Category: Book and Movie Blogs

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Happy 50th Birthday, #TellurideFilmFestival

Fall begins for me a few weeks ahead of schedule when I make the trek to Telluride for its annual film festival, a four-day reprieve from three-digit temps and the daily humdrum of home in Denver. Once I stand in line to wait for screenings, feeling the crispness of the impending season already upon me, I remember how movies in the mountains herald more than changing weather.

This year’s fest, the 50th of its kind, both special and familiar, offered its signature glimpse into the state of art and culture and ideas at a particular moment, this time the pandemic having slid past our rearview and something less known but inescapable waiting ahead.

While festival director Julie Huntsinger curates a program based on her own tastes and vision, each of us who makes the trip also crafts our version from the timetable of offerings and activities on hand. For me this year: sixteen films, all 2023 releases, that starred big names who were primarily absent from the birthday celebration (solidarity forever…).

If last year’s selections represented various directors’ personal journeys into and out of the pandemic, often coming to terms with decades of unprocessed loss and change, this year also ended up a directors’ year but for very different reasons. And with so many diverse offerings again, I relished the challenge, as always, to find my thread, a commonality, that strings together what I watched and what I witnessed into a larger texture of how artists are viewing their world right now.

In this year’s celebration of film in the San Juans, every creative wanted to show off how the form is highlighted by the form itself. I walked out of each screening with the sense, only in film can that happen, only in film.

Thanks to #TFF49, I got to see a few of Georges Melies’ restored movies projected in stereoscopic 3D. Since then, I have wondered periodically what he might say about the form today. He would be surprised but mostly delighted in the eventuality of what he and others spawned over a century ago. Musician, and star of documentary AMERICAN SYMPHONY, Jon Batiste explained about music what I would bet Melies might say about today’s films: “We don’t love music because it feels good. We love music because it feels inevitable.” In one moment of the film, we watch Batiste dig into his heart and create an original song that inexplicably, yet inevitably, sounds like something we’ve heard before. Great movies can do the same for us.

Melies might have been confused by the giant parrot with its deep baritone, but twenty minutes into the film (TUESDAY), he would have said, “Of course. How else do you talk about loss?”. He may never have seen the motorcycles of the late 60s (THE BIKERIDERS) or visited the barren savagery of the Outback (THE ROYAL HOTEL), nor might he be prepared for the violence–really, the brutality–of those two films, but he would have recognized how movement of humans and landscape can communicate something.

Several of this year’s selections tapped into the zeitgeist of parent-child relationships, mostly on the screen but also behind the camera. Guest director Ethan Hawke traveled to Telluride with Maya Hawke, his daughter and star of the film WILDCAT, a biopic that weaves the fictional stories of Flannery O’Connor with the realities of her writing life. Proud papa Hawke gushed over Maya (and Laura Linney who plays O’Connor’s mother and a few of her stories’ characters) in the film introduction, and exposed how an artist’s work will blur the line between their lives and their art. Watching these actors change from real-life character to fictionalized one cemented how film may be the only form capable of showing that connection.

Two films relied heavily on surprise endings, ALL OF US STRANGERS and SALTBURN, but it was the former directed by Andrew Haigh that parlayed its final shock into a clever but affecting exploration of parental loss, especially when one’s parents never get the chance to see who their child has become. As you would expect, Paul Mescal turned in an exceptional performance, but it was Andrew Scott as Adam and Claire Foy as Adam’s mum who made the film my favorite of the festival this year.

I saw several others that did not disappoint, some even rekindled my love for what cinema can do that no other medium seems to: RUSTIN, the true story of almost-unknown organizer of the March on Washington Bayard Rustin who finally receives his due recognition after being sidelined for decades as a gay man who believed civil rights meant all civil rights; DADDIO, a two-hour conversation between a NYC cab driver (Sean Penn) and a young woman returning home from Oklahoma (Dakota Johnson) as they navigate traffic on the streets and in their complicated lives; Silver Medallion recipient Wim Wenders debuted two films, including PERFECT DAYS about the mundanity and the beauty of a Japanese toilet cleaner (only Wenders, a quintessential German filmmaker, could pull off such a lovely tribute to the culture and people of Japan and it’s obvious why Koji Yakusho won Best Actor at Cannes); THE HOLDOVERS bringing director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti together again for a sweet and funny take on the classic student-(Dominic Sessa)-becomes-the-teacher and teacher-learns-from-the-student riff; the anxiety-inducing THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE left me wondering whether I might start having beginning-of-the-school-year nightmares again after watching a fresh-faced, well-meaning teacher make every mistake in the book; and, the sumptuous, eye candy of Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS from Yorgos Lanthimos who somehow reimagines Frankenstein as a prurient satire about women’s roles in a society hellbent on making them proper.

In every one of those movies, I can still see long-held close-up shots of actors who made the audience stop and pay attention to everything we should not see but somehow can.

And there was one film, more than any other, that epitomized why seeing movies in Telluride can be different than in any other setting. I woke up early to get in line for Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST, but I was lucky to have time to stay for his Q&A afterwards. Glazer set out to make a film about the Holocaust that no one had ever seen before. Based on the novel of the same title by Martin Amis, Glazer turns his camera to a home on the perimeter of Auschwitz where Commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig raised their family while smoke from the crematoria lofted in the air and dogs barked and guns blasted in the distance. Glazer’s explanation of using cameras with remote crew to create an authorless story and making sound the counterpoint of the images of typical family life to avoid fetishizing the horrors we’ve all seen at Auschwitz proved how revolutionary it was to focus “on making a film you couldn’t see.” Instead, we heard it and we wondered about it. Only in a film where the atrocities are left off-screen could a filmmaker show us how more connected we are to the perpetrators of the crimes than their victims.

Every time I sat down in a theater and wondered if I could sit through another two hours, the lights would dim, the sound would roll, and I would forget how tired I was. There’s something about the full-bodied experience of watching movies, even at 9000 feet, that keeps me thinking and wondering and connecting. These films did not offer an escape from life but a deepening of it. I can’t wait to go back next year.

My Telluride

  • SALTBURN-3 stars
  • PERFECT DAYS-4 stars
  • AMERICAN SYMPHONY-4 stars
  • TUESDAY-4 stars
  • THE ROYAL HOTEL-3 stars
  • THE ZONE OF INTEREST-5 stars
  • THE HOLDOVERS-4 stars
  • WILDCAT-4 stars
  • THE BIKERIDERS-2.5 stars
  • DADDIO-4 stars
  • RUSTIN-3.5 stars
  • JANET PLANET-2 stars
  • ALL OF US STRANGERS-5 stars
  • POOR THINGS-4.5 stars
  • BALTIMORE-3 stars
  • THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE-4 stars
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2019 In Review: Books, Movies, and Television

On this final day of the year (and the decade), I thought it might be worth my while to remind myself of all the great books, movies, and TV I’ve experienced this year. Lucky for me, Goodreads collects an exhaustive list of what I read to jog my memory. As for the movies and TV, I’m just going to recall what pops up which may mean I miss a few from the spring. Here goes:

Books I Read (and Enjoyed) in 2019

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

I know the reason I enjoyed this one so much had more to do with the audiobook reader than the story itself (though the story kept me engaged). Dion Graham, a stage actor probably best known for his appearance in HBO’s The Wire, has won multiple Audie awards (that’s what they’re called!) and named to Audible’s Narrators Hall of Fame. Graham, more than a narrator, takes on so many diverse voices in this novel that I wanted our oral interpretation students to hear what he can do! The story follows an escaped slave from the West Indies to Nova Scotia and across the Atlantic to England where he becomes a well-respected naturalist. While the story seems far-fetched, the characters are not. Edugyan captures the humanity of a naive white man who attempts to save a slave who comes to read more than just the written word. Combining Edugyan’s words with Graham’s exceptional voice brought this story alive on my 15-minute commute everyday for a month!

Transtlantic by Colum McCann

I wrote about the experience of reading this last summer, so I won’t belabor the point. Let’s just say I would not have understood this book in the way McCann intends without listening to the audiobook and Geraldine Hughes’ narration. McCann first follows the stories of three historic moments and the men central to them: the first successful transtlantic flight, Frederick Douglass’ voyage to Ireland to promote his slave narrative, and George Mitchell’s efforts to broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That in and of itself would have made a fine novel, but the second half of the book is where McCann shows off his talents to bring disparate characters and detached moments together in a way that highlights the crucial women in the backdrops of history. Once you get to that point in the novel, you also understand the genius of having a woman like Hughes’ read the story. Honestly, when I realized what was happening, it came to me as nothing short of a revelation.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

When I read the synopsis of this book, I thought Nope, can’t do it. How can a book about trees be that interesting. Then the book won the Pulitzer and eventually showed up on my hold shelf at the library, and I thought I had to try. You want to talk about revelation, well this is as close to a religious text for me as I can read. While the book is about trees, it’s also about our human connection with trees, how those trees connect with the rest of their environments, how humans tell stories like trees–digging roots into our past and branching upward to future generations. I loved this really long novel in the way I loved reading The Grapes of Wrath in 11th grade. The intersection of narrative and politics pushed me to see my place in the world differently. This book was selected for the NPR/New York Times book club in November, and the voluminous responses full of adulation and pictures of beautiful trees attests to the power of this book. All I can say is if you have the time, you should read it.

There, There by Tommy Orange

This debut novel by Native American writer Tommy Orange astounded me with his gift for language and character voice. He shifts through many different narrators, gathering a wider and more-comprehensive view of Native culture along the way. While he focuses on the urban native experience, his characters travel from the reservations of Oklahoma to the Southwest before all ending in Oakland at a pow-pow in the A’s stadium. I took a risk this year and asked some of my students to read this book. Some couldn’t stand it, but those who got it and invested some time in it found it to be one of the best books they’d read in their young lives. While the ending leaves a bit too much open to interpretation for my tastes, I can’t ignore Orange’s sheet talent, his fresh perspective, and his ability to capture the struggles of his people without evoking maudlin pity from the reader.

Honorable Mentions

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The River by Peter Heller

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

Circe by Madeline Miller

Movies I Watched (and Loved) in 2019

The Two Popes

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Booksmart

Ford v. Ferrari

TV Shows I Watched (and Binged) in 2019

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

While I didn’t enjoy every episode of season 3, there were enough moments of comedy and connection that I really did love the show. I hate when it’s over! I could have done without some of the Shy Baldwin singing, and I’m not sure the Sophie Lennon moments were as great when Susie wasn’t in them, but I get why they were included. Midge doing stand-up, her “date” with Lenny Bruce, any scene with Susie, especially her fish-out-of-water antics while learning to swim, will stand out for me.

The Crown

As I stalled to finish Mrs. Maisel, I interspersed my viewing with some high-brow culture in the form of The Crown’s third season. As my colleague and astute friend Ashley pointed out, much of this season seemed to focus on the men who orbit the Queen and come to terms with their roles on the outside of the crown. Namely, Prince Charles comes of age in the turbulent 60s only to learn the change doesn’t necessarily benefit him and what he wants from life. But, it was Prince Philip’s central role in episode 7, “Moondust” that took my breath away. I cannot think of a better hour of television that captures the restlessness and frustration of a middle-aged person coming to with the realities of life. After I watched it, I wanted to write about it, but I wasn’t convinced anything I wrote could measure up to the perfection of that 50 minutes of acting, writing, and setting.

Mr. Robot

I came to this show later than most, but I’ve been an ardent viewer ever since. While I’m still not sure I understood most of what Sam Esmail was doing in this sci-fi, near-future attack on our consumerist culture, but I did “get” and appreciate what he did with Elliot’s character in the final season. Everything pertinent to the storylines of the characters was revealed, but we were left with enough mystery to feel like you got you money’s worth in the end. Elliot’s relationship with Darlene became the central point of the series, as she gave Elliot his connection to reality. Every week, this show served as my antidote to the reality around me…I miss that inoculation.

Honorable Mentions

This Is Us

When They See Us

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Americans

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Sorry I haven’t written lately; I’ve been spending the last few weeks in Ancient Greece. Oh, and what a lovely venture it has been, transporting me to a distant past when I can envision a clear picture of where I stand today.

I began my journey, ironically, by staying in one place–Aeaea (pronounced eye-ay-uh)–the island where Circe, title character of Madeline Miller’s novel of the same name (2018), meets the heroic Odysseus. According to Miller’s recasting of this ancient tale from the perspective of the goddess nymph, Circe has been banished to this island by her father Helios for all of eternity. Yet, I don’t think I recognized the static nature of her punishment until I saw her story set in a relief against that of Odysseus as his own story is retold and explicated by Classics professor and author Daniel Mendelsohn in An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017). Set side by side, and read contiguously, I find both books highlight how and why our ancient tales, by and about men, can still teach me something profound about my own mortality and the need to travel and explore within “this mortal coil.”

I listened to both these books, which means I don’t have vivid memories of the words on the page, but I enjoyed the readers’ voices as they captured a layer of storytelling that we inevitably miss in reading an epic on paper. Actress Perdita Weeks reads Circe, and her mellifluous voice helped me connect with the nuances of this amazingly complex character who explains her immortality by connecting with famous mortal characters who’ve ironically become immortalized by Homer’s epics. Bronson Pinchot (yes, the actor who played Balky on Perfect Strangers) reads Mendelsohn’s book, and I delighted in his voice of Daniel’s father with a pitch perfect Queens accent and his comedic timing that captured a touch of sarcasm as this son-turned-professor suffers the commentary from both his freshmen students and his father. I have listened to quite a few books this summer, and the experience has grown on me when I find the time to really listen. I think it’s rather fitting given The Odyssey‘s roots in oral storytelling that I got to re-experience this tale from different perspectives and different voices than the ones I create in my head when reading the written word.

While Miller’s Circe is immortal, she uses this character trait to explore what it means to be human, to be mortal, to have an expiration date on your life. Circe faces the concerns of any girl-turned-woman as she fights with her siblings, disagrees with her father, and comes to terms, as every mother does, with the mortality of her son who has been fathered by Odysseus. At first, Circe welcomes her exile, a chance to work on her witchcraft and to escape the drama of the gods at court. But in contrast to the mortals that visit her, her life lacks meaning and purpose as she faces the prospect of unending, read unchanging, life. When she becomes enlisted in the struggles of mortals, just as Prometheus does when he opts to bring them fire, she makes a crucial decision that suggests a life of meaning comes from adventure and movement–something Odysseus famously pursues but is denied Circe–not the staid comforts of home.

In an interesting parallel, Mendelsohn’s father, the focus of his memoir, also relishes a chance to journey, to encounter something novel, while his wife prefers to stay home. Mendelsohn explores how we come to terms with our own mortality by sharing his journey to teach Odysseus’ story to his students and to his father. While the inevitable death of his father seems to enshroud the story, Dan (as his father calls him) captures the timelessness of the epic, of The Odyssey, and of our ongoing relationship between teacher and student. Mendelsohn accomplishes for his father what Homer did for Odysseus–telling his tale of mortal struggle and inexplicable dangers for the purpose of keeping his memory and his story alive for always. Dan’s father seems most alive when he’s seeking something, whether it’s knowledge or adventure in Greece or meeting someone new. Their journey together to understand The Odyssey forms an even better understanding of the relationship between father and son, teacher and student, storyteller and listener.

Both books make me wonder about the nature of timelessness, whether it has been achieved in the perpetuity of Odysseus’ tale or ultimately elusive as we futilely attempt to keep our memories alive via story. Mendelsohn lands on this idea that in reading and exploring the classic epic, he and his students (which certainly includes his father) participate in a timeless tradition, that of teaching others, of passing on those stories from one generation of parents (or even professors) to another. Additionally, the fact Miller takes up Homer’s oft-told story, something that many writers before her have done, illustrates our need to carry on the stories that sustain us, to find new ways to retell them while honoring what they mean at their core.

Mendelsohn, thus, helps me recognize how we continually attempt to look back as a means of making sense of who we are. He and Miller revisit The Odyssey in different ways but with the same seeming purpose: to capture some glimmer of what the past means for them in the present. Mendelsohn wants to understand his father, and thus himself; Miller explores the strength of women in a patriarchal culture to see our own role today. Both prove for me that while the rearview mirror helps, we will never capture it all. Instead, looking forward to the adventures and experiences where we pass on our knowledge, share those stories, journey into the unknown, with the ones who come after us, THAT marks our opportunity to forge a new distillation of what we mean to the world.

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Crossing the Divide: A Review of Colum McCann’s Transatlantic

When I set to read, well listen to, Transatlantic, I had prepared myself for a mediocre competition with McCann’s earlier widely-respected and seriously-loved (at least by me) novel Let the Great World Spin. In fact, I am set to teach the National Book Award-winning novel to my seniors this coming fall, so I set my expectations high for this more recent book, convinced that it would not measure up.

To add to this assumption was the fact a couple teacher friends, whose reading tastes I respect, had also panned the book, and, really, who wants to be the giddy ingenue choosing to love too much when other sophisticates have already told you not to waste your energy? (Perhaps I can tackle the psychology of rating books among friends who read in another post…) But because I was teaching McCann’s other novel, and Transatlantic had popped up as a suggested listen on my Audible account, I thought this might be a nice option for summer my walks.

Transatlantic begins with three seemingly separate stories about men who have bent the arc of history as they traveled from North America to Ireland: first, John Alcock and Arthur Brown successfully compete to fly across the Atlantic in 1919; second, Frederick Douglass crisscrosses the Emerald Isle in 1845, lecturing the Irish on the realities and travesty of American slavery while bearing witness to the emerging devastation of the potato famine and O’Connell’s fight for freedom; finally, former senator George Mitchell leaves his young wife and newborn son in New York City on a quest to find peace in the British Isles as they attempt to put the “Irish Question” to bed in 1998. Each story, in terms of character and action, seems detached from the others, yet the stories do feel connected in the way they bring the reader back and forth across the Atlantic, even conjuring up our own links to the island and its heritage. Just as everyone gets to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, this novel helps us all to recognize why that kinship exists even when we can’t trace our roots directly.

Each of the fictionalized accounts of these very real historical events engaged me enough because of how little I knew about them. While I must have known in theory someone else had flown a plane across the Atlantic before Charles Lindbergh, I had never given much thought to those forgotten trailblazers. Certainly, I had no clue Douglass had traveled beyond our shores and shared his Narrative with the Irish Quakers, Protestants, and Catholics. Having lived and studied in Dublin for a semester in 1996, however, I did know some of what Mitchell worked to accomplish in the Good Friday agreement. In some regards, just reading the first half of the novel would have been enough for me as I redrew the line of Irish history from the 19th century to today and recalled some of what the Irish people have faced and how much they have contributed.

Yet, what fascinates me most about listening to this novel was the use of a female Irish actress’ voice Geraldine Hughes to narrate the story. Generally, the gender of the narrator matches the gender of the author, especially when a first person narrator is not identified as being male or female. At first her feminine Irish accent intrigued me given that McCann is an Irishman living and teaching in New York and the novel is told via an omniscient, seemingly heterodiegetic (outside the story itself) narrator. I should have known, however, once the second half of the novel begins that I was in for a treat. Once McCann establishes his version of the facts behind these famous men and their travels, the novel then takes up the stories of the less noticeable women who populate and help contextualize what really happened.

It’s the shift towards this female perspective that justifies and explains the choice for Hughes a the narratorial voice of the audible version, and my delight in that decision ultimately confirmed my love for what McCann was attempting to do in this novel. While the experiences of men (even enslaved minorities) have always driven history, McCann reminds us the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and friends that ultimately influence and shape what happens above the waterline. Dropping below the surface with McCann’s female narrator, who does reveal herself towards the end of the novel, enables the reader to imagine the millions of unspoken and unheard stories that people our histories and remind us not only of the connections from one side of the Atlantic to the other, but from the near and public side of the gender divide to its lesser known and more private view where women quietly give voice to all our experiences.