Just a roundup of what I’d recommend from what I watched and read in January:
Call Me By Your Name
A love note to falling in love. I was delighted to find myself similarly entranced by Call Me By Your Name (2017) despite all the high praise it’s garnered before I was able to see it. It’s hard to imagine a more sensual/sensuous film. Guadagnino et al. invite us to feel, everything: from love, to warmth, to summer swims, peaches, Italian countryside, skin, grass, to the music that makes us dance, to heartbreak. A zealous affirmation, an ode to feeling. I fell in love with falling in love.
The Square
Ruben Ostlund claims to have curated an art installation of the same name in Sweden and Norway, said to have addressed similar themes, as his award-winning film The Square (2017), which he wrote and directed. So in a way, is The Square just Ostlund making fun of himself? The Square is a film more about asking questions than answering them, and I love it for that. Here Ostlund dedicates himself to identifying and depicting the contradictions of Western, liberal society, and while often hilarious, he never makes it easy, nor lets his audience off the hook.
I’ve seen some criticisms of The Square for aiming at addressing too much, and failing to bring its threads together cohesively or intelligibly. I want to consider this more extensively, but what if Ostlund addressed and formed exactly what he meant to? What if this sprawling, slightly scattered narrative is exactly the point? Ostlund seems to like to refuse his films and protagonists any chance of redemption or satisfaction. The point is to feel disappointed, to be less-than-satisfied after viewing. That’s a bad pitch but go see it.
Mosaic
I was drawn to Mosaic instantly. This 2017 HBO television show has a killer opening scene (a great hook). What follows is Steven Soderbergh’s post-modern take on a pretty standard murder mystery. Viewers are presented a narrative in non-linear threads so as to offer multiple perspectives on events, and emphasize the problematics of Truth and interpretation. Like the art form for which it’s named, Mosaic attempts to organize individual pieces into a larger, coherent masterpiece–“Hey! That’s neat!” It is, but sadly, I just think it’s been done before.
I like that Mosaic plunges its audience into the thick of things without taking loads of time for set-up or exposition, but unfortunately, like most mysteries, it’s more exciting the less you know, and that excitement wears off the more you learn, the more you know. But I like murder mysteries, and this is a good one, so that’s why it’s on the list!
Walkaway
Walkaway (2017) is a post-capitalist, post-scarcity science-fiction novel set in a world only slightly fast-forwarded ahead of our own. So not SF as in space, but SF in being geared toward humanity’s future, and involving loads of future tech. I didn’t always love this book as compelling fiction, but I did love it for its engagement with ideas, ideology, theory, and Doctorow’s simultaneously wild yet plausible imagination. Although it’s at the bottom of this list, it’s probably the most important work on it.
"hoping to post more soon" 