#9: December Round-up
And some New Year's Resolutions.
Welcome to Hoots and Hollers 2024! I’m entering the New Year with last year’s cough, two big pimples, a surprise period (stress-induced?) and a slightly bad attitude—all on my birthday week— but I remain constitutionally incapable of true pessimism—not to say I feel good about the world (I do not! Call/bully your reps.), but that I am feeling hopeful about January and becoming the best version of myself that I can be (the perfect alchemical cross between Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch/Chrishell Stause from Selling Sunset/Alexa Chung, in looks only).
December was a cramming month, which I like because it feels like homework and I like January because it’s my birthday month and I get to write lots of lists in my little notebooks and imagine that this year I will have perfect hair and be a good person. Here is how I spent my last month as a bad, mediocre haired person.
Movies
More new releases, new releases, new releases
Early in December, I was in LA for a weekend to celebrate the engagement of two of my very best friends in the world. A bunch of us stayed in a Bachelor-esque compound apparently owned by a member of 5 Seconds of Summer and we all spent a lot of time in the hot tub, but before that I spent most of a day with my family in which time I managed to watch the worst movie I saw all year: Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins. I’m not sure how you manage to fuck up a fun, obvious little premise like this, but Waititi managed. I also watched Polite Society, which was miles and miles better—a zippy action movie that grounds its flying kicks and comic book energy with a sweet sister story. On the plane home from LA, I re-watched Asteroid City and cried.
Back in New York, I was mostly at various AMCs. I already talked about my love for Godzilla Minus One (“Godzilla-1.0 Godzilla Suite II” is still on repeat) and Napoleon (fabulously big & stupid, the 4 hour cut is going to be a masterpiece). Eileen was boring. Poor Things’s got a lot to love—Emma Stone is a genius forever, excellent Ruffalo, puff sleeves, weird chicken-dog, great dance scene, and that Victorian steampunk by way of Bruegel production design—but I still think it peters out after the ship chapter and ends with a thud. Like basically every person who has seen it, I liked The Iron Claw immensely, I cried and I need Zac Efron to get an Oscar nomination!!!!! Let us honor him for nearly two decades of reliable, likable charm!!!! I hope he gets more and more interesting projects to work on.
At home, I caught up on A Thousand and One—also rooting for a Teyana Taylor nomination, long shot though it may be, and the score is wonderful—and I finally got around to Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani. My favorite part of Rocky Aur Rani, a rom-com about a rich himbo and feminist news anchor who fall in love & struggle to reconcile their differences, is a dance subplot where Rani’s dad is a kathak dancer (which is apparently considered feminine1?) and Rocky must let go of his prejudice/learn kathak in order to really win Rani’s heart and convince her he isn’t a chauvinist schmuck, culminating in him performing “Dola Re Dola” (famously a girl dance!!!!! From Devdas.) with Rani’s dad. Let boys dance!!!
Not at home, but on a plane, I finally caught up with Joy Ride which was funnier-than-expected, still not as funny as it could be, and a real tearjerker.
I’d like to end this section with Wonka because I saw it twice and it was in fact the last movie I saw in 2023. The first time was with Claire and Jonah in IMAX. I ate two Nerds ropes and found myself charmed. Wonka never truly justifies its existence (I do not need to know what young Willy Wonka was up to!), but Paul King’s got the juice when it comes to British fare in the vein of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I love that shit. The next morning I went to IHOP with Danielle to get Wonka pancakes (good, not too sweet). The second time I saw Wonka was with my family in a ridiculously beautiful theater in Amsterdam, where I learned that Dutch people have no idea how to line up properly. Total chaos. People keep saying the songs in this are bad, and they are, but they have also ALL been stuck in my head for the past 10 days. Noodle, noodle, apple strudel. There’s chocolate… and there’s cho-co-late. Scrub scrub. Anyway, more musicals! More unabashed, charming children’s movies!
I’m alone in my house! (sung like Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born)
These are the movies I watched when I was alone in the apartment in the gap between Danielle leaving the house early & before I left for vacation. I finally got around to Bram Stoker’s Dracula which I started watching on a plane about a year ago before I fell asleep and we landed. This is one of the best looking films I have ever seen in my entire life and unfortunately every single person besides Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra is bad in it. Maybe Lucy’s three boyfriends are fine (one is Cary Elwes).
I was supposed to see Velvet Goldmine at MOMI with my friend Sarah, but I had this stupid cough so I stayed home and because I have been trying to see this movie for YEARS, I decided to just rent it. It’s magnificent! Dense, epic, beautiful, sad, starring the three prettiest boys ever. I’d nearly forgotten what an intense crush I had on Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the 2000s—a man so handsome I wasn’t particularly annoyed about his casting as Henry VIII, which is saying a lot considering what a 12 year old, wives-of-Henry head pedant I was.
I also watched some Christmas movies, sort of
The only normal Christmas movie I watched was Christmas in Connecticut, one of those crazy, midcentury romcoms with a real Premise: in this case, an unmarried, big city columnist (Barbara Stanwyck) who’s been pretending to be a wholesome farm wife in the paper for years must host a shipwrecked soldier for Christmas because he needs a good American meal soooo bad. I would do anything for this character to be real, right now. Imagine the scandal. The Cut article about her scam. The podcast. The discourse. I, of course, would defend her. This movie is great because at no point is Stanwyck’s character remotely apologetic about her lie, or the fact that she’s fallen in love with the shipwreck guy while pretending to be married. I love her.
Birth is not a Christmas movie, just a winter-in-New-York movie and would be better categorized as a “week between Christmas and New Year’s” movie because I think it captures the same chilly, lonely limbo of a city holiday as Metropolitan or Eyes Wide Shut. I had no idea how this movie, that I have been told by everyone is great, would manage the premise “A 10 year old claims to be the reincarnation of Nicole Kidman’s dead husband and she kinda loves him back” but holy god yeah it’s good. Completely committed to its weird premise, and in its cool, detached approach, it is overwhelmingly emotional. Of course Hunter Harris already wrote about the line that made me literally guffaw. I wish somebody had told me this has one of the best film scores of all time!
Eastern Promises actually IS a Christmas movie, in the sense that it explicitly takes place at Christmastime. This is just a real good, twisty, made-me-gasp mob movie and also the way Viggo Mortensen says “Das vedanya, Anna” makes me kick my feet up… twirl my hair… giggle and blush… This might be the best he’s ever looked, Aragorn included. (He just looks so un-showered sometimes as Aragorn! Plus I like a clean-shaven man.) This also made me laugh because I am planning to spend my birthday at the Russian bath. Hope this doesn’t happen to me!
Books
I had a pretty solid reading month! I read James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which wrings a good story out of the fascinating history of Chicken Hill in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a community of black, Jewish, and Catholic immigrant families who lived alongside each other around the turn of the century and into the 1950s. I thought the novel lost steam toward the end (mostly because it loses its best character) and there’s a dash too much “she breasted boobily” in the descriptions of every female character, but I liked it!
I picked up The Thursday Murder Club in pursuit of a cozy, wintry vibe and it hit that mark! Breezy, charming, readable, I wish he’d nixed the cop characters but what can you do.
My official last read of the year was David Grann’s The Wager—thrilling, a tiny bit tedious (I just do not know or care how sails work! Also they functionally spend a LOT of time on that rock looking for clams and stuff), and just as I was feeling that it lacked the gut punch of Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann came in for the kill. I do still find it less interesting than KOTFM, but it’s still well worth the read and that last chapter… devastating! It’s also insane/cool that Lord Byron’s grandpa was famously shipwrecked. Of course he became a poet!!
Theater
I had the real pleasure of seeing two amazing shows in London.
First was a production of Pacific Overtures (my second of the year!) at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Up front, I’ll say I liked this a little less than the production I saw in DC—that production was more puppet forward, they had a BIG taiko drum, retained “Chrysanthemum Tea” and perhaps this is uncouth to say, but I sort of think any version of Pacific Overtures should make mention of the atomic bomb during “Next.” To me it’s kind of the whole point—that the opening of Japan by the West and Emperor Meiji’s consequent mania to Westernize turns Japan into an evil imperial power that eventually falls with two acts of inconceivable violence against civilians (at the hands of the same government that forced them to open in the first place!).
That said, I’m splitting hairs. I saw two fantastic, intimate productions of one of my all-time favorite musicals this year. What a joy! One of the best things about Pacific Overtures imo is how rich with staging possibilities it is. In the London production, I especially loved the ships as origami boats & the interaction of the old man and his younger self in “Someone in a Tree.”
The second show was a rather different vision of Japan: a stage play version of My Neighbour Totoro (with the British “u”). I’ll be completely honest—I was totally skeptical going in. I thought it would be a broad attempt at making the quiet rhythms of Totoro more accessible to British children. Incorrect! For some reason, this play is 3 hours long which is kind of crazy but it doesn’t matter because the kids seemed to love it and I did too. It did what all great children’s art does—trust children. We spend a lot of time just hanging out with Mei and Satsuki (played by adults doing the Flo-in-Little-Women thing really well) as they run around the house, pray to the tree (the Japanese spirituality in this was perfect!), play, fight, clean. The play smartly deploys Totoro like Godzilla—sparingly, with maximum impact. My jaw damn near dropped when I saw the big Totoro puppet. It is so big!!!! I love him!!! Totoro always hits because I’m a responsible older sister who sometimes lashes out unnecessarily and Kimi is a baby who loves a lot and cries as easily as she sleeps (she also LOOKED like Mei as a kid), but I admit this time I was really vibing with Kanta…. unpleasant and weird but shows love through actions he wants unacknowledged? Hm.
Resolutions
I have a lot of embarrassingly intense personal resolutions, but my pop culture resolutions are same as ever: watch more, read more. Stay off Tik Tok. My two big ones are 1) to read One Big Book again and 2) watch Bound. I am taking recommendations on the Big Book, although I am leaning pretty strongly toward Dostoyevsky. But which one? The Idiot? The Brothers Karamazov? Sound off in the comments!
Aside from a lot of specific blind spots I’m planning to fill (Toni Morrison! Edward Said! A Matter of Life and Death!), here are some other general resolutions:
Make zines
Learn how to draw
Read an abolitionist text and not just tweets/headlines
Watch along with Criterion series that look interesting, in the spirit of discovery
More books about film
Take advantage of final year of 30 under 30 for theater tickets, unless Cabaret tickets bankrupt me in which case never mind
Watch 1 anime (taking recs!)
Write this newsletter regularly!
If anyone has more information on this, I am listening!!
zines!!!!!!