Go see a movie in theaters. It’s one of the only times you can be with a group of people sharing the same experience and not (hopefully) have anyone on their phones. Studios are pushing to get rid of the theaters and focus on “second screen” content–dumbed-down trash that you can follow while on your phone. For me, this is very sad. Cinema is one of the few things I really enjoy about his world. So as fewer things get made with any respect for the audience, my hope for humanity certainly suffers.
Good things are being made, though! Just saw Aronofsky’s new film: “Caught Stealing”. Not his usual deep dive, but it is more serious and dark than it looked. It also had a scene in Tulum set around the time I was there 25 years ago. I swear I sat at the exact same seat at the same beachfront bar. It looked identical, and probably not what it looks like now that the site has become so developed. The whole movie took me back to that time, like great cinema can do.
The blockbusters have been good this year, too. Mission Impossible was a bit of a bloated overreach, but still a valid effort to fight back against the AI takeover of art. Superman was a beautiful testament to hope and sincerity, and even the last couple Marvel films were pretty great.
I think “The Materialist”, much like “The Brutalist”, had potential that it lost along the way, but it’s always fun to see people try new or artistic things with genre films, even when it doesn’t work.
The best new thing I saw this year was at home–a short show on Amazon called “Undone” that tackled all the metamodern themes of a “multiverse of meaning” that I explore in my writing. I have to thank AI for that recommendation–I can’t believe I had never heard of it. It is touching and visually stunning. I would put it up there with “The Leftovers” as essential viewing for the future of storytelling after postmodernism. What are you watching?