Life during this pandemic has challenged us in many ways. It’s forced us to slow down their lives and remain in one place, which, for some of us, may be a welcome adjustment. For others, it’s forced us to confront the trivialities of our lives, the constant, whirring fluff we surround ourselves with. The emails we decided we had to answer and couldn’t wait. The extra trips to the store we had to make because we were too distracted the first time. The money we had to spend on subscriptions we forgot about. But being in lockdown challenges us to think about how we are now and how much we like the person we’re suddenly spending a lot of time with: ourselves. There aren’t as many distractions to hide behind. The true self is there, naked and out in the open.

Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal launches us into Ruben’s normal, as the drummer of a fictional two-piece band, Blackgammon. It’s loud and aggressive and very quickly things start to go awry. The tinnitus and ringing surfaces. Before long, Ruben’s lost 80% of his hearing. His entire creative life has been cratered in a way he cannot even begin to figure out how to climb out of. His pursuit of answers leads him to Joe (Paul Raci), who leads a recovery house for Deaf addicts. And it’s a struggle for Ruben from the very beginning because he’s so convinced – or at least he’s determined to convince himself – that he’ll return to something approaching normal. He’s decided he just needs to get these two cochlear implants and everything will be fine. Just an expensive, invasive ticket back to his Earth. 

In an interview with the Observer, director and co-writer Darius Marder nailed just why his movie is perfect for 2020: we are, like Ruben (Riz Ahmad), desperate to return to a normal that may no longer exist.  We keep dreaming of all the things we’ll do when life is the way it was before. But before may never come, at least not the way we remember it.  We have to accept and adapt or risk being left behind, tumbling into a cycle of frustration and regret. 

The Crack of Dishonesty

There’s a moment late in the film when Ruben (Riz Ahmad) has done the deed: he’s had the surgery for his cochlear implant yet hides his head. He’s conscious of the scars. He’s even more conscious of what the scars mean in his new home. But it’s not the surgery itself that’s truly the problem. There are many Deaf out there with the same implants and their own Deaf identity strong and intact. The line of demarcation, in this case, is not about choosing to gain some form of hearing. It’s about the dishonesty of it all. Ruben makes deals on the side and in the shadows, selling his RV and his recording equipment and anything he can get money for. The brilliance of the way Marder portrays this is we don’t quite know at first what Ruben is going to do with the money. He looks just as much like an addict desperate for another hit as he does a man desperate to return to his old normal as a hearing man.

When he returns, Joe is ready for him. Ruben knows he did this the dishonest way. He’s wearing a hood over his stitches the entire time. All his needs, he contends, is just to stay there three more weeks until his implants activate. That’s all. Just three weeks. 

But Paul’s seen this before. The nervous energy. The shame. The pleading. The dealmaking. 

Prior to the surgery, Joe had tasked Ruben with sitting in an empty room each morning with nothing but some paper, a pen, and a cup of coffee. He wanted Ruben to get it out. To write everything that came to mind. To give himself a chance to see his own thoughts and patterns and be more conscious. He wanted Ruben to come close to, if not touch, the feeling of stillness. For some of us, the idea of an empty, quiet room to write sounds wonderful. To feel unbound by time and responsibility and to have the freedom to just sit with ourselves? That can be pretty great. But for Ruben, there’s too much clawing at him from the inside out. For someone desperate to leave and return to normal, that empty room might as well be a prison cell. It’s as suffocating as it is bare. 

“I wonder all these mornings you’ve been sitting in my study, sitting,” Joe says, “have you…had any…moments of …stillness? Because you’re right, Ruben. The world does keep moving and it can be a damn cruel place. But for me…those moments of stillness, that place, that’s the kingdom of God. And that place will never abandon you.”

What comes next physically pains Joe. Someone who once showed great promise has escaped his grasp. Stillness won’t be found with the walls of his program.

“As you know,” Joe continues, “everybody here shares in the belief that being deaf is not a handicap.“Not something to fix. It’s pretty important around here. All these kids…all of us, need to be reminded of it every day. And my house is a house built on that belief and built on that trust. And when that trust is violated, things happen. And I can’t have that.”

While some will (understandably) read this as Joe kicking out Ruben solely because he got a cochlear implant, I don’t think that’s the trust that’s broken. The trust is one of honesty. It’s something central to a recovering addict. It’s also central to building an identity. It’s not just the surgery for Ruben. It’s sneaking into Joe’s office to use his internet. It’s roping in fellow housemates to make deals for him. It’s spinning a web of deceit in which the central conflict is the inability to ever truly confront oneself. And in that avoidance, stillness is impossible. The internal noise is too much, too invasive and disruptive. 

Building the Empathy Machine 

Marder and his co-writing brother Abraham tie their main character and central predicament together like a taut, unforgiving rope. Ruben relies on his hearing entirely to do his job well. But Marder isn’t just interested in sound – he’s just as interested in finding peace. What makes Ruben the perfect character for this predicament is his status as a recovering addict. I would never claim to know the life of an addict, but I do know that stillness is something they constantly seek and struggle to find. There is always something gnawing at them, calling them and guiding them towards relief in the form of another drink or another dose. In the silence, you can hear all your demons. 

There is a point where it looks like Ruben is on his way to a happy story. He’s finally learning to sign. He’s making connections with the Deaf members in the house and taken to showing off a bit to the Deaf teacher he’s worked alongside. We can see where he can truly find some kind of new identity. But that wouldn’t be honest to Ruben’s core. At least not yet. 

When Ruben gets his cochlear implants activated, I recognized that look of fear. That look that says it can’t possibly be the thing you’ve dreamed for and expected. It just can’t. It sounds too weird and a few thousand miles too far away from what you once knew sound to be like. I remember getting my digital hearing aid for the first time. I could feel fear and anger and all kinds of things bubbling up within me. I wasn’t sure who to direct it at. So I just crumbled inward. I wasn’t going to be more hearing, like I was promised. The world was not going to make more sense, at least not initially. It wasn’t the hearing aid that was going to adjust, they told me – it was going to have to be me. 

As someone who’s heard the cochlear implant debate for so long, and who’s grown exasperated at all the delusions the hundreds of activation videos online show, I deeply appreciate the way Marder and his sound designers show the reality. He doesn’t tell us what happens, but instead uses the film’s two biggest empathy machines in its sound design and in Riz Ahmed’s incredible, deeply-felt performance. We can just see it in his eyes. We see the panic set in. The dream he has so nervously reached for has now arrived and it’s absolutely nothing like he imagined. Even worse: for him, there’s no clear way out. He can’t just smash a coffee cup and storm out of an empty room. He can’t just reverse the surgery and get his money back. The door to the life before his loss has shut behind him and locked itself. He can only look behind through the window, but he’ll never return to normal. The only way is forward into the unknown. 

Chasing Stillness 

There’s a handful of subtle things this film does so well and with such intention – especially with the way it presents sound as it gets disrupted, pushed around, drowned, and laid out to dry. One of my favorites is the way the subtitles don’t kick on with the ASL onscreen until Ruben himself uses it. He doesn’t get to fully access the new world around him until he stops fighting it and just tries. Soon enough, he’s become a favorite, with his infectious personality and his deep-rooted energy. But we can tell by the way Joe offers him opportunities of stillness and he responds by smashing donuts and screaming into empty rooms. This isn’t a solution that’s going to last. 

When people ask me what I appreciate the most about being Deaf, they often assume it’s the silence. “You can just take your hearing aid out,” they say, as I talk about the things around me that are loud and that shriek in ways that warp my brain. But it’s taken me over 30 years to realize it’s not silence I’m chasing: it’s stillness. When I can walk around the neighborhood without my hearing aid in the morning, there’s a stillness present in me that allows me to think about whatever comes to mind. The noise of the world has, if only temporarily, been removed. Deafness has taught me stillness. It’s made it a muscle I exercise. It’s how I can sit in a coffee shop full of people and focus on the writing at hand; it’s also how I can become so severely disrupted by just the slight tinkering of a person in the kitchen as I try to work. Silence isn’t always in stillness, and stillness is not in every moment of silence. Like the digital hearing aid or the cochlear implant, silence is a tool that pushes you towards the stillness you really crave. That’s when you, like Ruben at the end of the movie, can finally take a deep, unburdened breath. 

In the early months of the pandemic, my wife and I had a bit more time to work with. While my Top 20 of 2020 list is coming, these are some of the older films we watched and enjoyed throughout the year.

Moonstruck (Amazon)

You may expect to hear this from someone who was born the year before this movie came out, but: what a weird, utterly delightful movie. The whole thing feels heightened, as if characters are dealing with life and death when they’re really struggling with love and what it means to them. And maybe that’s the point: love, at its most aching and enthralling, feels like a rollercoaster through peaks of life and euphoria and valleys of death and heartache. It’s so confident in its style and cadence that you can’t help but admire and love it. 

The final scene incorporates almost every character we’ve come to know and takes place around an increasingly-crowded kitchen table. It’s beautiful in its construction, the way Olympia empathetically tells her husband to end his affair and he grows quiet and teary at the grace of how she ties her forgiveness up in her demand; the way the doorbell keeps ringing and we think, “Oh God, another person! But to sit where?!”’; the way you keep thinking it’s going to be the most explosive, ugly conversation ever, that there’s no way this can possibly work out, and yet, when it’s all said and done, it’s gorgeous and freeing and they all take a rather heartwarmingly bizarre family picture together. 

Leave No Trace (Amazon Prime)

Director Debbie Kopnik arrived as a documentary filmmaker, and that careful, objective eye is evident. No one is ever judged. There are no villains. There is an awful lot of conflict, however, and it’s beautifully, patiently etched. We see it with the daughter slowly recognizing that what her father thinks is best for them may not actually be. That there’s worth in trusting a system he’s so deeply opposed to. That the world and community he fights and runs away from may be the one she actually wants to be in. The final exchange, wordless and heartbreaking, is one of the more gorgeous things I’ve seen all year, and not just because of the lush forest it takes place in. It’s a silent protest that flows into an acknowledgment and, finally, bittersweet acceptance. 

Juliet, Naked (Hulu)

A spark is a dangerous thing. It makes pistons pump and cars run. It gives life to barbecues and satisfying grilled foods. It lights warm candles in the still darkness. But it also leads to fires, from the minor and quickly stomped out to the wild and disastrously destructive. I know this because I’ve been on both sides. I’ve seen the sparks in my life that have led me astray into crazy situations involving regrettable screenshots and multiple lapses of mental and emotional logic. I’ve also been a part of sparks that not just gave me life, but the kind of life I’ve often longed for. 

Juliet, Naked is about these sparks. For Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), there are a great many sparks, short and attractive, that have led to a life of multiple kids with multiple mothers. They’ve led to a life tinged with regret and the desperation for one more invigorating spark, and yet the quiet resignation that it’s not only something he won’t experience, but that he probably doesn’t deserve. For Annie (Rose Byrne), the spark is something sorely needed, but one she worries is a good ten years too late. She’s as terrified of it as she is drawn to it. It could go either way. 

Based off Nick Hornby’s novel, there’s a beautiful collision of what happens when a person who’s lived too much meets a person who’s lived too little. They’re both struggling with their own accumulation. Tucker Crowe’s got more kids than he can keep track of, all with different mothers. Rose is plagued daily with the thought she’s wasted the last 15 years of her life, in a cycle of comfort and never, ever doing anything outside her comfort zone. What this movie shows more than anything is that it’s never, ever too late to connect.

I think a lot about a short scene in the middle of the movie. Tucker has just hosted one of his daughters – who’s very young and very pregnant, repeating a cycle he’s been unable to break in his own life – for the weekend. Except it’s not even his house. It’s his ex-wife’s house. While he lives in a shack out in the backyard. There’s nowhere else for him to go and no other way to entertain her. So he does the best he can, which he knows is not nearly enough. As he drops her off on the bus, he calls her name. “Hey,” he says. “Thank you for coming to visit.” You can feel through Hawke’s great performance the full weight of the words. He’s genuinely grateful. He knows he doesn’t deserve the opportunity. And then: “Wish it was more fun.” Not for him. For her. That it was more worthwhile. That it would leave her feeling hopeful about her birth father and not slightly bemused or embarrassed or resentful. There’s a parallel universe he imagines in that moment in which he’s the supportive, loving father she wants him to be, and they’re having a great, laugh-filled weekend together. The pain in his words at the bus stop is the sound of knowing that universe isn’t the one you’re currently living in.

 I deeply admire the way Jesse Peretz keeps this wild story from giving the too-safe, unrealistic ending. Both characters have to acknowledge the trickiness of the future. The best romances we see onscreen may always feel like time is running out; but the ones that give us hope are the ones that show us that it is never too late to hold something worth fighting for. 

Valley Girl (Amazon)

Clearly a product of its time, it’s a fairly formulaic story about the girl who falls in love with the guy from the other side of the tracks. What elevates it to something special is the absolutely electric chemistry between newcomers Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman. Seriously, find someone in your life who looks at you the way Foreman looks at Cage. Even your most loving animals cannot compete with her infectious smile. 

Broadcast News (Amazon)

It’s always fun to revisit a movie you haven’t seen in ten years (a fun thing about memory is when you can’t even remember how long ago it was and don’t want to confront the fact that maybe it was even just a few years ago). I remembered the love triangle. I remembered Albert Brooks being the brainiac, talented friend and William Hurt the smooth dullard. I empathized deeply with Albert Brooks’ character. I knew the feeling of being that guy in love with a woman who just couldn’t quite cross the friendship line with you. Of representing everything they like and still somehow not being enough. But I also recognized the insecurity of just simply wanting to be recognized for the skills I had. 

What I didn’t expect this time around is how much William Hurt’s character would resonate with me. I could feel it in my chest. That imposter syndrome where you know how to be honest about the skills you lack but can’t quite get people to believe just how real and deep those feelings are. Some of this comes from the masterful writing, but a big chunk of this comes from Hurt’s performance. There’s pain and longing in his eyes. He’s so desperate for approval by people he respects, but he’s so unsure of his ability to even pull it off. He wants to be a peer, but he’s terrified of the criticism that could come with taking a risk. He’s moved up through the ranks as the handsome, smooth guy not just because he can, but because being a good-looking face is easier to deal with than the crippling lack of self-worth. 

Which makes his turn at the end even more excruciating. In a weird way, I wanted Holly and Tom to work together so bad. I wanted them to go on vacation. To somehow make it work. To maybe not be their intellectual match for each other but perhaps an emotional one. 

I understood better Albert being so mean to Holly because when you don’t want to confront someone you love not sharing your feelings, you want to push it away as much as possible. And because you inevitably change your minds – because you are human after all – sometimes the only effective way to do this is to be truly mean. Because you can be mean in a way very few people can. You know where the deepest pains are to be found. (Read this excellent Bright Wall/Dark Room essay that gets into it further)

What I also took away from this is just amazing a character Holly is. It’s such a beautiful mixture of Brooks’ writing and Hunter’s performance. When a producer comes by and tells Holly, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” and she responds with, “No. It’s awful.”? It absolutely kills me. It says so much about her as a character but it also says so much about women all over the world who regularly have to deal with mediocre white men making all the decisions or those some mediocre white men listening to their great ideas and brushing them off with a bit of mansplaining. It’s a lonely, depressing state to be in. And Holly Hunter makes you feel every inch of it. 

How Do You Know (Amazon)

While Broadcast News is a testament to just how great a movie can be when James L. Brooks is firing on all cylinders with a great cast, his 2009 film How Do You Know shows just how quickly the train can get derailed. I remembered this film more for the headlines it created – the excessive bafflement at just how a simple movie with no action scenes or expensive CGI could cost $100 million to produce. I also remember how it seemed to fall off a cultural cliff despite starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd (before he became the Fountain of Youth), Owen Wilson, Jack Nicholson, and (the lone bright spot) Kathryn Hahn. I figured this was just a movie where famous, well-regarded people got paid a lot of money to just throw out something, anything. 

But the bizarre thing about this movie – and what may help explain how inert it is – is how hard Brooks worked at it. He spent over 300 hours interviewing professional and amateur softball players to learn about them. What makes them tick. How they deal with disappointment. How they move on from a historically short career. It all seems pretty cool until you realize just how little softball plays in the life of Witherspoon’s character. 

And then it just gets weirder from there. You can see Nicholson straining to make a character out of his lines and, uh, not quite getting there. You can see Rudd and Witherspoon trying their best to spark the movie to life and also not quite getting there. You can see the outlines of the story Brooks wants to really tell and the themes of disappointment he really wants to work with while his movie title is a question about how you know if the person is the person. When it comes down to it: the movie title itself shows how confused this movie is. It sounds like a question. But there’s no question mark. So what is it? 

But the thing about watching something by a titan like Brooks is that even while sifting through the trash, you’re gonna find something pretty neat. There’s a late scene in which a very pregnant Kathryn Hahn gives birth and her husband, as supportive as he can be throughout, decides to propose to her. What elevates this whole scenario is the way the husband asks Rudd to film the whole thing and everyone gets so swept up in the damn emotion of what’s happening that Rudd doesn’t even realize the camera is not recording. And then after some griping, they do something unexpected: they do it all over again. And it’s still pretty moving. To me, this is what Brooks does exceedingly well as a writer: finding the emotional heartbeat of comedic scenarios.

Ishtar (Prime)

I came to this movie out of sheer fascination. I had been reading about writer, actress, and director Elaine May and how she hadn’t directed a film since 1987’s Ishtar. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for female directors to be thrown in Director Jail for long periods of time for perceived misfires while their male counterparts can cost a studio hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and still get another big-budget job as if nothing happened. Adding further to the intrigue is how Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman both agreed to star in this almost as a favor to May, who had done a great deal of movie-saving, uncredited script work to some of their bigger hits (Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, Hoffman’s Tootsie).

So what do you get when you combine all these elements with a blue-eyed camel, a Morocco film location, and the premise of two terrible lounge singers getting mistakenly drawn into an international crisis they’re only barely aware of? Well, you get Ishtar. It’s such a singular, bizarre mix of elements – both behind-the-scenes and in front of the camera – that enjoying it is an exercise in abandoning expectations and appreciating what happens when people try something new and original. It’s especially fun to see Hoffman and Beatty try to be deliberately bad at their lounge singing jobs, as it is to see a young Charles Grodin nearly run away with the whole movie.  

Tiptoes (Prime)

I…uh…I have no words for this movie. You ever see something so bizarre, so tasteless, so completely stacked of baffling decisions that you are far more interested in just how something like this got made than the actual movie itself? That is Tiptoes. 

So I will link you to an article that gives some explanation for your bafflement. Whew.

Crawl (Hulu) 

The only thing more terrifying to me than being in close proximity to alligators is being trapped in close proximity to alligators.  Director Alexandre Aja and writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen do a beautiful job in building on this foundation of fear.

This film follows a simple but effective structure. 

1. Give us a spunky, stubborn protagonist with a unique skill (swimming – which comes in handy)

2. Strand her stubborn father in a flooding house in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane. 

3. Lean into both of their stubborn natures so they’re both trapped in the house. 

4. Throw in alligators. Lots of them. 

Aja really milks all the tension out of this premise, with blind spots, subtle movements, and a jump scare so bad I gave my wife a secondary scare from my reaction alone. Just when you think they’re almost about to escape, another wrinkle is thrown in. It all adds up to a pulse-pounding, highly-entertaining ride worth checking out on a dark, stormy night. 

Harold and Maude (Amazon Prime) 

I had no idea what to expect going into this 1971 classic. I especially had no idea what to expect after its first scene, in which an apparent suicide attempt is treated with mild indifference. Ninety minutes later, I couldn’t get the smile off my face. What an unexpected, absolutely delightful film. 

Colin Higgins’ script has a young, rich man obsessed with death (hence the playful suicide attempts) and deeply struggling with any point to his life until he runs into a wild old lady, Maude, who steals random cards and also attends the funerals of people she doesn’t know. To say any more would rob you of the discovery that comes with watching something so touchingly original and unorthodox. What makes it all work is the incredible direction of Hal Ashby. I don’t know how to describe it as any other way than treating his subjects with dignity and warmth. The slow, deliberate camera movement. The staging. The use of depth and space. It all ties Higgins’ script together in a warm, memorable blanket. 

Straight Up (Netflix)  

I’m really thankful my wife and I had seen 1939’s Her Girl Friday only a month before. Why? Because otherwise I would have said, “Wow, I haven’t seen a romantic comedy like this before.” And I’m well aware of just how annoying that genre of writing is where people watch old movies without context as if they’ve just stumbled upon new, alarming insight.  

Straight Up is a hugely entertaining callback to the screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, in which female characters often dominate the relationship and challenge the masculinity of the male. This is exactly what happens with James Sweeney’s Straight Up. Sweeney plays Todd, a guy who’s not even totally sure he’s gay due to his extreme aversion to gay sex and, really, sex in general. He meets Rory (Kate Findlay), who not only connects with him but doesn’t seem to mind the lack of sex in their early relationship. It’s a fascinating dynamic that plays out over the course of the film, with its own ebbs and flows, and overlaid with that festive, rapid-fire dialogue of the screwball classics it honors. Sweeney and Findlay play their characters beautifully, equally hilarious and moving. This is a highly underrated movie lost in Netflix’s algorithm. It straight up deserves more. 

Total Recall (Netflix) 

We look back at TOTAL RECALL as a good movie and perhaps even the better Phillip K. Dick adaptation. But when seeing it in 2020, I’m struck by the sheer creative willpower it took to pull it off. The filming in Mexico City. The futuristic cars were made out of the local Mexican transportation. The impressive prosthetic effects, some of which took 15 puppeteers to pull off. This is not a movie you make when you want it done simply and easily. This is a movie you make because you believe in it. Because you want to do something wildly different. 

It’s also startlingly relevant today. To see a governing head willingly cut off the air supply of its population to maintain power? It’s not a far line to draw between that and the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to provide ANY kind of federal response or support to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. If you don’t believe that our government would willingly steal and hide a life-changing discovery from another race, well…maybe you need to read your history books a little more closely. It’s as American as apple pie, warts and all. 

Zardoz (Hulu) 

When my wife and I watched ZARDOZ, we had a perpetually stunned reaction throughout. Just what 100 minutes of fresh hell had we exposed ourselves to? But in the time since, where a quick Google search has greatly increased my understanding of the story, it’s grown on me. More importantly, it’s made me realize how much more I need to appreciate movies that go for broke in trying something new. They may be unsuccessful in their execution, but hundreds if not thousands of people gave it their all.  It distinctly feels like a movie that was written by someone who read the book, but greatly overestimated how many other readers were out there. Even writer and director John Boorman, more well known for films such as Deliverance and Excalibur, admitted he didn’t understand parts of what they were making. Should you endeavor to watch this film without the assistance of edibles or copious amounts of alcohol (this is not an endorsement), I will say Boorman shows off some impressive in-camera tricks at the end with reflections and light. You just have to get through the rest of the movie first. 

Easy Rider (Prime)

Somehow I saw this movie as a kid and only remembered Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper riding motorcycles on the open road. I thought it was pretty much just a road trip movie, apolitical and full of long, sweeping shots of Americana. I thought it’d feel like a relic of the past. 

Holy smokes. 

Somehow this film feels as timely as ever. There’s a lot going on in America that’s exposed the consequences of steep capitalism and systemic racism, where it can feel like you can never quite catch up to where you want to be. Sometimes it’s paying off a loan early and having your credit score dinged. Sometimes it’s watching the richest man in the world run away with his wealth, likely hiding in his secret lair in Mount Rainier, giving his bald head another shine as he pumps out a few more biceps curls. Quarantine has done a thing to our brains where we are more available than ever to see what’s going on in the world, scrolling through our social media feeds and looking for answers just as we step into new questions. But that availability has been matched with an unprecedented level of chaos, when a pandemic rips through a country not entirely convinced of it. As a result, there’s a half-hearted sentimentality of just wanting to get away from “it all”. To chase a freedom in which we can bet on ourselves and not be beholden to systems we violently disagree with. 

The premise of Easy Rider is simple in that Fonda and Hopper get enough money from their latest cocaine deal to take a long, leisurely ride through the Southwest and Deep South. They roll into communes. They camp out under the stars and smoke lots of weed. And then they run into people like George, an ACLU lawyer played by Jack Nicholson, in an insanely magnetic performance that actually awarded him his very first Oscar nomination. 

Towards the end of the film, after a great deal has happened, Fonda demises, “We blew it.” It’s never quite clear exactly what “it” is and Fonda in the fifty years since refuses to tell. But I could feel it in my bones. Here were two guys determined to be free, only to realize they were widely rejected in swaths of the country and that, one day, they were going to run out of money and have to get a job just so they could have a home to safely sleep in. They were gonna have to reinsert themselves somehow back into the system they had tried so hard to reject. 

Turner and Hooch (Disney+)

There was a time when McDonald’s sold VHS tapes in their restaurants. One of those tapes my family bought was Turner and Hooch. Seeing it again many years later, I’m struck by how well-designed the premise is. You got a cop who’s a neat freak and soon to retire. And then you throw at him a particularly complicated, sneaky case that involves the dirtiest, nastiest, drool-heavy dog you can possibly find at the tightest button of them all. It’s a classic setup of conflict – organized order meets chaotic mess – that’s elevated immensely by Tom Hanks’ performance and his hilarious, adorable energy with Hooch. There’s a reason this movie is looked back at fondly by many, and it has nothing to do with the crime that drives the plot. I still think about near the end (spoiler alert!) when Hooch is laying on the vet’s table, clearly not going to make it, and Hanks, reminiscent of his turn in Captain Phillips, pulls off that same stunned, emotionally-broken performance that inevitably drains my face of all its tears. 

Three Men and a Baby (Disney +) 

After a particularly gnarly episode of Hannibal, my wife and I were looking for something fun and light to rinse out our brains with. Lo and behold: 1987’s Three Men and a Baby, directed by Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy (no joke). This is one of those movies I’d seen so many times as a kid that watching it felt like a memory test. Even further: my wife and I, now expecting, wanted to see what baby tips we could glean from this filmic venture.  

The setup is clear: the film paints all three popular 80’s actors – Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg – as the ultimate, responsible-free bachelors. They all live together in a giant NYC designed by Selleck. And, of course, all three main characters have jobs – architect, comic strip artist, and actor – that, while demanding, usually have pretty flexible hours. Handy! And then after a particularly packed birthday party, in which all at least two of the men have to gently turn down women who just cannot be more than six feet away from them, they are presented with a gift at their doorstop: an abandoned baby. 

I had completely forgotten that Ted Danson disappears and doesn’t show up until over halfway through the movie (actors!). I had also completely forgotten about a very irresponsible drug bust that takes place in the middle. But what I do remember was only cemented further: this is a film with three highly-likable, charming leads with innate goodness. We want them to figure it out. We laugh at their mistakes and their deep misunderstanding of anything related to childcare and yet: it’s no less touching when we see at the end just how much little Mary has made an impact on their lives. They don’t care about the lack of sleep or the bizarre work hours. They just want that little girl to be safe and with a happy, supportive family. And that’s the most important lesson of all.  

One thing (of many) I appreciate about a Jim Jamursch movie is that it always moves with an unexpected rhythm and in an unexpected direction. Some of this is due to marketing. The Dead Don’t Die looked like some kind of delightful horror-comedy in the realm of Shaun of the Dead when it’s actually something far weirder and deliberate. 

What I didn’t expect with Paterson is to be held up to a mirror. 

Ever since my wife and I found out we’d be welcoming a daughter into this crazy world, a soft, gentle ticking began in the back of my head. I wasn’t worried about the loss of freedom or time or money. In fact, I look forward to sinking into those moments where night and day blur, and your only concern is to keep a child as restful and safe as possible. But the ticking came from a creative place. What was once a mild pull to figure out a system I could fall to (instead of a goal to rise to) became more urgent. I recognized that I had to shake out all my story and writing ideas from all their various trees and somehow organize them into a room I could walk into whenever the opportunity presented itself. In other words, I needed to get my shit together. 

So the first thing I notice about Paterson, of course, is that he leads a life of simplicity I almost envy. He carries with him one single notebook, in which he writes poetry in the spare moments before his job begins and in the time he has for lunch. He uses his walks to and from work each day to let his mind wander and stumble into words and phrases. And he truly seems to have no pressing interest in sharing his work with the world. 

Yet the most telling moment in the entire movie comes near the very end. His wife comes home so delighted with the success of her cupcake bake sale that she wants to treat them to a dinner and movie. Nothing about this is particularly exceptional except what Paterson leaves behind: his secret poetry journal, resting atop the couch. That Jamursch gives us a shot of Marvin, the adorable, ever-huffing bulldog is all the numbers we need to do painful math with: that journal is a goner. 

Sure enough, as Paterson and his wife arrive home, they walk into a floor covered with bits and pieces of his work torn apart. It’s confetti made from his very soul. But what’s most telling about this scene is how Paterson responds. His wife is angrier with Marvin than he appears to be. He doesn’t even respond at first, taking it in for a few moments before heading downstairs. He’s not even particularly interested in punishing the dog, managing a somewhat playful “I’m not very happy with you, Marvin” the next day as they sit across from each other in the living room. The kicker to all of this is that for the entire week we’ve been following Paterson, his wife has been asking him to make copies of his poems. She knows that the joy of keeping everything in one place has a mirror devil in how easy it is to lose everything all at once. Each day of the week, she insists. And each day he relents, saying it will happen. 

But it doesn’t happen. And it doesn’t happen for a very clear, painfully relatable reason: Paterson doesn’t think his poems are good enough. 

Remember when I said Jarmusch’s films always seem to zig when you expect it to zag? Life for Paterson in Paterson (yes, it’s the name of the character and the town) seems like any small town, with its sweet personalities and own personal dramas. But there’s one key exception: twins. Everywhere Paterson walks or drives, he daily seems to run across a set of twins. And they come in all shapes and sizes, no one particular race or gender or type. It’s almost as if there’s a town lottery in which someone is chosen each year to be duplicated. And if you’re hoping that at some point Jarmusch will give you a hint of just what the hell is up with all these twins, I can assure you he most definitely does not. No hand is tipped. No clues are given. 

But it’s pretty clear to me what these twins represent: imposter syndrome. Jarmusch only gives us Paterson’s perspective throughout the film, so we have no way of knowing if the rest of the town sees double as he does. But we do see how Paterson always notices the twins. He looks at them often enough that the balance tips from “Oh look, another set” to something far deeper. Imposter syndrome – in which one doubts their own accomplishments and is convinced they will one day be seen as a fraud – is a very, very real thing for creatives and especially writers. I imagine so much of this is due to the internal nature of our work. I can tell my wife nearly every day that I did some writing and it’s an accurate statement. But unless she searches through my computer – or my brain when I’m on a walk – there’s very little direct proof. It’s a leap of faith only rewarded by the occasional finished piece. I also think about how often I stumble across a piece I wrote – sometimes only weeks before, sometimes years – and marvel at how it’s much better than I remember. For the longest time, I accepted it with a private admonishment. I would tell myself that I could still write that well if I just kept at it, that I was just rusty and needed some extra practice. What I realize now, thanks to Paterson, is a private admonishment as such is just Imposter Syndrome with its hooks deep in me. I looked at my skill and craft through a rearview mirror without realizing it was just a plain old mirror showing my reflection. 

But to Paterson, these Imposter Syndrome twins only make sense when you compare him with his wife. As he works his way through the week – walking to and from work, writing poetry on his breaks – we see glimpses of all the projects his wife is working on. There’s the guitar she wants to buy so she can become a singer-songwriter. There are the many, many home and fashion projects that involve black and white in various arrangements. I kept waiting for Jarmusch to show something – anything – with her that clued us into why he spent so much time on her. At first, she seems to be what brings out Paterson’s kind, supportive core. But it was only long after watching the movie that it hit me: she shows her work. Sure, her work, by its very nature, is more visual. It is meant to be seen. But every day she is doing something that is wearable, edible, or liveable. It is meant to be shared with others. 

For each set of twins in Paterson, there’s a set of conflicting questions: will you show your work or will you keep it to yourself? Will you create or will you remain passive? And then the most important of all: will you consider yourself good enough or are you convinced you’re a fraud? Twins have shown us, time and time again throughout history, the many ways they can look the same and yet turn out so wildly different. It’s not the genes that usually decides this. It’s the choices. And Paterson shows us how the choices we make say an awful lot about how we view ourselves. 

Even at the very end, Paterson sits near the same waterfall he does every lunch break. He doesn’t have his journal, which currently sits at home in confetti form. But he also isn’t sure if he’s going to start another book. At least not yet. When a Japanese man comes over to talk poetry with him, Paterson refers to himself as a bus driver first. He’s imagined him and his twin and chosen the bill-paying profession over the creative identity. It doesn’t matter that Paterson knows all the poets the man is talking about or that he can even give him some extra bit of hometown trivia. It doesn’t matter how obviously in love with poetry Paterson is. He still does not believe he’s good enough. 

I didn’t fully appreciate Jarmusch’s last film, The Dead Don’t Die, until long after seeing it. Only in the back of my mind did I realize how much it had to say about climate change and our apathy towards life-threatening issues. Maybe it’s the shot of a bespectacled Adam Driver crammed into a little smart car that fools you into thinking it’s just gonna be a fluffy comedy. And you could be swayed by an adorable bulldog like Marvin and the many affable characters in Paterson. But it’s going to catch up to you. One day you’re gonna look in the mirror and you’re gonna have to decide which twin you’re gonna be.

Quarantine streaming has been a weird dance. Yes, we have more time. But Twitter, a pandemic, and underlying anxieties about what the future holds can do a number on the brain. This is my attempt to write about what we’ve watched in our time since It All Began.

Devs (FX)

Ex Machine and Annihilation – both also written and directed by Alex Garland – are two modern sci-fi classics that have stuck with me since first viewing. Throw in Nick Offerman – the spirit animal I wish to claim, the man I desire to be – and you could not possibly get me any more excited about a new show. For nearly a good 9 of the 10 episodes, I was all-in. The characters felt removed with a purpose. It embodied the filmmaking eye Garland had perfected since Ex Machina – evocative music with tranquil camerawork and shiny objects clashing with the sprawl of nature. Even as it moved slowly through its story, I held my trust it would stick the landing. 

The problem with putting so much weight on an answer that comes in the final episode is that it runs into the same problem the LOST finale did: how can you tie up so many different strands of ideas in an emotional, evocative way? Devs is a fertile playground for Garland to touch on things that clearly compel him. But as they funnel towards the final episodes, I…I don’t know. Something seemed amiss. It didn’t land for me. It felt almost like Garland himself realized the explanation couldn’t support the weight of what he had built, so he added layers that only confused the ending rather than deepened them. It may just be me (it probably is!). It may also just be a rare, gorgeous misfire from one of our best cinematic storytellers. 

GLOW (Netflix)

The word thing about our age of binging shows is that you’re sometimes recommended something on the promise it gets better. “It will pick up by the third season!” they say. I know this happens with shows – I distinctly remember how one of my favorites, Parks and Rec, didn’t click in place until the second season. But the result is that you can sometimes feel like you’re given homework. And as a writer who hears every other day how “you need to grab the readers by the first page!” – it can be hard to dip those toes in the water. 

I say all of that because, well, I started watching this show on the promise of how great the 2nd season was supposed to be. The first season started out a bit slow, carefully building its world, but after a couple of episodes, I began to appreciate the difference between vertical and horizontal storytelling. Horizontal storytelling is what we often think we want from our shows – a continually moving, ever-forward plot. Cause and effect. One thing after another. But vertical storytelling makes it look like the story isn’t progressing when, in fact, it’s going deeper and deeper into the characters. We see this a lot with “bottle episodes” that shows may have. Or where unusual character matchups are created to bring out new colors in them. When the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling are stuck in a shitty hotel, wondering if this show they’ve got themselves into is ever going to see the light of day, GLOW starts to pick up steam. It builds its characters. It strengthens its conflicts and contrasts. And then by the tail-end of the season, it starts running with the confidence of knowing what it is and wants to be. 

That only further continued in Season 2, where it grapples with a #MeToo situation that nearly tears the team apart before they slowly build each other back up again. And Season 3 does some really interesting things when the team moves to Las Vegas, combining its vertical and horizontal storytelling in interesting, emotional ways. It just so happened that we watched the final Lynn Shelton-directed episode, “A Very Merry Christmas”, the day after she died. I could see her fingerprints all over it, most especially in the love you can see she has for her actors and the difficult conversations they still need to have. This episode made me cry more than once and it hit me just how much I had grown to know and enjoy such a wide spectrum of characters over 3 seasons. 

Never Have I Ever (Netflix)

I wasn’t crazy about the first episode. It felt too busy, too clever, too…a lot of things. But here’s the thing: it also rather deftly set up every conflict – between friendships, parents, cliches,  and the overlying trauma story – all with a John McEnroe narration that, baffling at first, made total, perfect sense by the end. Too many shows love to hint at what’s to come without ever revealing anything. They prize mystery over clarity. It may be enough to draw a viewer in, but what makes you emotionally invested in what’s to come is a clear sense of everyone’s relationship to each other. It’s a large cast with a lot of dynamics. Never once did I misunderstood how they related to each other. And because of that, seeing characters start to collide with each other only further increased the investment. 

And there is so much to say about this show. That it 110% feels like Mindy Kaling’s brain injected into a high school teen comedy. That it’s the most diverse show I’ve seen. That it’s empathetic towards all of its characters in a way that feels like a combination of the best of James L. Brooks and any of Michael Schur’s TV series (some of which Mindy has written on). What takes this show up several notches is the overarching thematic work done with Devi’s recently passed father. We get caught up in the hilarious character interactions and then bam: we’re reminded why Devi is emotionally stuck where she is and what she needs to do to work past it. By the end, when it all comes together and Devi and her family can have a cathartic moment? My wife and I were crying just as much as the people onscreen. 

Atlanta (Hulu)

As I was nearing the end of Atlanta, grappling with all the storylines and cultural observations this brilliant show had weaved together, I was also working on my own feature script. Atlanta motivated and crippled me in equal measure. I made me want to create and yet presented a level of clearance I wasn’t sure I could even approximate. On one afternoon walk as I eyed traffic and scrolled through Twitter, I stumbled upon some screenwriting wisdom from a professional script reader. He said to be wary of I or T pages in your script. All of a sudden, everything I loved about Atlanta crystallized. You see, a script that looks like a towering I or T of text means it’s nonstop dialogue with very little action written in.

In other words: your characters are doing a lot of talking and not a lot of moving. This creates a long, tall pillar of centralized text making it look like one giant I. And before you start to think about dialogue-heavy movies you love, I’d challenge you to actually read their scripts. There’s a lot more action written into them than you’d expect. 

By the time my wife and I funneled towards the end of Season 2 (the last currently available), the masterfulness of the writing became even more evident. This is a show that uses action and movement as well as any out there. Before a character really expresses in words how they feel, you’ve seen several scenes of them sulking or screaming or being dismissed or condescended to. You’ve seen microaggressions and doors slammed in their face. You’ve seen actors that have been trusted, time and time again, to not use their words but instead their face and their body as their sole acting instrument. So when they finally do say how they feel: you see it coming. And the accumulation of emotion you feel for them as it finally lands? It’s brutal. There’s still a part of me that sinks when I think about Earn (Donald Glover) telling Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), “You’re so even keel usually, but my world is falling apart.”

Another example of this is how Al (Brian Tyree Henry) keeps talking about how successful the manager of another peer rapper is. Al especially mentions it to Earn, his current manager, hoping it will light a fire in him. And this goes on and on without every expressly stating the obvious: that Clark County’s manager is largely able to secure all these endorsements, connections, and great gigs for his client because he’s white. It’s not until that same scene in which Earn tells Darius his world is falling apart that Earn finally asks a Hasidic Jew at a passport center (it will make sense when you see it) if his Jewish lawyer friend is better than all the black lawyers. The man’s response lays out what’s been hinted at for nearly two seasons: “No, but he gets the kind of opportunities Black wouldn’t because of systemic racism.” 

There is so much you can learn about writing with Atlanta, and I still think, many months later, about how well they set up their core conflict between Earn and Al. Al doesn’t think Earn is getting him enough gigs or enough money. Earn doesn’t think Al is understanding how he has to work his way up to better gigs. It all comes to an explosive head after a gig completely, disastrously falls apart.

The construction of the moment is key: it gives just enough fault on each side of each character for us, the audience, to have an opinion that could go either way. We can see how hard Earn is working to get everyone situated and have a profitable gig, yet we can also see how some of the corners he cut endangered them. We can see how angry Al is with the gig falling apart, but we can also see he’s looking too high while sitting too low and how he completely overlooks how untrustworthy and dangerous his own cousin is. What’s so beautiful and heartbreaking about this is how Earn and Al can’t take it out on each other. It’s why Earn has to pick a very ill-advised fight with Tracy, a man who towers over him and beats him up badly. Earn’s gotta take all of his anger out on Tracy because there’s no way he can stomach doing it to his true cousin Al. The way all this works together and leads up to the final scene of Season 2 is just *chefs kiss*. 

Few works of art have taught me as much about writing as this one. And as much as I’m dying for another season, I want them to take their time.

If writer/producer Stephen Glover’s tweet, written in the midst of June’s Black Lives Matter protests is any indication, it’s gonna pack just as much of a vital punch as each season before. 

Ramy (Hulu)

There are two unmistakable influences on Ramy: Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, and Donald and Stephen Glover’s Atlanta. All three shows examine the microcosms of their characters in their own unique ways, with Master of None showing what it’s like to be Indian and Asian in 21st century New York, Atlanta what it’s like to be Black and in the juxtaposition of Atlanta proper and the Deep South of white America, and Ramy with the ongoing battles of being a New Jersey Muslim in this day and age. 

Ramy also shares a heavy similarity with them in the way it surrounds its core with delightful supporting characters that challenge and support the main character. We get to see such a spectrum of the Muslim experience throughout, in ways both expected and unexpected (such as an entire Season 2 episode involving expensive cars, an expansive estate, and an always clothed porn star – you will not see any of it coming). Very few shows gave me as much to think about. And Ramy, like its spiritual predecessors, is truly a testament to how the more specific the storytelling gets, the more universal and relatable the characters are. I could see a little of myself in each episode. One of the most entertaining mirrors around. 

What We Do in the Shadows (Hulu) – 

When I first heard they were making a TV series out of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s 2014 mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, I was unsure just how much more they could get out of the premise. What I should have remembered is that Taika has made a name for himself making terrible-sounding ideas work beautifully (Thor 3, Jojo Rabbit).

This is a masterfully-written show delivered by a great bunch of comedic actors in Kayvan Novak (Nandor the Relentless), Matt Berry (Laszlo Cravensworth), Natasia Demetriou (Nadja), Harvey Guillén (Guillermo), and Mark Proksch (Colin Robinson aka the energy vampire). It’s pretty amazing just how many wrinkles the cast and writers are able to mine out of the premise, which sees vampires of different types and time periods trying to make a living in Staten Island, New Jersey. Sometimes you get simple, yet delightful ideas like Nandor getting a ‘mail daemon’ email and being convinced he’s been sent a curse he must send to 15 other people, and other times you get to meet a Vampire Council made up of Tilda Swinton, Evan Rachel Wood, Wesley Snipes, and Pee-Wee Herman. 

The best sitcoms are the ones that are effectively a group of people you want to hang out with (at least figuratively) and What We Do in the Shadows in its two seasons has shown just what delightful, entertaining company they are. I already miss them.