors people are capable of inflicting on others, and the evil that people perpetrate because they think no one will care or intervene.  I refuse to choose the narrow view of my little, happy life to the exclusion of the rest of the world, primarily because that is simply wrong and selfish, but also because one of the things I love most about humanity is our interdependence, and something that harms my neighbor will one day harm me, too.  There has to be a way to hold all these truths at once without becoming paralyzed by despair or denial.

Through all of this, I've come to the conclusion that neither of those two preceding worldviews are accurate, and neither of them are wrong.  Instead, I think we're on a circular path, but moving through space in a slow yet inexorable course toward justice.  There are still going to be periods where things get worse, but that doesn't determine our overall trajectory.  The journey is more circuitous than I wish it was, yet the destination remains the same.

Key in consolidating this view for me was a recent metaphor using the Shepard tone discussed in one of my favorite podcasts (around minute 6 of this episode, if you're curious to hear it for yourself).  The host used this tone to illustrate the reality that there are things that are getting better and worse all the time.  The getting-better and the getting-worse are always there, a part of the overall song of our world.  What comes through the loudest is what you focus on.

The message I hear in that metaphor is to recognize the combined realities of our world, and to choose your focus intentionally depending on what the moment requires.  If you find yourself lapsing into despair, as I very often have in the past few years, then focusing on the good in the world could bring you back from the brink.  If you instead lull yourself into an inaccurate sense of comfort and passivity, then focusing on where your energy and attention is still needed and taking action is necessary to avoid complicity in the cruelty and oppression that still exists in the world.

All that to say, I've found it's heartbreakingly easy to lose sight of the arc of the moral universe, because it's so very long.  Yet I believe Dr. King was, ultimately, right: it bends, ceaselessly, toward the light.  Because it has to.  Because we can make it so.

So that brings us to today, two days before the next election.  I don't pretend to be able to predict the outcome.  A lot of bad things may still happen.  But we've got each other and a future to fight for.  To reference another leader for justice, we must mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.  At the end of the day, there's simply no other choice.

{Heart}