Well, January was a spectacularly bad month for news from beginning to end but it was also my birthday month and the birthday month of a lot of my friends (I am unusually prone to making January baby friends). On a personal level, I’ll admit I had a good month—hanging out with friends old and new, going to the movies, eating dim sum and black sesame cake and roast chicken and Balkan sausage, schvitzing—but in quieter moments when I look at my phone I feel… so scared! I’m scared of the 1.5 celsius thing and the open Nazi salutes and the deluge of profoundly evil executive orders and I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to keep a budding flying phobia at bay (this has never been a problem for me!!!! I hate it!!). That said, I loathe doomer shit so do not mistake this for that!!!
Anyway, I thought I’d have something interesting and perhaps essayistic to say about turning 30 and what I’ll say is the anxieties I once had about feeling uncool or ugly or unsuccessful have mostly (leaning on this mostly…) been supplanted by grander terrors. I definitely don’t feel jealous of other people these days, except people who are good and charismatic at karaoke.
Movies
New Releases

The big movie news of the month was that Better Man, the biopic in which famously not-famous-in-America Brit pop superstar Robbie Williams is played by a CGI monkey, is Pretty Good. Due to my open and un-ironic heart, I quickly forgot about the “weirdness” of the monkey and was easily swept up in the energetic direction by Michael Gracey who is best known for the exceptionally stupid but undeniably mesmerizing The Greatest Showman. What I like about Better Man is that in lieu of the usual “watch this genius become famous and then do drugs” arc of most biopics, this is actually a movie about a jovial idiot with a bad dad who doggedly pursues fame at all costs because he hates himself (and then does drugs). The drug stuff gets dully repetitive, but I was surprisingly moved and generally won over by Williams’ ability to admit that he’s not some great artist, he just wanted it really, really bad and hopefully entertained along the way.
The other/better new release I saw was Steven Soderbergh’s latest formalist experiment Presence, a haunted house story from the POV of a ghost. Soderbergh himself operated the camera and therefore “plays” the ghost as skittish, lonely, confused but protective being, scuttling around the home watching over a (wasian!) family consisting of White Collar Criminal Lucy Liu, her sweetie pie white husband, the swim star eldest son she loves most and the grief stricken daughter she pretty openly loves less as they move into a new home. Julia Fox shows up early on as the real estate agent, which made me think she needs to show up on an episode of Selling Sunset. I thought their unhappy family dynamics were totally absorbing and even when the film took a turn for the ridiculous, I still felt shaken by the dreadful sadness of this ghost, and by a crucial final Lucy Liu moment. Also I don’t feel like expanding on this in a public forum, but I think this movie is legit very Wasian even though it seems like screenwriter David Koepp was not thinking about it much while writing. Text me about this separately.
2024 Catch-Up
January always ends up being half catch-up month for me as I finally get around to Christmas day releases I missed and other international latecomers. A couple of these made my end-of-year list, but let’s rapid fire:
I loved The Count of Monte Cristo and Here so much I put them on my top 25 (#14 and #19 respectively).
A Complete Unknown is a completely fine movie. Actually I fell asleep briefly, but I thought Timmy did an admirable job. I know very little about Bob Dylan & Joan Baez so I strolled into this with none of the strong feelings about representation I will have when I begrudgingly go to see Sam Mendes’ Beatles tetralogy in 2027. I think it’s nice that Monica Barbaro has been nominated in the “Most Luminous Brunette” slot which once secured Jennifer Connelly a statue (Barbaro is better here. Similarly happy for Isabella Rossellini securing the “Judi Dench Elder Stateswoman’s Three Minute Slay” slot). The Top Gun: Maverick cast—Danny Ramirez in particular—were so happy for her!!
Babygirl is also fine. Nicole Kidman wasn’t afraid to let out some crazy noises and Harris Dickinson is great, swaggering around in his little gold chain with just enough hesitation to feel legitimately interesting. I like how bumbling and fumbling their dom/sub sexual relationship is.
On account of not being in the mood for an existential crisis, I was fine with the toothlessness of Pedro Almodovar’s death themed two-hander The Room Next Door. Great colors as always!
Emilia Perez is real bad. Lol
The best 2024 release I’ve seen this year (but after I wrote up my end of year list!!) was Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World which was serendipitously playing at MOMI on #1 DNETMFTEOTW fan
’s birthday weekend. Jude’s film follows a day and a half in the life of overworked production assistant Angela as she drives around Bucharest to interview candidates for an Austrian corporation’s work safety video. Something very funny about Angela is that she wears a sequined shirtdress to her primarily car-bound 20 hour (?) workday. In whatever spare minutes she can snatch, Angela makes vulgar, wildly misogynistic Tik Toks with a bald filter on, performing as an Andrew Tate-type character named “Bobita.” All of this is intercut with clips from a real Communist Romania-era film about a female taxi driver. This is not a particularly easy watch—you feel most every minute of its 2:43 runtime—but I found myself dazzled by Jude’s formal originality, by a breathtaking POV-shifting epilogue, and by his invigorating anger at the absurd, exploitative nature of How We Live Now which miraculously never stops the movie from being actually funny.
Rep Screening

MOMA screened a very beautiful, crisp restoration of Mexican Golden Age classic Maria Candelaria for this year’s To Save and Project series. In truth, I’m not always one for elemental, simple, mythic fables, which this very much is, but I thought it was gorgeous (big fan of the Blessing of the Animals scene where the whole town brings an animal to church and the villain flings a goose into the air, unleashing chaos) and I liked reading Dolores del Rio’s Wikipedia page afterwards which includes a whole section of blurbs from her contemporaries about how unfathomably hot she was.
B-day Blu-Rays
For my birthday I bought myself physical copies of a few Japanese movies I’ve been dying to see forever (and also a copy of my beloved Swing Girls, a 2004 comedy about a group of delinquent schoolgirls who form a big band jazz group) and two of them came in the mail this month.
Linda Linda Linda is a super charming, lo-fi Girls in a Band movie about three Japanese schoolgirls who, having lost two band members, recruit a lonely Korean exchange student (baby Bae Doona!!!) to be their lead singer (even though she’s not exactly fluent in Japanese) three days before they’re set to perform at a school festival concert. Son (Doona) booking a solo karaoke room to practice singing is one of the great heartbreaking/warming movie moments I will think about forever. I LOVE love love that these girls are sleepy and a little disorganized and that this movie has basically no stakes except making friends <3 and making music <3.
Shall We Dance? is about a bored Japanese salaryman (baby Koji Yakusho, in the sense that he was merely 40 and this was his international breakthrough) who takes up ballroom dancing, and if the title sounds familiar beyond the Rodgers & Hammerstein song, it’s because there was an inferior 2004 American remake with Richard Gere and J.Lo1. This was the first movie I ever added to my watchlist on Letterboxd (Linda Linda Linda was also an early add) and it’s long sat in my head as a sort of Pending All-Time Favorite. I love movies about dance and I love movies about hobbies and I have loved far worse films about these subjects, but Shall We Dance? is near-perfect. The magic of Shall We Dance? is that it is basically a treacly, feel-good story that at every turn is rendered in the most low-key, grounded, emotionally complex manner possible while still making time for classic bits like “the PIs that the salaryman’s wife hired because she thinks he’s cheating on him when he’s actually at dance class end up getting way too invested in watching ballroom dance competitions.”
Good Movies Only (Almost)
For a long while this month, I was on what felt like an infallible streak of great new-to-me movies. I started calling this my Good Movie Month. In the end, I have to admit I faltered BUT… barely! The worst new-to-me-but-old-release movies I saw were A Classic Epic I Found Somewhat Overrated and A Beloved Auteur Experiment That Didn’t Quite Work For Me. Not bad!!
I’m just gonna rapid fire rank these, best to worst:
John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, a beautiful tender western about boy best friends, getting a haircut for your crush, self-destruction, the creeping end of the Wild West, and the value of accessible theater.
Evil Under the Sun, a great, dishy Poirot mystery set at a fancy and secluded island hotel occupied entirely by divas.
Lone Star, a Western/detective mystery about American myth making.
Don’t Bother to Knock, a revelatory little thriller starring Marilyn Monroe as an unhinged babysitter.
Onibaba, which is almost the sort of elemental, fable-like tale I shy away from except Onibaba is perfectly made/has a cool jazz score/the BEST final shot.
Desire, a rom-com about jewel thief Marlene Dietrich scamming Gary Cooper (which gets a little worse when it has to get serious).
Angel Face, an awesome noir with Jean Simmons as a terrifying but kind of inept femme fatale.
The Wrong Trousers, the wonderful Wallace & Gromit short that introduced Feathers McGraw and involves an extended train setpiece.
Clearcut is a totally uncompromising Canadian revenge-horror-thriller in which the great Graham Greene kidnaps the CEO of a logging company with the reluctant aid of a “good guy” white lawyer—very cool stuff about the uselessness of white liberalism here!
Grand Prix, a flawed but fun Formula One epic with racing sequences so good they made me scream out loud from my couch. Every day the Cinerama Dome doesn’t reopen and screen this is a dark one.
Once Upon a Time in the West has an astounding opening and you gotta love the Henry Fonda casting but honestly, what the hell is this mess…
I guess Soderbergh’s idea with Haywire was like, what if a spy movie was stripped down and I hired someone who can really fight (but cannot act?), and that’s certainly something you can do!
Rewatches
There’s a John Waters series on Criterion right now I need to make my way through, but so far we’ve only fit in a rewatch (on my end) of Hairspray, which I totally forgot has a pretty extended theme park scene?? Nice, good movie.
I made Adam watch Birth because it was snowing and he was like… why did you show this to me… He’s the love of my life but he truly does not care enough when a film has a life changingly good score?? Oh also, last time I watched this movie I *SPOILER FOR JONATHAN GLAZER’S BIRTH* totally missed the “Sean found the backpack of love letters and was definitely not actually reincarnated” reveal so yes, I thought this movie was more supernatural than it is. Adam and many friends yelled “how???” at me and I don’t KNOW okay, I wasn’t even on my phone I don’t think. Whatever, sorry I believe in magic and mystery! And the mysterious magic of love!
Film Fest
Since my last dispatch, we’ve released an episode on the best movie of all time When Harry Met Sally… with Hooman Yazdanian (one of my funniest friends, I gotta be real), a great one on The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (my favorite discovery of the season!), a brave dissection of the truly abysmal Little Italy with
, an anarchic episode on Chocolat with Marie Sicola (we took a hot chocolate break), and finally, the foodiest of food movies because it’s got double the food—Julie & Julia with Madeline Wells. Fun season!Theater
I was very generously gifted tickets to Little Shop of Horrors which has been running off-Broadway with rotating casts since 2019. There have been a lot of stunt-y celeb Seymour and Audreys over the years, but when Adam and I went, I was really excited that our Audrey was stage legend Sherie Rene Scott and an understudy Seymour (too lazy to go dig up my Playbill, sorry!) who actually looked the part and not like goddamn Clark Kent. This production is so charming!! Scott is a slightly older Audrey than many, which I personally love because it adds a natural layer of experience and sadness2. It’s an intimate space and you can tell everyone’s truly having fun and the puppet’s fabulous. I have to say that as a Little Shop novice—I wasn’t so familiar with the show, having only seen the movie with its studio mandated happy(ish) ending and the original unhappy ending on Youtube—the ending on stage left me BEREFT. In Oz’s flashy, disaster movie finale, watching Audrey II triumphant on top of the Statue of Liberty felt so over the top I didn’t have to sit with the sadness but on stage it’s like… oh that was my friend, she was 30 feet away from me and had hopes and dreams…
Books
I read True Grit by Charles Portis because I love True Grit by Joel and Ethan Coen and guess what, that movie is an insanely faithful adaptation of the novel so the Portis felt dear and familiar to me. I cried! One thing I do love about the novel is you get more Adult Mattie asides about her judgy Presbyterian values. She’s so mean I love her. Perfect, perfect book and perfect movie (which I rewatched too).
I also started East of Eden for a book club and HOLY SHIT!!! I’m sorry that what I really love in a novel is a series of dramatic reveals!!
Television
Been rewatching 30 Rock, the only great television show besides Mad Men.
Adam bravely watched this and reported that after a surprisingly grounded, shot-for-shot remake opening, it took a swift, broad turn for the worse.
Not like, “old is sad” but it’s obviously sad if Audrey is older and still with a dirtbag like Orin Scrivello dreaming of the suburbs!!!!