ADAM MEMBREY

INKTHINK #4: Knot

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A trinity knot with an inking mistake: can you spot it?

Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

I have rarely met a knot that didn’t make me anxious. I could appreciate them – the way they’d tie a boat securely to the dock, the way they’d hold a tent up in high winds, the way they’d represent a promise of something difficult to unravel – but I had no idea how to make them. And the thing about learning how to do a knot is you have to watch it being done while being told how to do it at the same time. Any Deaf person knows this is a fool’s errand. Something will get lost in translation. You will think it can’t be much different than tying your own shoes and yet every single time you make a knot, you feel the give. It’s not something to be trusted. 

But there is a knot I can entertain: the Triquetra – otherwise known as the Trinity Knot. It’s a Celtic Irish symbol I’ve been drawn to before I ever had an inkling of family heritage tying back (see what I did there?) to the culture. Drawing this knot is difficult for the very reason that makes it so captivating: there is no beginning or end. There are only eternal curves. In other words: it’s Life as we’ll come to accept it. 

There’s also a Celtic conviction – at least according to a questionable Google search – that things of significance in this world come in threes.  I think of triangles and how I’ve been told my whole life they’re the strongest structure to build with – a fact that did not keep the balsa wood bridge I built in my high school architecture class from collapsing under an embarrassing low amount  of pressure. I think about how the best passing in soccer often occurs when players form an ever-shifting triangle wherever they are on the field, always allowing the teammate with the ball at least two quick options to go to. I think about my wife and our newly-2-year-old daughter and the unmistakable power of the firstborn. You start with two people. And then you make a third. And everything with that child is a series of firsts, the bond burnished through the experiences you survive and build upon. 

Recently, in the third and final test for my bilingual certification, I did an ASL (American Sign Language) interview. The process is deceptively simple: you chat with an interviewer over 5 questions and 20 minutes, using as much ASL grammar and structure as you comfortably can. But the hardest part of the test is everything before and after. Very few Deaf people sign in strict ASL; we’re the accumulation of all our experiences and exposures to language, especially English (or any other dominant speaking language). Our individual language style is one of survival, a way to say, “I got to this point in my life by signing just like this.” And yet the results are scored by someone not in the room, someone who reviews this recorded interview video that flattens your 3D conversation. You can’t help but feel like the score – one way or another – is some indictment of your own Deaf identity. 

I say this because as I was practicing for the test, thinking through signs I’d seen hundreds of times but didn’t quite feel comfortable with on my own, I ran into one unexpected roadblock: lists. When you’re describing a list of things in ASL – in the air, not through spoken words – you will use your non-dominant hand to keep track of them. To me, the easiest number to work with is 3. It feels sturdy and true. Like the triangles that build everything powerful and imposing around you. When you extend the list to four, the natural instinct is to raise the ring finger, which is awkward as hell. It doesn’t feel right. Unless you’re really flexible, that ring finger will be barely rising, like a deflating tube balloon, a shy digit eager to duck out of the exercise altogether. What you’re supposed to do is fold in the thumb and raise four fingers. But now your brain has to shuffle the list one finger over. And then if you decide to extend the list to 5, you reshuffle a finger over in the opposite direction, with your thumb becoming the top of the list.

At some point, it feels like 3 is where you should stop. 

(Sidebar: this led me, a childhood Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles megafan to wonder: just how would these four dudes say “I love you” in ASL? Just hold their hands up, all fingers extended? Squeeze two green balls between their two fingers? Would it mean that “hello” and “I love you” and “goodbye” are all the same sentiment and this is why they have commitment issues?)

Coming back to the Celtic conviction of threes: it can represent many things: birth, life, and death; earth, sea, and sky; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But there’s one particular triad that’s slapped me around in adulthood and parenthood alike: the past, present, and future. 

As a parent, there is no way to unhook the curves in the Trinity Knot of your life. Every decision you make about your child runs through all three time loops all at once. When you wonder just how many salty snacks is enough before Nabisco signs them to an endorsement deal. When you fret whether to rock them or let them cry it out. When you try to determine how much money to set in a college fund when you can’t even imagine what college will look like in this crazy world 16 years down the line. In each decision you will consider your past as a child, and as an adult you will consider the impact in the present moment. You will wonder, far more than you want to admit, if you’ve irreparably screwed up your child. All these three timelines will bleed into each other like someone placing a tissue paper collage over your brain, one overlapping layer at a time.

As an adult, you’re going to constantly be fidgeting with your identity in every idle and chaotic moment. You’re going to be rewriting your past, reframing every embarrassing high school moment (God, they were many) and decision you swerved away from making, trying to rewire everything so the person you are today makes a little bit more sense. And then you’re gonna look ahead, into the great unknown, and wonder just what is yet to come. This is all normal. This is all what makes life wonderful and difficult and interesting and unique. I love my animals, but I do not believe they have these trinity loops running through their heads. Perhaps that’s why you don’t see substance addiction and therapy in the Animal Kingdom. 

One day I will learn these handy knots. I’ll secure a few boats and assure the structure of some tents (especially so my family doesn’t assume I’m as clueless as I sometimes look). Perhaps I’ll even help my daughters build an especially invulnerable balsa wood bridge, vicariously living through their project, shaking my fist at the architecture gods and their impossible standards. But until then, I’ll be okay with stopping at 3. Three is more than enough. Three eternal loops is a life worth examining. And a life examined is one worth living. 

INKTHINK #3: Vessel

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Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

You may be familiar with the Freshman 15. My first year of college, through a combination of sleep deprivation, overwork, and the toxic availability of all the foods at the cafeteria, I gained nearly 40 pounds. I didn’t really pick up on it first. Being 6’2”, it’s easy for that extra weight to spread throughout your body, and for muscles to nudge up against fat in such a way that almost looks like tone (but is, in fact, just muscle against a bigger wall of fat than you realize). So I tried different things. I worked out. I tried to not eat everything in the cafeteria. I flipped through ad after ad of overpriced fashion to find workout ideas in Men’s Health magazines. But college life made it difficult and it wasn’t until after I graduated that I actually learned how calories worked. From there, my focus became one both solemn and silly: I wanted to be the most efficient version of myself. My rationale? One day I would have kids, and I did not want to be sucking wind chasing them all over the house, falling off of tree forts, and generally finding new ways to get hurt in the safest of situations. And, of course, there was an element of vanity in that I wanted to look better in pictures.

I then looked for shortcuts. I went to a climbing gym, thinking a random night of bouldering would get me closer to a Spiderman physique (it did not). I went to CrossFit for a month, thinking it would transform me with some kind of natural steroids (I only got debilitating soreness). I dabbled in a little bit of everything, not realizing until much, much later in life that everything generally works, but the only things that truly work are the ones you are consistent with (a very annoying truth). So I futzed around a lot, fooling myself of progress over and over again. It wasn’t until I read Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour Body, a book full of ideas for the shortcut-minded like myself, that I stumbled upon something that didn’t necessarily make me any leaner, but made me feel far more efficient: Total Immersion.

The gist of the program, developed by Terry McLaughlin, is that your aim should always be to be as efficient a swimming vessel as possible. You’re not generating power. You’re making yourself as sleek and aerodynamic as possible so that there’s little power needed. This is how you go far. This is how you do laps upon laps and somehow emerge energized rather than exhausted. It feels counterintuitive, like something a sloth would come up with. Like someone was going to eventually tell me to just lay and float in the water because we’re all gonna die anyways.

But after I got over my initial skepticism, I gave it a shot. And I learned very quickly why my swimming took so much out of me; why I’d feel my muscles working, but in a way that felt deeply inefficient. For most of my life, my body was not balanced in the water. My feet would often sink behind me, creating more drag, and I’d have to madly pull with my arms, stroke after stroke, only able to complete a lap or two at a time before stopping. With Total Immersion, I learned to reach for the floor of the pool. Again, it felt counterintuitive, but it miraculously evened out my body and the slightest, gentlest strokes suddenly had me moving with the steady, seamless pace of a shark through the water. It felt like a magic trick. It still does.

Nowhere else do I feel as efficient a vessel as the pool. No matter how many creaks or aches I may have in my body, there’s always the chance to glide with a grace I can’t find elsewhere. There’s just something special about holding your arms together between your ears, looking down, and pushing off the wall as you cut through the water with frictionless motion. You soar over the bottom of the pool like an aquatic ghost. Whenever I would swim at the local YMCA, I’d look at the lanes next to me and see people of all shapes and sizes doing their own thing. There would always be someone who looked a little beaten down by life, who found a kind of cathartic, necessary relief in a place that did not punish them for the things they did or did not do. Here, they could float. They could glide. They could dream of smoother journeys and healthier futures. They could just be.

And that’s the thing. So much of efficiency comes from not fighting the environment, but moving smoothly with it. Through recognizing when you’re doing too much and thinking about how you can be like Terry McLaughlin, gliding through the water, free as an underwater bird, always searching while always feeling at home.

INKTHINK #2: Suit

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Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

I spent most of my childhood enthralled by the possibilities of space. In grade school, my answer to any “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was always, unmistakably, an astronaut. Perhaps it was Tom Hanks’ charm in Apollo 13 or seeing that Lieutenant Dan not only grew some legs back but almost made it into the same shuttle himself. Perhaps it was just the sheer enormity of it. That space was some statue you’d admire and could never, ever wrap your arms around. In 8th grade Science, I had to do a group project on planets that quickly became a solo project. The other three members of the group quickly realized how little motivation I needed to do research about something I was already deeply intrigued by. So they let me do my thing. It was only at the end, when teacher gave me a giant, ugly D- – itself a practical joke to remind me of the importance of it being a GROUP project – that I realized you could never go that far up in the sky without a team. You had to trust people. You also had to accept you might not make it back.

While space maintained its hold on me, I found myself more and more lured into the mysteries of the deep. The San Mariana Trench, which I first read about it in Steve Alten’s Meg, waterlogged my daydreams. The fact an inverse Mt. Everest existed below the surface of the Pacific Ocean waves felt more tangible than the vastness of space. It also felt more terrifying. There, down below, you could not only run into the 80% of the ocean and its creatures we had yet to discover, but you could also, with one false move – one slight crack in the windshield – succumb to the pressure of the deep ocean and no longer exist. You could be crushed so fast no one would know.

Over the years, James Cameron’s passion for the deep sea only drew out mine even further. I’m still kinda mad at him for being too busy with blue cat people to adapt the best Sports Illustrated story ever. But if the man who created some of the biggest, most successful movies of all time could spend so much of his career in ever-shrinking, deeper-diving submersibles, then there had to be something he knew we didn’t. After all, the man had made an entire career out of being betted against and winning each and every time.

Recently, I found out one of my co-workers has a bone-deep phobia of whales. As I inquired further, her face grew with embarrassment, shaking it off with, “I read too much and had no friends”, a phrase meant to signify isolation but instead pulled the most empathetic of strings. I knew what she was talking about. Left to our own devices, we could read our way to a despair we didn’t yet know how to rise beyond. “But they’re so big and there’s so many of them and you know how big the ocean has to be to fit all of them?” I could only smile. “But that’s why I find them so cool,” I said. “Terrifying, yes, but also really cool.” I theorized out loud – a move I’d later learn to be a big mistake – that perhaps her phobia came from seeing something so big in a place in which you were so immobile, the water resisting your every move and reaction. “Stop,” she pleaded, embarrassed at the can of deep-sea worms she had given daylight. We agreed to only talk about beluga whales. They are small enough to comfortably think about.

Over the summer, NASA released the results of a $5 billion project over two decades in the making: the most detailed photos of space ever, taken by the new James Webb Space Telescope. Only the size of our own viewing devices could limit the awe contained with each photo released. And only just last month, NASA researchers found the first exoplanet with the Webb Telescope, a planet within 99% the size of Earth. How crazy is that, to know there’s a same-sized planet circling a star millions and millions of miles away, some parallel universe we’ll always be curious about? Another question: if we the Earth is 70% ocean and we haven’t discovered 80% of it, that would mean we have over half the planet unexplored. Completely off the grid. Unmapped and unknown. Why can’t we develop a Sea Telescope of sorts, an inverse version of the James Webb variety?

What I’ve ultimately grown to understand is how the lack of further exploration of our oceans mirrors our collective disinterest in saving the planet. More specifically: the collective disinterest of the wealthy elite – those with the power to make and avoid decisions that affect us all. There is so much to explore and, within them, so many possible solutions and realizations we need to stumble upon. You don’t need carbon-vomiting rockets to do it. You just need coordination and deep pockets. In other words: we may never know.

I drew this picture to draw attention to the parallels of both explorers. One for deep space, the other for the deep sea (at least until the pressure becomes too much for a suit to absorb). In many ways, they feel like two sides of a coin. They both offer death-defying exploration. They both captivate the imaginations of the youth in a way few things do. They both look cool as shit. But there is so much focus on space and far-off dreams of ghost colonies we’ll never build that I wish we could flip the coin over and see the other side, like we’ve been playing with tracing paper this whole time and people need to see the original. Wonder is a powerful thing. If only we could bottle it up in ways that weren’t meant for profit but rather the pursuit of a better future within our current home.

INKTHINK #1: Crystallize

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Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

I confess I don’t know much about crystals. I use the term ‘crystallize’ with far more confidence than I have in understanding how the process actually works. When I started sketching out this picture, I thought about the gift of time. When my daughter was born, I assumed my writing time would evaporate, the giant Mop of Time just dabbing and sweeping and soaking up everything I once had. I gave myself the first two months of her life to just be as present as possible. To notice the little details of growth. To be nurturing. To talk back every single time she tried talking to me. And it worked, for a while. Then I became antsy.

Once my paternity leave ended and I got back into the flow of work, I found time to be even more lacking. I knew that as soon as I got home I’d have to take the baby for a walk so my wife could have a break and/or do some freelance work. What I didn’t see coming is just how valuable those walks would become to my writing process. My daughter loved being outside. She also, at this point, didn’t say much beyond a few babbles here and there, taking it all in with her wide, sleepy eyes. Often, she’d fall asleep. Always, she gave me the time to be bored so I could let my creative mind wonder.

It started with a few key story breakthroughs for a screenplay I had written ten months prior. A screenplay in which I, already feeling like a completely different person, struggled to ascertain any clear path forward towards a second draft. I knew I wanted it to better. Wanted it to be deeper. I just didn’t know quite how. But after that first week of walking, I had several ideas to play with logged in my phone’s Notes. I went from begrudgingly going through these walks to absolutely giddy at the idea of them each day. What better combo than to glance at our beautiful, growing baby while letting my mind crystalize all these long-fomenting ideas?

For some, crystals may represent perfection. Hardness. Class. For me? They represent the results of letting the mind wander and make connections. They represent allowing myself the time to be bored, to resist the ever-intrusive world begging for each nanosecond of my attention.

I said before I don’t know much about crystals. So I decided to use Google and try and get a sense of how they’re born. And surprise of all surprises: it eerily mirrors the writing process. Crystallization is a signifier of a process from chaos to perfection. Well, well, well. The nucleus of the crystal is formed, then it gains size on the outside, growing outward, the final process one of termination as growth seizes. The writing I’ve felt best about is the one that has a beating, Arthur’s Round Table center to it and everything is built out from within. The details ooze from what began as the emotional truth at the heart of the story. That ooze goes out in many different ways, building layer upon layer on the surface, before finally settling into its final form. The last part of the process – the process of termination – is just like editing. We kill our darlings. We thank them for their place in the creative process. Sometimes we find them a new home, a running document for orphans. And then we shut the door on the piece, urging it out into a world we cannot control the response of.

They are our crystals, ready to catch some light.

Adam’s Top 11 of 2021

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Parenthood does wild things to your brain. You may have noticed it’s nearly May and I’m just done writing about movies that came out in the 2021 calendar year, a time that ended nearly four months ago. I used ‘nearly’ twice in the previous sentence. Time is relative these days. So is my amount of working brain cells.

Another example of parental brain warp: I struggled initially to come up with enough movies to fit this list. Admittedly, many of them came in the opening months of 2022 as I tried to catch up with all I felt I missed. And there are still many more films I have yet to see and will surely be talking about in the future, including: The Green Knight, Drive My Car, Nine Days, The French Dispatch, West Side Story, Nightmare Alley, Titane, to name a few. Yet as I set up this lighthouse of a list, stray ships slowly came in from the fog. I had, it turns out, seen more than I realized. I found small joys in the big things and big joys in the little things.

I’ve heard it said that parenthood doesn’t make you necessarily feel anything new, just the same things even deeper. Your mind plays over all the ways things can go wrong and the devastating despair accompanying it. And then you have moments where your daughter sits there, looking at you, a look of love and calm no island vacation could ever compete with. Some of these movies made me cry harder than I ever in my life. Some of them made me laugh so hard I was sure I discovered the center of my body, the place where my contracting abs finally hit a wall. And some of them baffled me in ways I could only grow to appreciate because the world looks so different – both simpler and more complex – when you see it through the eyes of a parent. There is no going back to the way I saw movies before. This is the new norm. And it’s pretty dope.

A Dress of Delightful Excess: House of Gucci 

Everything about this movie is too much. It may be too long. It tries to squeeze a lot of disjointed story into its movie sleeve. It’s got one of the weirdest sex scenes I’ve seen in a long time. Jared Leto successfully disappears under layers of makeup. Everyone wears delightful outfits. Lady Gaga gives it everything and her accent is a choice I nevertheless greatly appreciated. The entire cast is clearly enjoying their time making this film, clearly enjoying the pageantry and scenery of it all. And then Ridley Scott just makes it all move at such a clip that you don’t realize until the end you’ve seen just about the wildest fashion house story ever told. 

Embracing the Inner Child: Godzilla v Kong 

This is the rare blockbuster franchise film that seems to get what many others of its kind don’t: sometimes the most logical thing to do is to embrace the child logic we’ve long abandoned. The coolest part of Transformers as a kid was not the 20,000+ moving CGI parts we could see but never comprehend onscreen (as you can see in any of the last 5 Transformers). We didn’t need an explanation or realism; it just looked cool. The best Transformers film of the last ten years is actually Pacific Rim, which embraced simple concepts with gorgeous complexity, all while never forgetting these were giant, thudding machines and beasts beating each other up.

There is no better use of awesome child logic than when Godzilla fires a blast of atomic breath straight from the Earth’s surface to its center, opening up a passage to Hollow Earth. It makes no goddamn sense, and yet: I cackled with utter, complete glee. There is surely some in-universe explanation for all this (being drawn to power sources and blah blah blah) but all I could think of was an increasingly petty, increasingly insecure Godzilla just done with Kong talking shit about him.

The absurdity of it all only increases from there as Kong discovers a Battle Axe built by his common ancestors, furnished with a torn-off atomic dorsal plate of Godzilla’s ancient kin. Like, did I really just see a major blockbuster film suggest a wild ancient history of titanic creatures fighting each other in ways only dinosaurs could dream of? This is a film that gets it. Sure, there’s bizarre narrative dressing involving (mostly delightful) human actors, all doing their best to make the film feel a little more weighty than it really needs to be. But God Bless Warner Brothers and Legendary for allowing a film with two 300-foot plus behemoths to be this wild and weird.

The Lost World Award: A Quiet Place Part II

Three years after the monster success of Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg arrived with its sequel, The Lost World. The dinosaurs became even more front and center, with ever-improving CGI and animatronics. Spielberg cranked the action up by several magnitudes, with an unforgettable trailer cliffhanger, weaponized jeeps chasing fleeing, desperate dinos, two T-rexes tearing a man apart, a gymnastics-inspired raptor fight in an abandoned building, and a rampage through San Diego. It’s a movie that perhaps took the wrong lessons from the first film and blew everything else up. Yet so hypnotic is the result it took me over half my life to realize I kept falling asleep during the movie because it wasn’t that great.

Writer/director John Krasinski is very much channeling more-is-more TLW Spielberg with the way he repeats the structure of the original and uses the sequel as an exercise in showing his filmmaking muscles, going bigger and wider and louder. I just wish he went deeper. 

Everything about this movie can be summed up in a chase scene early in the film. Desperate to escape a chasing monster, the entire family runs through an abandoned barn towards the camera, debris falling behind them. Notice how I said ‘behind them’? That’s because there’s no sense of danger. Yes, there’s a monster jumping and throwing its weight around. Yes, there are scaffolds and platforms and bits of metal and concrete falling. But it never feels like Emily Blunt or her kids are ever threatened. It reminded me of the sequence in Peter Jackson’s King Kong – another instance of a new blockbuster director draped in excess – where the entire team tries to outrun a desperate, sprinting stampede of dinosaurs. The actors are doing their best to sell it, but the iffy composite work breaks the illusion: we know they’ll live.

It was maddening in the first film how often the ASL would get cut off by the frame. This happens several times in the sequel, and it feels like a metaphor of sorts. The aim to scale up the scope and craft pretty images ends up handcuffing the story it may be trying to tell. Just like with Lost World, the actors absolutely give it their all, drawing you into a deeper film that’s not quite there. And just as Lost World moved beyond Isla Nubar to the show fresh destruction in San Diego, Part II finds an island it nearly just as quickly destroys.

You know it’s a sequel when they Millicent Simmonds use her makeshift CI against a bigger speaker for a bigger signal across a bigger expanse of land. This isn’t the first sequel to repeat an original’s structure while dialing up everything else, and it certainly won’t be the last. But for a film franchise so obsessed with sound, it would be nice to see it return to finding the unmistakable, emotional signal amidst all the noise.

Try So Hard, Die So Hard: Space Jam: A New Legacy

You can see the thinking: bring on LeBron James – the man argued on a daily basis to be either the Air Apparent to Michael Jordan or everything MJ isn’t, depending on which side of the generational divide you talk to – and bring in a producer like Ryan Cogler, the writer/director behind the immensely successful Black Panther, and try to make a movie that’s actually good and not ironically good like the original. 

But sometimes the problem with having too many good intentions in the kitchen is that you overdo it: you make a meal so large and varied, no one could possibly enjoy it. Space Jam: A New Legacy is the filmic embodiment of a food coma – too much to absorb in the moment, and something you won’t remember the next day. 

You can follow the film’s logic. It wants to be hip to the audience, thinking itself especially clever for coming up with a villain that’s literally an algorithm. But what it seems to show in self-awareness feels to be a complete lack of it. It wants to be meta without understanding the meta its chasing is deeply unflattering. At times I didn’t know what movie it was trying to be: a good one, a clever one, or a shameless plug for HBO Max. There are elements of a good film here, with the way the conflict between LeBron and his tech-loving son plays out, the way the final game relies on LeBron himself accepting his son isn’t like him and should be allowed to pursue his own thing. But it will never not be disorienting to see the Night King, the It Clown, and the A Clockwork Orange gang cheering from the sidelines of a supposed kids film. In the end, the villain isn’t the algorithm; it’s Warner Brothers’ own hubris, assuming the algorithm knows us better than we do ourselves. But we’re not fools: we recognize when we’re being played. 

A Hopeful Beginning: CODA 

I love Twitter for the variety of takes it exposes me to. It helps me see my own blind spots and sometimes violently disagreeing with something helps me clarify my own thinking. But sometimes there is such a thing as reading too many takes. Where the topic is so sensitive and complicated that you can’t help but feel Twitter has hooked you into a kind of Brain Matrix, where you cannot separate your own thoughts from the Twitter hive mind. 

This was CODA for me. From the minute the first trailer hit, much of Deaf Twitter had a strong opinion, to say the least. It felt like the film would lean into harmful stereotypes we’d been working for ages to dispel. By the time the film rolled around, months later, the matrix had bored its way deep into my brain. In the months after seeing it, leading all the way up to the Oscars, I fluctuated between feeling like I was being too hard on it and, at other times, like I was being too passive and gentle. 

I choose instead to look at CODA as a beginning. It gave us our first Deaf Oscar winner since Marlee Matlin 35 years ago, paving the way for Troy Katsur and Youn Yuh-Jung to give us one of the most touching Oscar moments I can ever remember. Writer/director Sian Heder winning Best Adapted Screenplay gave her a chance to be a true ally and bring an interpreter on stage with her for her acceptance speech. And the many ways Heder and her team did their best to create an accessible set for her Deaf stars hopefully sets the standard for Hollywood from here on out. Let’s hope this is just the beginning and we’re well on our way to ‘narrative plentitude’. 

WTF Twist of the Year: Malignant 

There is a very, very specific tone this film carries through the first two-thirds of its runtime. James Wan and writer Akela Cooper know how to keep the scenes serving as building blocks for a narrative while doubling as possible clues to the final twist. When it finally comes, it literally unleashes a particular brand of hell delivered with utmost glee and confidence. This is a show delighted to exist and clearly fun for everyone involved to make. The energy is infectious, all the way through its batshit crazy final minutes. 

Return for a Better Grade Award: Zack Snyder’s Justice League 

There was no reason for this to exist. At no point during Joss Whedon’s 2017 version of Justice League – a film he took over after Snyder had to step aside to deal with a family tragedy – did I feel like the film had been wronged. Truncated, maybe. A weird hodgepodge of styles, yes. But a genius project deprived of enough air to truly soar? Seemed unlikely.  

Warner Brothers set a horrible precedent in spending many millions on allowing Snyder to go back and fulfill his vision. Way, way too many film journalists were harassed, doxxed, and harassed some more by fervent, deeply misguided fanboys in their pursuit to “Release the Snyder Cut”, a cut that, for all intents and purposes, did not actually exist. It’s one of the most toxic campaigns ever conducted. It should have been ignored. But desperate for some top billing streaming content to debut with its new app, HBO MAX, Warner Brothers gave in, to the tune of $70 million. I still think this should never have existed. However.

Two things can be true at once. 

The way this previously two-hour film got blown up into four-hour, six-part film, showing in bizarrely letter-boxed 4:3 ratio, often feels far too much like a student redoing and returning an assignment for a few extra points. They were never gonna get an A, but at least the effort will be rewarded with a slightly better grade. There is far more CGI, of varying quality. The villain is redesigned because more is more. The story is shifted and significantly restructured in parts. I’d be useless to tell you how much has really changed since the original was so deeply unmemorable beyond Henry Cavill’s CGI mouth. 

And yet.

A lot has been written about Whedon’s behind-the-scenes treatment of Ray Fisher and his Cyborg character, which felt marginalized in the original film. A lot of reporting has brought to light just how toxic a dynamic Whedon created on-set, for Fisher and for many others. So it’s pretty nice to see Cyborg’s role restored to its beefier status as the beating heart of the team, and for Fisher’s committed performance to truly get a chance to shine. You can imagine how demoralizing it must be to win a role you’re convinced will level up your career, only to be pushed off the screen and fighting a battle in the press for some accountability of the way you’ve been treated. The best story of Zack Snyder’s Justice League isn’t the one onscreen, but the ones along the margin it restored.

The Icarus, You Brave, Crazy Soul Award – Annette – written by Sparks (Ron & Russell Mael); directed by Leos Carax

I am so glad a movie like Annette exists. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a good movie. But it is an amazing movie. It matches the high-brow – great actors like Adam Driver and Marionee Cotillard – with the possibly lo-brow in a simple story of love poisoned by fame and jealousy. Oh, and there’s lovechild puppet, played completely for real. 

I thought a lot about Carax’s last film, Holy Motors, and how it was one of the last pure cinematic experiences I could remember. Aided by Alamo Drafthouse’s No Phones Allowed policy, we all sat in the dark, both narratively and literally, awaiting the craziness. I know for a fact none of us in the audience would have appreciated the movie the same had we watched it from the comfort of our own home. The claustrophobic nature of it all kept us so locked in so we could hum along with every bit of this fever dream of a film. 

Annette, for the most part, had to be seen at home. And you can feel how badly it needed to be seen in a theater. I applaud Carax for his bold vision and for Cotillard and especially Driver going absolutely full-tilt in their roles. Also: “Stepping Back in Time” is a total banger. 

Reclaiming the Narrative: The Matrix Resurrections – written by Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, and Alexsander Hemon; directed by Lana Wachowski 

Perhaps it’s just my exhaustion from the daily fanboy whining and entitlement I see on Twitter everyday, but few things delight me more than an artist who reminds us, as we should be reminded, that they do not owe us a single goddamn thing. The way Lily Wachowski destroys all your expectations in every aspect of this film is something that still brings a smile to my face. She saw the way the franchise had been purposefully misunderstood and weaponized by some of the worst people around, and how it would only continue to sink further into the moral morass if she didn’t do something about it.

This is a film made by a voice emboldened. You can tell she wants to wrestle back ownership of the narrative once taken away from her and her sister, and she’s going to cauterize every wound in pursuit of a clean, satisfying ending. The door is open for more, you could say. But I felt like this was a filmmaker who rediscovered purpose in her life – after suffering significant loss – and could only smile, after being so long in the dark, at the open sunshine ahead of her. 

The Arrival Award: Pig

It did not take long for Arrival’s first trailer to convince me I needed the whole meal of a film as soon as possible. By the time I finally saw it, I was coming straight from a long day of teaching. I figured the popcorn and constant munching would keep me awake. It failed. Perhaps it was the conditions created from the AC coolness and the new and very comfy theater seats. I have no idea. I just know that, despite my best efforts, I passed out for a chunk of this movie’s middle, only to wake up just as the incredible story turn takes place. You know, the one that makes you go, “Oh. My. God. This is the best movie ever.” And here’s the thing, the only reason I did not declare it the best movie ever afterwards is because I felt like a judge who stared at his phone too long before looking up for the figure skater’s final, dazzling move: my authority just wasn’t there. What if what I missed wasn’t that great? What if I fell asleep for reason not contingent on the theater but for the movie itself?

(Spoiler: it was definitely my fault.)

A very similar thing happened with Pig, a movie perhaps irreparably harmed by the misconception this was just gonna be John Wick but with Nicolas Cage and a dead pig. I kept waiting for the film to shift into something more in line with expectations, and yet it impressively fought me at every turn. This is such a deeply soulful film. So, of course, I had to succumb to the comfort of the couch and pass out through a small chunk in the latter half. Yet, as with Arrival, I woke just in time to see the climatic scene where the film finally lays all its culinary and thematic cards on the table. It’s so vastly different an ending than I ever expected, and one rich in metaphor and emotional depth. It’ll remind you of how good food can be just as much of a memory-packed time capsule as music, books, or film. Art you can and should truly digest. 

11. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar – written by Kristin Wiig & Annie Mumolo; directed by Josh Greenbaum

My wife and I first watched this less than a month into being new parents. We were sleep-deprived. I remembered really enjoying this film, but felt most struck by the adorable, enduring friendship between Barb (Annie Mumolo) and Starr (Kristen Wiig). The thing about being a sleep-deprived parent is you’re likely to forget a lot of plot details and only the essentials will remain – if even that. So I went over Wikipedia to remind myself of the actual plot of this story and, whew. They sure packed a lotta plot into this thing. But they also had a blast doing so. Wiig plays a truly bizarre, totally effective weirdo villain by the totally really name of Sharon Gordon Fisherman. Jamie Dornan shows up and kills it. Even Reba McEntire has a hilarious running gag of a role as Trish, the water spirit. 

You can tell the entire cast had a complete blast making this inspired bit of absurdity. But what I keep coming back to is Barb and Starr. It’s hard to believe it’s been over a decade, but Wiig and Mumolo earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for the BRIDESMAIDS script they co-wrote. The true key to that film’s runaway success was the film’s central friendship, between Wiig and Maya Rudolph, clearly modeled upon Wiig and Mumolo’s. It’s really sweet to see them aging up the friendship while keeping the same bond in Barb and Star and daring themselves to go even weirder than ever before. Who knows? I have no idea what their next film with a central female friendship will be about, but I hope it goes as inspiringly, delightfully weird as this one.

10. Luca – written by Jesse Andrews & Mike Jones; directed by Enrico Casarosa 

At some point, it gets old to see corporations fund stories that work harder to save the planet than the corporations themselves. Disney has insane cultural, technological, and economic power, and yet: it will probably plant a million more trees for Avatar 2’s release in December and then will go about its way perpetuating some of the worst impulses of capitalism. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a mandate in the highest of corporate offices that at least 75% of the big-budget films (which is all Disney seems to make these days, anyways) must be about saving the world, just so that the audience may be lulled into thinking that, actually, guys, everything will be fine no matter what cruelty of indifference the moneyholders show the rest of us. All of this to say: I’m so glad to see a movie with such small stakes again. The world is not in danger of ending, but a friendship is – and the beauty of Pixar is how they make both scenarios equally terrifying to consider. 

I will never forget the moment Luca exposes his friend and yells “Monster!”. The look of betrayal on Alberto’s face could crush a thousand hearts. It’s awful. And you’re fully aware in the moment of just how mean it all is. The central sea monster metaphor may get muddled at times, but the way the story can go from that cruel moment to its warm, heartfelt ending is a bit of Pixar magic.

9. Encanto – written by Charise Castro Smith & Jared Bush; directed by Jared Bush, Byron Howard, and Charise Castro Smith

Among the many things to admire about Encanto – the stunning and inclusive variation in character models, the earworm music – I keep coming back to the way it personifies the fracturing of a family. We’re told for so much of the film that Mirabel doesn’t have a talent, even though we know she’s going to turn out to have one. She has to! This is the Mouse House, after all, the Kingdom of Happy Endings! But I did not expect the film to curve further and further inward until you couldn’t help but feel everything it wanted to say. Mirabel just wants her family to be happy. She wants the status quo. She wants peace. But she cannot stand the idea of her being the reason for it being broken. The way the whole family heals whole again, all from the efforts of a determined Mirabel, is as inspiring a story as anything Disney has been a part of. 

8. Raya and the Last Dragon – written by Qui Nguyen & Adele Lim; directed by Don Hall, Carlos López Estrada, Paul Briggs, and John Ripa

We’ve all heard the phrase “in these divided times” far too much. And the many variations spun out of it only make it more nauseating. We know. We get it. And yet because there’s so many capitalistic forces working above us as we toil below, it can be easy to feel defeated and to feel like that’s just the way it’s been, it is, and it always will be. And yet. Sometimes seeing how simple things fracture allows us to see how they can – one day – be brought back together. Sometimes, a little trust is what thaws the coldest heart.

I hoped, after the way Disney and Lucasfilm absolutely did Kelly Marie Tran dirty in Rise of the Skywalker – really, it did a lot of fine actors dirty – that they’d throw their full synergistic corporate energy behind Raya. And yet it had the misfortune of being stubbornly released in the thick of the pandemic, when vaccines had just been released and people were still unsure of the movie theater. 

It’s a true shame because once the film gets past the aggravating Awkwafina AAVE, there’s so much to treasure about it. The way it opens and ends with the same event, separated only by the one side of betrayal, hurt, and loss, and the other with renewal, trust, and community. The way it allows people to have a change of heart. It’s not easy to make a movie about trusting others in such fractious times as we live in now, but the team pulled it off. And through it all, there’s a powerful heart beating beneath it, unafraid of grief and not having all the answers. All of this leads to a cathartic ending that hurt my chest and left a stubborn, yet welcome lump in my throat.

7. The Suicide Squad – written and directed by James Gunn 

It’s so bizarre to see James Gunn – once considered the heir apparent to Joss Whedon (yikes) as the Chief Architect of the MCU – having such a blast in the DC sand. It took a pretty unfair firing (for some admittedly terrible tweets from over ten years ago) from his third Guardians of the Galaxy film to set this all in motion, but after some time away from the spotlight of Twitter and the muckraking press, Gunn found himself with a golden opportunity to reignite a Suicide Squad that was once DOA after David Ayer’s 2017 version made more of a dent in merchandise than a favorable impression on anyone. 

The glee is palpable from the get-go, from the way Gunn has fun with shadows and angles in a sun-drenched prison to a beach invasion gone horribly, hilariously awry. From there, it only builds with the typical Gunn skill in deepening these goofy characters into something we cannot help but deeply empathize with. This is perhaps no more apparent than in a truly absorbing shot midway through the film where King Shark, the lovable, often-confused CGI wonder he is, sits in a van at night, staring longingly at his reflection in the window. These are broken people, we’ve been told. But only because they’ve been put in increasingly inhospitable situations. It’s not like anyone thought it would be a good idea to give a shark arms, legs, and board shorts. Even characters as ridiculous-looking and sounding as Polka Dot Man are given their own running gags with emotional payoffs. 

It all comes together in a final act showdown with – of all things – a truly massive starfish. You know you’re always going to get some good, darkly humorous one-liners in a Gunn film, but it was great to see him bring the other half of his formula – the heart – in such a wide, colorful variety of ways. 

6. Power of the Dog – written and directed by Jane Campion 

Benedict Cumberbatch has a voice. We often talk about the celebrities we could listen to read a phone book, but Benedict? He could read the blandest, most pathetic lines and his voice alone would make them sound like something stumbling upon Shakespearean. This places him in that special British actor class of Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, Michael Caine, and many others. I still remember seeing the otherwise forgettable Star Trek Into Darkness – the one JJ Abrams kept swearing didn’t have Khan in it only for Benedict to most definitely be Kahn – and sinking into the reverberation of Cumberbatch’s voice through the theater’s overwhelming sound system. His character may have been a dumb misdirect, but the man sold every syllable of it. 

So believe me when I say in a movie full of numerous superlatives – the golden hour, silhoutte-rich cinematography, the delicate yet assured editing, Campion’s open-hearted yet closed-fist direction, the entire extraordinary cast – the one that still strikes me the most is the way Cumberbatch cracks your heart. Even more of a marvel is how it has so little to do with his voice. Sure, he luxuriates in a bit of an American cowboy drawl, but we come to learn how much of it is a cover, a costume. Phil Burbank is a man bruised by time and loneliness, and the way we see a hurting man dare to feel hope again, all through Cumberbatch’s face, is what lifts this film into the unforgettable. There is so little room to be vulnerable in this American West, room that is rapidly shrinking. Power of the Dog possesses one of the year’s Top 3 Hidden in Plain Sight narratives (alongside Righteous Gemstones and Succession), and I’ll remember it most for the way Dr. Strange came under a heartbreaking spell he didn’t see coming. 

5. The Last Duel – written by Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, & Matt Damon; directed by Ridley Scott 

It sounded horrible from the beginning. A movie based on the true story of a 14th-century French woman sexually assaulted and the resulting duel that took place between her perpetrator and her husband, each fighting for their own truth of what happened to her. In other words: two men fight out what history records of a woman’s sexual assault.  And it’s gonna be made by three men: director Ridley Scott and writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. As much as I respected the filmmakers involved, I had to say: yikes. Even when news broke of the involvement of Nicole Holofcener (Please Give, Enough Said) – a truly underrated writer/director I’d love the non-Twitter crowd to more readily embrace – I wasn’t totally sold. Without knowing the structure, it sounded too much like she’d been brought in for damage control. 

But guess what? This is a truly fantastic film. While it initially came and went, a product of Hollywood’s ever-changing release strategies in these wild times, Film Twitter eventually course-corrected. People finally saw the actual product. And they, far more often than not, came away disciples. Count me as one of them. It’s got epic scale, bruising action, and, believe it or not, is quite funny – and not just because of the haircuts. Also pretty crazy: Ben Affleck has bleach-blonde hair and a bleach-blonde goattee and he’s one of the best parts of the film. 

What’s brilliant about this film’s structure is giving Matt and Ben the first two acts and Nicole the third is definitely going to make you think it’s a bandaid job by everyone involved. Except that’s totally the point. The first act follows Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and when my wife remarked how stilted the dialogue sounded, I knew something exceptionally clever was afoot. Carrouges is not an educated man. He does not read books. He has a kind of brutish pride clearly hiding his own insecurities, perhaps even over his awful haircut. And its perfectly dramatized in the way everyone responds to him and the he comes across as the heroic underdog. When the film shifts into the second act, it follows Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), an educated, flirty man – so the dialogue becomes more playful and sophisticated. But Le Gris is also the man who has committed the horrible crime against Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer), an act that appears in all 3 sections of the film. By the time we roll in the third act, I was already laughing at the way Holofcener repaints everything we have seen through Marguerite’s eyes. Immediately, holes are poked in the puffed chests of all the men we’ve seen before, and their lies are laid out in the sun to shrivel. 

Scott has proven his skill at filming brutal battles before, and here he’s in top form. These men aren’t just fighting for their lives. Le Gris is fighting to preserve the punishing patriarchy he’s clearly profited from whereas Carrouges is fighting for his wife’s truth and his own pride. It’s an ugly, exhausting battle, where Scott makes us feel every punch, push, and stab. But the trick of it all is the most brutal fight doesn’t even happen in the arena. It takes place before, when Marguerite is on trial, a hall full of old men and obeying women. Fighting through tears, sobs, and a restricting corset, she begs to have her evidence and pleas considered. The only responses she gets are ones Holofcener knows are deeply recognizable to women – the accusations disguised as questions and punishing contempt disguised as conspiracy theories – and Comer, in a performance criminally overlooked by the Academy, absolutely sells the inner and outer turmoil of it all. Kudos to the Scott, Affleck, and Damon for having the humility to recognize where to let Holofcener and Comer take over the story and remind us how seven centuries of time can collapse and lay bare truths we’ve still yet to truly confront. 

4. The Lost Daughter – written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal 

For most of the film’s beginning, Gyllenhaal’s camera follows the face of Leda (a beyond exemplary Olivia Colman) as she sets up her vacation in a sleepy Italian coastal town. Leda doesn’t say much, and what she does say is largely perfunctory and evasive, meant to keep people at a safe distance. But Colman shows it all in her face: something is clearly consuming Leda, especially as she watches a young girl and her mother play, chase, and sunbathe along the beach each day. It feels like Leda is holding in a lifetime of tears. You keep expecting to find out one of her two mentioned daughters died at a young age, or something equally irreversible. 

Instead, Gyllenhaal skillfully sidles flashbacks to a younger Leda alongside the present, like a heavy boat pushed away, only to slowly drift back and bump up against her. It’s such a skillful way to show memory and the cost of our choices in a way, one that reminds me of Jean-Marc Vallée and Nick Hornsby’s adaption of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, with dialogue and images torpedoing their way into the pain felt both past and present. It turns out no one died, but rather that Leda made a choice to pursue her dreams for a few years, childless. For her children, absence may have been as painful as death. Everything that’s come after is a desperate attempt to amend what may never be fixed. 

As the memories start to flood in in her first days at the villa, Leda goes to eat an orange in her room’s fruit tray, only to turn it over and see it’s rotted from the inside out. It’s a deft visual symbol of something clearly eating at her. Later, Gyllenhaal returns to the orange. After an entire film’s worth of Leda making decisions she doesn’t fully understand, controlled by forces and memories she feels little ownership over, she retires to the beach, orange in hand, and calls one of her now-adult daughters. It’s a chirpy conversation, one she’s going to ride as long as she’s able. As she caresses the phone with between her ear and shoulder, she peels the fruit. It’s ripe. It’s healthy. Perhaps it’s a sign Leda just needed to soften her own exterior, to forgive herself a little more often. Perhaps, instead, it’s a sign that the orange may be fresh for now, but will surely spoil later in just a few days, just like the one she found in her room the first time. We don’t know. They mystery is left in. It’s a sign of a mature, patient filmmaker in Gyllenhaal and one I’m eager to see make more films in the years to come. 

3. Jackass Forever – written by Eric Andre, Colton Dunn, Spike Jonze, Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, and Steve-O; directed by Jeff Tremaine 

Nearly eight years separates my younger brother and I. The difference felt surmountable when we were kids because we were, after all, a family unit. But as I graduated college and began moving beyond my comfort zone, it became more and more difficult for my brother and I to relate. We read different things. He liked playing repetitive racing video games, whereas I wanted platform adventures and variety. He loved hockey and, despite my lifetime of playing soccer, I could never understand how offsides worked in the rink.  I remember at one point getting a glimpse into our family phone plan’s data usage and seeing how my brother spent 95% of his data on social media while I spent 95% of mine on Safari, reading article after article, chasing rabbit holes until I reached the bottom of the internet. 

But one thing we truly shared is Jackass. We watched the first film together, feeling a bit scandalous without our parents around, and laughed ourselves into tears. Jackass Number Two only cemented that warm, elemental feeling of laughter further. And when Jackass 3D came around, I absolutely took a break from my twenty-something post-college ennui to join him in watching a dildo fly right towards us, daring to break the movie screen. 

I always tell people that despite the age difference between my brother and I, nobody – and I mean nobody – makes me laugh like he does. At some point it becomes a chicken and the egg thing. Does he make me laugh so hard because we broke into something deeper while watching the first Jackass movies, or did his cracking me up over the years prime me to be infected with that infectious Jackass fever? It doesn’t matter. The movies – and my brother – compel a laughter in me very few things can match. It feels, in many ways, like something sacred I never wanna lose. 

All this to say I was absolutely primed for this movie and yet found myself as deeply affected by it as any of their previous entries. The stunts are just as hilarious. The gross-out factor has been turned down a notch – they had to turn down something after the dangerous highs of the last two films – and it’s all for the better. These are simply guys who truly love each other, who don’t know how to make anyone else laugh quite as hard as they do together, age only making the truth deeper. They cannot quit each other. They don’t want to quit each other. They’ve found something deeper than church: the pure joy of laughter that comes from chasing after the most life a body can handle.  

2. The Mitchells vs the Machines – written and directed by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe

After the Summer of 2009 epidemic of Pixar’s Up making everyone cry within its first 10 minutes, I thought I was safe. No movie would ever shake out some tears from me that early in the game. They’d earn them in the end, maybe even in the middle. But certainly not before I’ve even had a chance to register the storyline. 

Then came along The Mitchells vs the Machines. 

Only months after my daughter’s birth, I knew my soft spots. For all the confidence I felt in myself as a parent and in creating a bond with my first child, I still felt the aching doubt that comes with knowing there is still so much ahead of you to screw up. There are arguments that may occur, words that may never be returned. I may, despite my best efforts, find her desperate to run away from home, headlong across the country, to pursue something I don’t understand. My point is: even the most confident of parents can be broken. And the first ten minutes of Mitchells is so deeply surgical in its story precision that it left me a sobbing mess. I cried tears I haven’t cried in forever, that I didn’t even know I had in me. And then we still had an hour and forty-five minutes to go. 

The highest compliment I can pay this film is that the rest of the movie never felt like a letdown, but rather a warm hug by some of the funniest, most brilliant people you know. There are so many lines tossed at you (and you’re bound to discover on repeat viewings) and just so many wonderfully personal things going on all over the screen. This is a film made by a team of people who loved what they were doing and wanted to make the best thing they possibly could. They have so much to be proud of. 

What many genre films get wrong is that they never move beyond the initial premise. They rely on the big monsters and the epic, sweeping events to carry it along. But the ones that stick with us the most begin as one recognizable movie before being interrupted by the genre as the next act kicks in. This is 100% true for Mitchells, which has a very recognizable beginning in showing a family unsure of how it will respond to a member leaving for college. The Dad doesn’t know if his relationship with his daughter will survive. The son doesn’t want his sister, his real best friend and biggest supporter, to be absent. And the mom is anxious at just what this new family chemistry will be like and just how will she absorb all the new sharp edges that come with it. Everyone is dreading the impact, but there’s no way to go but forward. I don’t know anyone who won’t recognize at least some core element of this setup. And then it’s all interrupted by a giant robot apocalypse. 

What makes Mitchells rise above all other sci-fi comedy fare is all the groundwork it lays in the initial act, drawing on the family’s conflicts to wring new laughs and pathos throughout. By the time Katie and her Dad again sing their ridiculous, too-cute song in the final act? Well, I didn’t cry as hard as the first ten minutes (those tears will take months – if not years – to replenish) but I felt it deep within my soul all the same. 

What a gift of a film. 

1. C’Mon C’Mon – written and directed by Mike Mills

There is something that feels so effortless about C’mon C’mon. You relax into its rhythm, utterly absorbed by the symphony of sound, editing, writing, and acting. It takes a seemingly mundane situation – an uncle takes care of his nephew for a few days – and makes it feel like the most important thing you’ve seen all year. There is so much wisdom woven into the tapestry of this film, there for you to feel as it wraps itself around you. I found myself deeply in awe, almost unable to move, at the seamlessness of Mills’ overlaying of dialogue over image and voice over emotion. It’s completely masterful. 

Mills’ described his goal with this film as wanting to juxtapose the intimacy of a parent giving a child a bath or putting them to bed alongside the bigger, deeper issues of the day. Johnny (a fantastic Joaquin Phoenix) and his team of kindred souls go from city to city, interviewing kids about the same age as Jesse (a stellar Woody Norman), asking them about their feelings of the future. As the film rolls, you can’t help but think about how much this country fails its own people, time and time again, leaving those without power to pick up the pieces. It’s as simple an issue as Viv (Gaby Hoffmann, incredible) trying to figure out who can possibly watch her son while she helps her husband in crisis, only for us to hear young kids talk about the many ways they don’t expect things to change or get better because the people above them don’t care enough. That Mills’ can make this all feel of one piece is a tremendous accomplishment. 

For most films, one time is enough for me. The message is received. The skill is appreciated. And then I move on. But no film brought out a desire for a repeat, over and over, like this one. I want to re-see the unbelievable acting of Gabby Hoffman and Phoenix as they reconnect over each phone call, the way the screen acts like a window into their own rooms, sitting us right beside them. I want to hear the heartfelt score – both hopeful and melancholic – as it waltzes under the interview responses of concerned youth. I want to savor every exchange between Johnny and Jesse, two lost souls connecting at the time they need each other most. 

There is a cinematography trend that’s been building for a while now where the camera favors a shallow depth of field. The actors we see are in hyper-clear focus while the background is so hazy as to almost be pixelated. Perhaps it’s the Portrait Mode effect. We’re easily impressed by this artsy visual. Perhaps its COVID filming protocols reminding us we can’t keep too many people in the background. Whatever it is, it’s everywhere. Now every film, consequently, feels shallow. They struggle to stick. So much is dependent on the shallowest of things moving in front of the screen, forgetting an entire world beyond it. That, to me, is what makes Mills’ directing and Robby Ryan’s cinematography so utterly transporting: they play with depth in a way I haven’t seen in a long time. So many shots involve characters going from the back to the front, and vice versa. They pop in and out of frame. They show us there’s an entire axis of movement we’ve been ignoring and maybe, must maybe, somewhere in that area are the truths we’ve been looking for. 

At the end, Johnny shares a recording – a glorified voice memo – with his sister, and we see her play it for Jesse. These people clearly miss each other, all the more richer from the many conversations they’ve had in the past week or so. Johnny brings up the time Jesse asked if he’d remember any of this, this wild and crazy time they’ve shared together, and how he was convinced his nephew, destined to grow and move on to bigger and more impactful things, would forget. It’s an upsetting revelation to Jesse. “So I said,” Johnny continues, “I’d remind you of everything.” I hope to have this movie in physical form sooner than later because that’s all I want: to be reminded of the power of a single film and how it can slide in deep within you, filling a vacancy you never realized you had.