The Antisocial Socialist

 Consuming media is not the same as activism. That said.

Yesterday, I went to see a screening of Where Olive Trees Weep. If you haven't seen it or there's not a screening near you, you can PWYC on the internet. It's about Palestinians, trauma, and resistance, focusing primarily on journalist, activist, and therapist Ashira Darwish, with appearances from Dr. Gabor Maté, Amira Hass, and Ahed Tamimi. It's beautifully shot and compassionately written and edited.

The hardest thing about the film is that it was shot in 2022. You know. Before things got as bad as they are now. And yet it's still unbearable to see.

Then today I saw Omar El Akkad speak on his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Which I haven't read yet, but I've read a bunch of his articles and American War, all of which I loved. I go to a lot of readings and this one was probably the best. He's quiet and self-effacing, like he is rather surprised to find himself in front of a microphone speaking at the first of two sold-out events. And every word out of his mouth is just the most insightful, thoughtful thing you've heard anyone say. I can't wait to read this book and I already know that I'll weep big ugly tears.

Anyway. There's two things to check out, but then you (and I) have to go do something.

 Well, this will be quick and easy, as I only saw three new films this year, and one of them sucked. I don't know why I can mainline a million TV shows and not watch a single movie, but I think it's because I can only really sit still for an hour at a time. Anyway, the three whole movies I saw were:

El Conde: This is the one that sucked, unfortunately. You would think the premise was bulletproof: Pinochet is actually a vampire and gets dragged out of retirement even though he wants to die. That's ripe for political satire. This film has two problems. First, the characterization is muddled and so the satire is muddled. I think it wants to show some nuance and complexity and how fascism can appeal to even those who oppose it, plus the obvious vampirism = capitalism, but it ended up mired in pointless nihilism. Sometimes you have to be blatant in your satire. The other problem is that it's told almost entirely in voiceover narration. It's a stupid choice that's not justified once you realize who the voiceover is, which is also not a big twist. In some alternate timeline there is a good version of this.

Nimona: I liked this one quite a lot! I'm not a big cartoon fan, and I'm particularly not a fan of this particular cartoon style, but the story is good enough to overcome my aesthetic dislike. It's good for all the same reasons why the comic is good—it's a cute, subversive, queer fairy tale with memorable characters. My only issues were that I would prefer it if it were animated more like ND Stevenson's drawing style, because I like that more, and that I don't think the changes at the beginning work as well as the comic does. It's far more fun to discover Ballister Blackheart's backstory as Nimona does—this is one case where I think the story benefits from doing an obvious twist. It ends up softening the story quite a lot by not depicting any of Blackheart's villainy, though I guess that makes it more appropriate for the kiddies. I guess.

Cocaine Bear: Okay I can't believe I'm saying this but this ended up being the best movie I saw in 2023 because unlike the other two, it didn't have any flaws. It made us a promise—you get to see a bear on cocaine that kills a lot of people—and delivered exactly that. It's a massively self-aware film. It's hilarious. Sometimes all you want is to watch a bear that is higher than any living thing has ever gotten in existence eat a bunch of people and then try to get more cocaine. Unlike the other two it is an improvement over reality/the source material, as the actual story behind this is sad rather than funny.

I'll try to watch more movies next year. The key word is "try."

 As in previous years, I didn't watch a ton of movies, but there were a few notable films, including one standout last-minute entry.

Everything Everywhere All At Once: I don't have a lot to say about this one. If you like that kind of thing, you've probably seen it a million times. Personally I found it bloated and overlong, with a troublingly uneven tone that held some nasty implications about fatphobia and mental illness. But on the plus side it had a lot of Michelle Yeoh, and I will take an ambitious hot mess over the vastly inferior Marvel equivalent, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which was shit other than every moment that Wong was on screen.

Day Shift: This was a movie I did not actually expect to be any good at all, and that I forced my friends to watch after we watched The Invitation (which was also a 2022 movie about vampires and race and class, and also highly enjoyable) for two reasons, and two reasons only. There is a third, and a fourth, unconfirmed reason to watch it, but let's talk about the movie first. It stars Jamie Foxx as a down-on-his luck vampire hunter who must re-ingratiate himself with the vampire hunting union so that he can get enough money to pay for his daughter's braces before his wife leaves him. The first reason to see it is that the union that organizes the vampire hunters is the IWW. It's really a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo but if you think the online left cares that it's only there for a split second, you haven't met the online left. The second reason is that one of the other vampire hunters is played by Snoop Dogg, who is absolutely hilarious in it. Anyway turns out it's good, actually? The vampires' evil plan is gentrification and it's part of a growing number of horror movies, and vampire movies in particular, that have working class Black leads and monsters that are metaphors for white supremacy and capitalism. The third reason to see it is that the soundtrack slaps. The fourth, unconfirmed reason is that apparently it's an adaptation of Night Watch and Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, which I enjoyed in their translated and subtitled versions respectively. At the very least, it shares the bonkers sensibility of "let's play urban fantasy tropes completely straight."

RRR: This was, up until last night, going to be my movie of the year. It's a Tollywood (Telegu language) movie that's an absolute fucking masterpiece. Before I get too far in, there are some problematic politics about it that would probably be better analyzed by someone who is actually from India. I'm coming at this with as a white Westerner who knows slightly more about the early Indian Independence movement than the average white Westerner because I read some really horribly translated Marxist books about it.

Anyway, RRR is about two revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, who never met in real life and did not actually have superpowers and also never demolished the British in a dance-off in the 1920s. But look. It would have been better if they had. You know it would have been. There are musical numbers and CGI animals and imperialists get absolutely pwned and it's a delight that's manages to get some solid politics and heartfelt drama into a spectacle of a movie that is relentlessly entertaining for its entire 182-minute run time. Both of the leads are charming as all fuck. There's even a shout-out to my favourite Indian revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, at the very end.*

So that was going to be my pick as best movie of the year but yesterday I saw Women Talking, which is going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life.

I haven't read the Miriam Toews book that it's based on but I've read some other work by her, and Sarah Polley is a hell of a director so I went into it with no idea what it was about but figuring it would be great just based on who was attached to the project. Given the bleakness of the subject matter, the title almost feels like a bit of a joke or at least a play on the Bechdel-Wallace Test. Which, obviously, it passes with flying colours; there are two men with speaking roles in the film and they're both confined to the margins of the narrative for different reasons.

The film takes place on an isolated Mennonite colony in 2010. The women of the colony learn that for years, their husbands, brothers, and sons have been drugging them and violently sexually assaulting them in the middle of the night. The elders of the community not only participate in the coverup, but eventually take almost all of the men to town to post bail for the attackers and insist that the women forgive them. The only men left behind are the schoolteacher, who has only recently returned to the colony after his family was exiled, and a trans man who is in charge of supervising the children.

In the absence of the men, the women vote on a course of action with three options: do nothing, stay and fight, and leave. Doing nothing is ruled out by almost all of the women, but staying and fighting and leaving are tied. Two extended families are appointed to debate between the remaining options, while the schoolteacher takes minutes because none of the women can read or write.

What follows is nearly all dialogue and silences, which nonetheless manages to be visually captivating as well thanks to Polley's direction, the incredible acting, and an understated, heartwrenching soundtrack. The debate encompasses faith and theology, pacifism and nonviolent resistance, family, and female solidarity. The subtle use of light creates a gripping tension and urgency—the autumn day never feels long enough to grapple with the enormities facing these women. Every character is beautifully brought to life with a compelling viewpoint and poetic dialogue. And if you thought "Daydream Believer" was not a song that could ever bring you to tears, well.

This is one that was worth seeing in theatres because the cinematography is jaw-dropping, and worth watching multiple times because there are layers upon layers in a film that's 95% a group of women having a debate in a hay loft. Utterly brilliant.

* What's that you say? Not everyone has a favourite Indian revolutionary? What's wrong with you people?

 Late addendum to my film roundup post. 

Don't Look Up was absolutely my favourite film of 2021 and one of the best films I've seen in ages. I will be happy to take questions at the appropriate time.

Non-spoilery review:

The problem with Star Wars* as a franchise and this Star War in particular is that it attempts to marry fundamentally incompatible conceptions of duality in Eastern and Western philosophy. Balancing the Force makes sense if the Light Side and Dark Side are, respectively, order vs. chaos, or collective good vs. individual will. But not if they're good vs. evil or, in this case, Space Nazis vs. Not Space Nazis. Ironically this is the one thing the prequels did right.

But they didn't do that because you need to sell toys. Of Space Nazis.

* The movies. I know nothing about the EU or the video games or whatever.

This is going to be really short because it was the kind of year where I barely saw any movies. Which sucks, given what I do for a living. And most of the ones I saw weren't good enough to talk about. Here are the ones that were.

El Camino: This movie really didn't need to exist. It is 100% fanservice. The ending to Breaking Bad was perfect. We didn't need a movie sequel, as such.

So? It was more Jesse. It was two more hours of Breaking Bad, beautiful cinematography of Albuquerque, witty dialogue, dark humour, and things going horribly, horribly wrong. I loved every second of it. It didn't need to happen but I was glad it happened and the fact that something is not, strictly speaking, necessary, does not stop it from being good.

Deadwood the Movie: This, conversely, did need to happen, because I have waited a fucking decade for the end of my favourite TV show of all time. (Yes, most of the characters are historical figures. Yes, you can look up what happened to them. No, it doesn't matter, because the historical Calamity Jane is not the fictionalized Calamity Jane, and Joanie wasn't a real person, so Wikipedia is not going to tell me that they lived happily ever after.) 

The movie isn't perfect—there are a lot of flashbacks that I found quite unnecessary, as no one is going to watch this movie without having seen the show first, and I felt that they interrupted the narrative flow—but it's a fitting resolution to the story. And it had me in tears, both because it was just so awesome to revisit that world again, but because the primary plot, Al Swearengen's slow, poetic reckoning with mortality, comes out of writer David Milch's Alzheimer's diagnosis. This is, presumably, one of the last things he'll write, and it's absolutely gorgeous. 

Us: I am still kind of making sense of Us. It's not a straightforward allegory like Get Out was; it implies politics rather than outright stating them. It's creepy and atmospheric and Lupita Nyong'o is brilliant in it. I saw the twist coming a mile away, but I don't think that affected how disturbed I was by the whole thing.

Jojo Rabbit: One of the few movies I cared enough about to see in theatres because it is everyone's moral obligation to ensure that Taika Waititi makes lots of money and continues to get his weird ideas greenlit. This was the movie Life Is Beautiful didn't have the balls to be. It's also something that resonated deeply with me, as I see more and more young people seduced into fascist ideology. It's a story about how ordinary people can be warped into hatred, but critically, it offers a pathway out of that hatred, even though it comes at a terrible cost.

I'll probably see one or two other movies before the year is out—Christmas break being one of those times that I can actually go out and see films—so lemme know if you see anything good.

 This shall be very brief, as I don't get to the movies often and besides, there were only three movies released this year that mattered. (In fairness, I have not yet seen 2.0, which would almost certainly merit inclusion here.) They are as follows:

Black Panther

Hands down the best superhero movie of...ever, I think. It redefined the types of stories a blockbuster Hollywood action flick could tell, it had interesting, multilayered politics, compelling characters, gorgeous Afrofuturist-inspired visuals, and a kick ass soundtrack. You probably already saw it three times like I did.

The Death Of Stalin

Technically this came out in 2017 but didn't hit theatres here until 2018, so it totally counts. It's The Thick Of It but in the Soviet Union (ostensibly; like anything Armando Iannucci does, it's more about British politics than anything else) and it's about as pitch black as a comedy can get. Everyone is fucking terrible but some people are really, really terrible, and some people are merely terrible in ways that are entertaining. Which is, ngl, exactly the kind of humour I find most hilarious because I'm a bad person.

And the best movie of 2018 was...

Sorry To Bother You

Boots Riley's directorial debut is brilliant, funny, and political without ever getting didactic. The story of a black telemarketer who rises up through the corporate ranks owing to a magical ability to sound white on the phone starts out as one type of story, pulls the rug out from under you, and veers in an entirely weirder direction. Its only flaws are 1) I thought the ending was a little too long, and 2) I am really afraid that the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world might watch it and get ideas. But it captures the zeitgeist in a way that's simultaneously chilling and hilarious as anything.