2023 in books

This turned out to be big year for our family. We welcomed twins in the late summer and between that, some travel earlier in the year when my wife was still mobile, and a lot of extra work in the fall, things have only just begun to slow down. Despite it all, there was plenty of good reading to be had, so without further ado, here are my favorites of 2023 in my two usual broad categories:

Favorite fiction of the year

This was an unusually strong year for my fiction reading, especially in the latter half, when I had little time and my concentration was strained. I’d recommend most of the novels I read this year but here, in no particular order, are my dozen favorites, with one singled out—after great difficulty choosing—as my favorite of the year:

The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham—A genuinely creepy slow-burn thriller in which a small English village, not noteworthy for much of anything, plays host to a brood of strange, emotionless, hive-minded children who were all mysteriously conceived on the same night. As the children grow—at twice the rate of normal children, by the way—and they manifest powers of mind-control, the people of Midwich are forced to consider what kind of threat the children pose to the village and the rest of the world. Vividly imagined and populated with interesting characters, this is the kind of sci-fi I think I most enjoy. For more Wyndham, see below.

With a Mind to Kill, by Anthony Horowitz—The last and most Ian Fleming-like of Horowitz’s three James Bond novels, this novel picks up threads from Fleming’s final two, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, and develops them into a compelling new story. Having faked M’s assassination, Bond returns to the Soviet Union in a bid to infiltrate and destroy the Russian network that captured, tortured, and attempted to brainwash him. Briskly paced, atmospheric, and suspenseful, with the interesting twist of Bond having to pretend to be the thing he most hates.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima—A story of romance and disillusionment that is both hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. When an officer in Japan’s merchant marine service meets a young widow with an adolescent son, they fall for each other within a few days. The boy is smitten with the officer, too, admiring him as a man of action, adventure, and lofty independence—until the officer decides to give up a life at sea in favor of settling down and raising a family. When the boy relates his disappointment to the savage, cruel gang of schoolboys to which he belongs, they plot to bring the officer down. Briefly told in sensuously dreamlike prose, with a poignant love story and creepy parallel plot involving the boy, this novel totally absorbed me. I read it in a day, a rare feat for me these days.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A richly written, moving, bleak, and wholly engrossing novel in which a small family group of Neanderthals have a disastrous run-in with a band of Homo sapiens. Full review from late spring here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A tense, relentlessly paced thriller set in interwar Europe. When an English hunter sets himself the challenge of stalking and lining up a shot on an unnamed central European dictator—just to see if he can—he is caught, tortured by the secret police, and left for dead. Despite his injuries he manages to escape, but must elude pursuit by a dogged agent of the (again, unnamed) fascist regime, who trails him all the way to southern England. Relentless pacing, a mood of palpable paranoia, the irony of a claustrophobic final standoff in the idyllic English countryside, and the resourcefulness and toughness of the hero keep this book moving from beginning to end. One of my favorite reads from the spring.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel set in the near future, when England is ruled by a king selected at random. The current ruler, Auberon Quin, decides to make a joke of the institution by reintroducing heraldry, elaborate court etiquette, and the traditional subinfeudated privileges and freedoms of London’s separate neighborhoods. It’s all a lark to him until he meets a true believer, a young man named Adam Wayne, who determines to fight for his neighborhood and its people against the plans of the elite. A high-flying hoot, as much of Chesterton’s fiction tends to be, but deeply moving and meaningful.

Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—One doesn’t often associate the name Agatha Christie with historical fiction, and yet here’s an excellent, evocative mystery set in the country house of an ancient Egyptian mortuary priest. Christie constructs a realistic family drama involving the remarriage of the patriarch to a haughty young concubine who threatens the priest’s grown children with disinheritance. When she winds up dead, there is talk of curses, vengeful ghosts, and murder. The priest’s young widowed daughter and his elderly mother, sensing something is amiss, work together to determine who may be responsible for the disasters visiting their home. I’d guess this is one of Christie’s lesser-known books, but it’s now one of my favorites of hers.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger—An eerie and dreamlike fantasy of a peaceful seaside community thrust into bloodshed and destruction by the Head Forester, a violent warlord from the northern forests. Though Jünger insisted that On the Marble Cliffs, which was published as Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was not an allegory of Hitler and the Third Reich, it is certainly applicable to that situation—and to many others in which civilization declines into a scientistic and neopagan barbarism.

Declare, by Tim Powers—A genuinely one-of-a-kind novel: part espionage thriller in the mold of John le Carré, part cosmic horror, part straight historical fiction, part supernatural fantasy, this novel begins with Andrew Hale, an English sleeper agent, being unexpectedly reactivated as part of Operation Declare. He must flee immediately and seek instructions. As Hale returns to regions of the world he hasn’t seen in years and reflects on his career as a spy in Nazi-occupied Paris and the Berlin and the Middle East of the early Cold War, the reader gradually learns his mysterious history and that of the intelligence network of which he has been a part since childhood. The reader also gets to know Kim Philby, a real-life double agent who defected to the Soviets and who continuously and ominously reappears at crucial moments in Hale’s story. I read this on the strong recommendation of several trusted friends and loved it, though I made the fateful decision to begin reading shortly after the arrival of our twins in the late summer. The result was that it took me far longer to read Declare than it should have, and I do feel like I missed some of its cumulative effect. No problem, though—this is clearly worth a reread. It’s that rich.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog—An arresting short fictional portrait of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign for nearly thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Full review from late summer here.

Berlin Game, by Len Deighton—A close contender for my favorite read of the year, this is the first novel in Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, which follows British intelligence agent Bernard Samson as he tries both to help a valuable but endangered asset escape East Berlin and, when that is complicated by the discovery of a double agent in Samson’s own organization, to root out the traitor, whom he may be closer to than he’d like to think. Moody, atmospheric, suspenseful, and witty. Very much looking forward to Mexico Set and London Match.

Best of the year:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

A man wakes up in a hospital to discover that the world has ended while he was unconscious. I’ve seen at least two zombie versions of this scene—both 28 Days Later and “The Walking Dead” begin this way—but this device originated in the early 1950s in John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic survival story The Day of the Triffids.

Two events give rise to the plot of this novel: first, a massive meteor shower, visible worldwide, that blinds everyone who looks at it and, years earlier, the accidental discovery of triffids, walking carnivorous plants apparently developed in a lab (ahem) in Soviet Russia. Having been dispersed all over the world, scientists find uses for the oils produced by triffids and factory farms arise to cultivate them. Others acquire triffids as exotic garden specimens and remove their lethal stingers for safety. Gradually, triffids become part of the landscape, and Bill Masen, a biologist and the novel’s narrator, is partly responsible for their proliferation. Then the meteor shower comes.

Masen, heavily bandaged as he recovers from eye surgery, is one of a handful of people not to be blinded by the meteor shower, and he emerges from the hospital to find London almost silent and filled with the groping, helpless blind. But what begins merely as a grim survival story takes a turn into horror when the triffids appear, preying on the helpless people roaming the streets.

The rest of the novel follows Masen in his attempts to survive and to join others for greater protection. Different groups pursue different survival strategies—the blindness and the triffids offer many a chance to test out their ideal societies—and Masen bounces from one to the other. And all the while, the triffids are learning.

The Day of the Triffids is low-key sci-fi and its emphasis lies squarely on both the practical considerations of escaping and protecting oneself and one’s group from the triffids and on the ethical dilemmas such a catastrophe would produce. Masen witnesses the organization of many—one based on the guidance of academic experts, another based on charity and altruism, and another, the most menacing, based on autocratic paramilitary rule—as well as their failures. There’s an element of social commentary there, but it’s realistically done, not preachy, and also not the point. The point is the nightmare scenario created by the rapidly proliferating triffids and the question of how to survive, find love, and start over in a world ruled by sentient plants.

The Day of the Triffids totally absorbed me and I read it in just a few days. It’s a brilliantly written, vividly imagined, and engaging adventure that also manages to have satisfying depth.

After reading The Day of the Triffids I moved on quickly to Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (see above) and I have The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes on standby for this year. Wyndham’s fiction is my favorite discovery in quite some time and I look forward to reading these in 2024. If you check any of these out, make it The Day of the Triffids, but definitely seek some of Wyndham’s work out.

Favorite non-fiction

If 2023 was a good year for fiction my non-fiction and history reading flagged somewhat, especially after the twins were born (I read only three of the books below after that point). Nevertheless, there were some clear highlights, and what follows, in no particular order, are my thirteen favorites—a baker’s dozen this time, with one favorite of the year:

Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, trans. by Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, Ed.—A readable new translation of Beowulf by a master scholar of early medieval Germanic literature with a detailed and insightful commentary on everything from word choice and textual problems to characterization and theme. An ideal text for students who want to dig deeper into this great poem.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A very good short biography from Yale UP’s new Ancient Lives series. Crassus is a difficult figure to understand because he is simultaneously involved in seemingly everything going on in the late Republic and is poorly attested in our surviving sources. Even Plutarch focuses primarily on Crassus’s failed campaign against Parthia. A full portrait is probably impossible to reconstruct, but Stothard does an excellent job of piecing together what we can know about him, his career, his wealth, how he used it, and his disastrous end in the Syrian desert.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—An excellent account of the First World War’s mostly forgotten Italian Front, where mountainous terrain, terrible weather, and the politics and mismanagement of the Italian army resulted in protracted and needlessly bloody campaigns. Focuses far more on the Italians than the Austro-Hungarians, but still offers a good overall picture.

The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, by Russell Kirk—Trenchant observations on the American political, cultural, and educational scene from the early 1980s. Owing to its context, some of the examples Kirk uses are quaintly dated (e.g. complaints about the show “Dallas”) but the substance of his arguments is sound and quite prescient.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—Exactly what it says on the cover: a good brief history of a fascinating place and its people. Clements takes the reader from the Finns’ first mentions by the Romans—who were aware they were out there but probably never traveled to Finland—through conversion to Christianity, the Reformation, life under Swedish and Russian hegemony, and finally through both world wars to a hard-won independence and an important place in the modern world. A timely read considering the surprising Finnish decision to join NATO, and I recommend it in conjunction with Clements’s excellent biography of Marshal Mannerheim, which was my favorite non-fiction read of 2021.

The First Total War, by David A Bell—My closest runner-up for my favorite non-fiction read of the year, this is an excellent history of how European warfare changed in the 18th century. From wars fought by small professional armies for limited objectives, often ended through negotiation, and governed by an aristocratic code of honor, the French Revolution—which was partly rationalized, ironically, by the supposed pointless brutality of the old regime—ushered in an age of mass mobilization, unattainable ideological objectives, and an embrace of pragmatic and amoral brutality, especially against fellow citizens who have declined to join the new order. Bell’s chapters on the shockingly violent war in the Vendée and on Napoleon are especially good, and I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in how warfare and its conduct have evolved—or perhaps devolved—in the modern era.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A dual biography of two Georgians whose friendship, despite sometimes major political differences, proved crucial to both their homestate and the Confederacy. Through his portrait of Stephens and Toombs Davis also offers a good glimpse of the inner workings of secession and the dysfunction of the Confederate government as well as the course of the Civil War mostly away from the frontlines.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—A fun little book that works both as a paradoxical self-help guide focusing both on Poe’s strengths and his self-destructive weaknesses and as an approachable mini-biography of a great writer.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—I finally got around to reading this short biography from the Penguin Lives series following Johnson’s death in January. I’m glad I did. This is a bracingly unromantic look at the first great dictator of the modern world, a remedy to longer, more detailed, but worshipful accounts like that of Andrew Roberts. Johnson, a master of the character sketch, the elegant and razor-edged summary, and the telling detail, brings all his skills to bear on Bonaparte and crafts a convincing account of him as an ingenious brute. Not only did I like Johnson’s perspective on Old Boney, this little book was a joy to read. I strongly recommend it if Ridley Scott’s mess of a cinematic portrait got you interested in its subject at all. You can read a memorial post I wrote for Johnson last January here.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another in the Penguin Lives series, this one by an eminent Jacksonian era scholar. Remini does an excellent job not only narrating what we can know of Smith’s life, hedged about as it is by pious Mormon legend, but also contextualizing him in a world of fevered religious emotionalism, private revelations, and even mystical treasure hunting. I was most surprised by the chapters on Nauvoo, having had no idea that Smith had such a powerful private army at his disposal near the end of his life. An excellent read that I’ve already recommended to students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson—The biggest surprise of my reading year, I looked at the first chapter of this book on a table at Barnes & Noble and was hooked. Part naturalist study of a familiar but strange animal, part history, part memoir, Svensson’s account of what we know—and, more intriguingly, all that we don’t know—about the European eel was informative and enjoyable.

Memory Hold-the-Door, by John Buchan—A posthumously published memoir by a great novelist and good man, this book is full of warm remembrances of places Buchan loved and elegies for the many, many men of his generation who were lost in the First World War. Expect a full review for this year’s John Buchan June. In the meantime, here are my extensive Kindle highlights and notes, courtesy of Goodreads.

Best of the year:

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.

This was a tough choice, but in the end I just enjoyed this new volume of Tolkien’s work more than any of the other excellent non-fiction I read this year. Since reading it and blogging about it a few times this summer, I’ve also continued to reflect on it.

The Battle of Maldon is a fragment of several hundred lines of an Old English epic composed to commemorate a disastrous fight against Vikings in the year 991. During the battle, the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, was killed when he allowed the Vikings to come ashore and form for battle, a decision the wisdom of which has been debated ever since. The poem relates the story with great drama and sympathy, and with moving vignettes of Beorhtnoth’s doomed hearth-companions as they commit themselves to avenging their lord or dying in the attempt.

This book collects a large miscellany of Tolkien’s writings on the poem, including his own translation in prose, an alliterative verse dialogue designed as a sequel called The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, multiple earlier drafts of the same showing how the poem evolved both formally and thematically as Tolkien considered and revised it, an essay on Beorhtnoth’s famous pride, and—best of all—extensive notes and commentary from Tolkien that provide a lot of insight into the poem, its context, and broader topics like history, legend, warfare, and human nature.

Anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon England or the literature of the period knows The Battle of Maldon, and it unsurprisingly occupied a large space in Tolkien’s thought and imagination. This book—given my own interest in the poem, the event it describes (which was one case study in my master’s thesis), and Tolkien himself—is a most welcome addition to my Tolkien shelf and my favorite non-fiction read of the year. I highly recommend it.

I posted about this book twice during the summer, first on the topic of tradition and the transmission of poetry and culture, and second on the false modern assumption that anything literary in history is necessarily fictitious.

Kids’ books

Here, in no particular order, are the ten best of the kids’ novels and picture books that we read this year, many of which were excellent family read-alouds:

• The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A novelistic adaptation of legends surrounding Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion, told from the perspective of a lesser-known character from Greek myth: Helen’s young son Nicostratus.

• The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A fun historical kids’ adventure set among the trappers of French Canada and the Great Lakes.

• You Are Special, by Max Lucado—A beautifully illustrated and moving picture book about how it is our creator’s stamp, rather than any aspect of ourselves, that gives us worth.

• The Easter Storybook and The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Two nicely illustrated Bible picture books, one for the Lenten and Easter season and the other based on the Book of Acts.

• Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—Probably my favorite kids’ read of the year, this is a charming simplified adaptation with illustrations showing the characters as anthropomorphic animals. Though simple and kid-friendly, it hit hard—I ended up crying several times while reading it to my kids.

• A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David A Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A good short life of Crockett told accessibly but with commendable attention to the details and complexities of his life.

• The Phantom of the Colosseum and A Lion for the Emperor, by Sophie de Mullenheim—The first two volumes of a fun historical series about three young friends and their adventures in the Roman Empire. My kids adored these and I look forward to reading more.

• War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo—A simply written but powerfully moving look at the First World War from an unusual perspective.

Rereads

Everything I reread this year. My favorites were certainly my revisits with Charles Portis, especially Gringos, which I read for the third time while on a trip to Mexico in the spring. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Gringos, by Charles Portis

• Norwood, by Charles Portis

• Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

• The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz

• The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, by Patrick F McManus*

• Never Sniff a Gift Fish, by Patrick F McManus*

• The Face of Battle, by John Keegan*

• The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

• Beowulf, trans. Tom Shippey (see above)

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

One of my own

Of course, another big event for the year was the publication of a new book of my own, my World War II action novella The Snipers.

Set during the ferocious Battle of Aachen in the fall of 1944, months after D-day and the breakout from Normandy but still long months away from victory over Germany, The Snipers is the story of one bad day in the life of Sergeant JL Justus. A scout and sharpshooter in the 1st Infantry Division, Justus is tasked by his battalion commander with finding and eliminating a German sniper who has bedeviled the division’s advance into the city. Justus thinks finding the sniper will be tough enough, but the men he joins up with to enter the combat zone assure him that there is more than one. Discovering the truth and completing his mission will test Justus and his buddies severely, and give him a shock that will last years after the war’s end.

I wrote The Snipers in a three rapid weeks this spring and revised it in the early summer. The climactic action and its surprising revelation came to me first. After a vivid and disturbing dream of World War II combat, a dream the dark mood of which I couldn’t shake off, I decided to sit down and turn it into a short novel or novella. The rest came together very quickly.

I’ve been pleased with this book’s reception but, most of all, I’m pleased with the book itself. Every time I give a friend a copy I end up sitting down and rereading long sections of it. It’s always satisfying to find enjoyment not only in the work of writing but in the finished product, and The Snipers ranks with Griswoldville in those terms.

I’m grateful to those of y’all who’ve read it, either in draft form or since its publication, and I hope those of y’all who haven’t will check it out and let me know what you think.

Looking ahead

After a busy and chaotic fall things mercifully slowed down, albeit only briefly, for Christmas, and then revved right back up again with surgery and sickness in the family and prep for a new semester at work. But all is well, and I’m hoping for even more good reading in 2024. Right now I’m partway through an excellent study of Eastern Native American warfare and a short biography of Ramesses II, and there are so many novels jostling at the top of my to-read stack I don’t even know how to choose.

Whatever I end up reading, you can count on hearing about it here. And in the meantime, I hope y’all will find something good to read in this list, and that y’all have had a joyful Christmas and a happy New Year. Thanks for reading!

End-of-semester book recommendations

I just wrapped up my last class of this long, busy, exhausting fall semester. On my final exams for this course I asked a final “softball” question of each student: which new historical figure that you learned about most interested you, and why?

Despite the word “new” I got a lot of Abraham Lincolns and Ulysses Grants and Frederick Douglasses in response, but I didn’t mind so much because the students mostly offered good reasons for their piqued interest. I found myself offering a sentence or two of feedback to each with at least one book recommendation based on the figure of their choice.

In addition to several primary source texts—including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia, Brokenburn, the Civil War diary of a young Louisiana girl named Kate Stone, and The Vinland Sagas for the several students impressed with the pregnant Freydis Eiriksdottir’s ferocious response to Native American attack—I came back to several recommendations over and over again. These were books I mentioned to students who named Nat Turner, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S Grant as their most interesting figures. Given that the final unit of the semester covered the secession crisis and the Civil War there’s some obvious recency bias in these answers, but again, that didn’t trouble me too much. If even a fraction of them take those recommendations I’ll be pleased, and I hope they will too.

I thought about these books enough as I wrote that feedback that I decided to offer them as recommendations on the blog as well. So here, in roughly chronological order by subject, are six good books I recommended to my US History I students this fall:

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates

A deeply researched and powerful short narrative of the life and rebellion of Nat Turner. Turner was a slave preacher in quiet, rural Southampton County, Virginia who believed he had received signs from God that it was his mission to rise up and slaughter his oppressors. In the uprising that he eventually led, Turner and his followers killed over sixty whites of all ages, including a dozen school children, a bedridden old woman, and a baby in a cradle. When he briefly eluded capture he became a boogeyman throughout the South, and paranoid fears that Turner might have a coordinated network of slave rebels prepared to rise caused widespread vigilantism.

Oates writes well and smoothly integrates his research with the broader historical context of Turner’s revolt, making this a good look at the overall state of slavery in American at the time of the Second Great Awakening. Oates also doesn’t soft-pedal, excuse, or celebrate Turner’s violence. Here’s a longer Amazon review I wrote when I first read this some years ago.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz

John Brown, like Nat Turner, is an arresting and irresistibly forceful figure, but unlike Turner Brown was much better connected and his life is much more fully documented. This popular history by the late journalist Tony Horwitz, whose most famous book is probably Confederates in the Attic, gives a solid, readable overview of Brown’s life, work, and the evolution of his rigid, fanatical views not just on slavery but on a host of other activist causes. (A favorite example I offer in class: Brown, not only an abolitionist but a teetotaler, once discovered a man working with him on a construction project had brought a bottle of beer along for his lunch. Brown poured it out. Students see the point immediately.)

The bulk of the book covers Brown’s violence in Kansas, beginning with the coldblooded murders of five farmers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, and his magnum opus, the planned rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Brown and a small circle of close followers, including several of his sons and a handful of escaped slaves, plotted to steal stockpiled rifles from an armory at Harpers Ferry and start a local slave revolt that, with plenty of firepower behind it, would snowball into a brutal nationwide purge that would rid the United States of slavery. It didn’t work out that way. Like Turner, Brown was hanged and became a symbol of violent extremism.

I like to recommend Midnight Rising because it offers a short, readable, almost novelistic account without unduly lionizing or condemning Brown. It’s also packed full of good anecdotes and telling, well-chosen details, and its blow-by-blow reconstruction of the disastrous Harpers Ferry raid is excellent.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S Grant in War and Peace, by HW Brands

For students who expressed interest in Ulysses Grant I recommended Brands’s biography. This is a good, readable, cradle-to-the-grave biography that is neither as huge nor as worshipful as more recent Grant biographies like Ron Chernow’s. Brands not only narrates Grant’s life story and the campaigns of his career during the Civil War but also offers clear insight into Grant’s personal character, both for good and bad, as well as his relationships with superiors like Lincoln and Henry Halleck and subordinates like Sherman. Brands also doesn’t explain away or minimize the corruption of Grant’s presidential administration, as is often the habit of Grant fans. The result is admiring but not uncritical, highly readable and accessible, and detailed without being overwhelming.

The Crucible of Command: Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged, by William C Davis

One of the books I most often recommend in class, this is a dual biography of the two most important generals of the war, the protagonists of the final death struggle, and contested symbols of the aftermath. Davis—who has a lot of experience with this kind of work, having previously written multi-track narratives of the lives of Travis, Crockett and Bowie and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs—balances Lee and Grant’s life stories well, structuring them chronologically but still allowing interesting parallels and contrasts to emerge, especially as their careers weave past one another and occasionally overlap. Like the other good biographies in this list, he pays special attention to personal character, and is judicious and fair in his judgments of both men. The chapters bouncing back and forth between Lee and Grant and their dramatically changing fortunes over the course of the Civil War are the best of their kind, and radically reshaped by understanding of how the war unfolded as well as Lee and Grant’s places in the story.

Every time one of our children has been born, I’ve made it a point to read a book about Lee. That tradition started in the spring of 2015 with our first child and this book, and this is still my favorite of the ones I’ve read over the years.

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by SC Gwynne

This is a brilliantly-written, detailed, insightful biography of Jackson focusing primarily on the war years but with good coverage of his early life, too. Gwynne is a gifted writer and he not only capably untangles and narrates the complex, lightning fast campaigns of maneuver that Jackson fought in the two years before his death but also explores the personality of this exceedingly strange man. (Gwynne busts a few myths along the way, too, such as the one about Jackson constantly sucking on lemons. He didn’t. He may have been strange, but not that strange.)

Jackson’s lower-class mountain background, his inflexible Calvinist Presbyterianism, his experiences as an artillery officer in Mexico, his stern and rigid character both as a professor of science at VMI before the war and as an infantry commander—Gwynne explains and integrates all of these aspects of Jackson’s character, giving the reader a solid, understandable portrait of an eccentric, tenacious, fatalistic, but energetic and ferocious soldier whose career was cut short at its height. He also does an excellent job explaining and showing Jackson’s relationship with Lee in action, with the result that this book illuminates not only Jackson but Lee as well.

A book I never hesitate to recommend, and that I wish there were more like.

Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James McPherson

Just one student, impressed with the tone of an excerpted speech that I assigned near the end of the semester, stated some interest in Jefferson Davis, which is not all that surprising—there are far more romantic, heroic figures on both sides of the Civil War than the president of the country that lost. Indeed, the deeper you look, the more inclined you might be to study someone else. Davis was fussy, vain, opinionated, played favorites, and unnecessarily inserted himself into his government’s military policy. James McPherson, an indisputably pro-Union historian of the Civil War era, brings all of this to his study of Davis but also has the intellectual honesty to admit that, after spending time studying the man, he came to admire some aspects of his character, not least the work ethic that kept him going despite the dysfunction of his government (compare his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who got fed up and left Richmond for much of the war) and through severe recurring illnesses. That honesty makes Embattled Rebel a good short study of Davis that, though not wholly sympathetic to its subject, is that rarest of all things nowadays—fair.

Others

Here are two other books I considered recommending but didn’t. Let me recommend them here. Both come from the Penguin Lives series of short biographies by well-known writers.

• Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Thomas Keneally—An engaging, readable, warts-and-all biography of Lincoln that does an excellent job condensing his complex life and personality into a little over one hundred pages without oversimplifying.

• Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—I read this book most recently of all the books on this list, and it was a revelation. Remini’s account of the life of the founder of Mormonism not only narrates his life as clearly as we can know it, but situates him firmly in his broader historical context, showing him and his movement to be very much of their time and place.

Conclusion

This semester has been a blur, but I’m thankful for the work I had, the students I had, and that we can now take a break and focus on more important and long-lasting things. If you’re looking for some American history to read over Christmas and New Year’s, I hope you’ll check one of these out. Thanks for reading!

2022 in movies

I almost named this year of movies The Year of Indifference. After struggling along for several years, I finally turned a corner in the spring and just stopped caring about most of the movies that came out.

I can remember the moment. It was April, the year barely begun. I was sitting in a theatre waiting to watch The Northman when the non-stop pre-trailer fluff turned toward the mandatory Disney agitprop. Two youthful people announced—as if any of us could have forgotten—that next month Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would arrive in theatres. Fine. Whatever. But their second sentence was something like, “Here are all the movies and Disney+ shows you need to catch up on before the movie!”

I’m still not sure if I said it out loud, but I certainly thought, “Well, the hell with that.”

I had most looked forward to three movies in the spring of 2022. As it turns out, those were my three favorite movies of 2022. From the last of those in late spring right up to New Year’s Eve, I slid downhill into utter apathy. Movies came and went and I did not care. I did not see the new Dr Strange, or Jurassic World, or Thor, or Black Panther, or any edgy A24 stuff, or any prestige movies about movies like The Fabelmans or Empire of Light or Babylon, or anything that came out on any streaming service, and I probably will not in the future. Not that I felt any hostility toward these movies—the only one I bestowed hate upon was Avatar: The Way of Water, which I certainly will not see—I just did not care. Even the things I felt some flicker of interest in I could not be motivated to go pay money to watch. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

But I hope so, because while the lows of 2022 were, for me, very low, the tiny handful of high points were most high indeed.

So having explained how I came to be even more pessimistic than usual about the state of filmmaking, let me focus for the rest of the post on the purely positive. Rather than The Year of Indifference, I’m taking a cue from a coincidental symmetry in the titles of my top three films and dubbing 2022:

The Year of The _____man (and Top Gun: Maverick)

Top Gun: Maverick

The hype is real.

I have little personal attachment to the original Top Gun, but grew more and more interested in Maverick as it kept getting delayed and as I learned more about it. By the time it arrived in theatres I had even allowed myself to get excited, and boy was that excitement rewarded. A carefully crafted, well-executed action movie with clear stakes, straightforward old-fashioned storytelling, solid if not deep characters, some resonant themes of guilt, mentorship, hard work, and courage, and genuinely awesome action, Top Gun: Maverick thrilled me.

What is more, the movie holds up. I saw it twice in theatres in the late spring. My wife gave me the Blu-ray for Christmas, and my dad set up a great family movie night in his office’s conference room over Christmas break—massive TV, loud, bassy speakers, and plenty of pizza. The movie was just as exciting as the first time I saw it on the big screen.

You can read my full review from May here.

The Batman

The Batman was my first big movie of the year, but one I had looked forward to with some trepidation. I intentionally avoided reviews and information about the movie because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I went in almost cold, with few expectations though admittedly some hopes that it would be good.

Those hopes were fulfilled. The Batman proved a legitimate crime movie, serial killer mystery, police procedural, action thriller, and detective story all at the same time, with a good script, excellent acting, a wonderfully detailed Gotham City—the best I’ve seen in a Batman movie, in my opinion—just oozing and dripping the gloomy atmosphere I’ve always imagined, and a subtle but effective coming-of-age story for Batman. Like Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman takes familiar material and elevates it not only through its surehanded and expert storytelling but through the mature, old-fashioned themes it dramatizes.

You can read my full review from March here, with some further notes, thoughts, and observations here.

The Northman

The Northman is the best Viking movie ever made, and perhaps the only thoroughly good one. (Though I do have a soft spot for one very old-fashioned one.)

Robert Eggers’s stated intention in The Northman was to make a film that felt and worked like an undiscovered saga, one of the many Old Norse stories of outlaws, heroes, revenge, and the supernatural recorded in Iceland a few centuries after the end of the Viking Age. He succeeded brilliantly. This film drops the viewer into an alien world, one utterly indifferent to our modern values or pieties and one in which strength, victory, and the ruthless fulfilment of personal obligations—most notably revenge—offered the only guiding morality. It is a bracing vision, simultaneously breathtaking in its boldness and courage and disturbing in its bleak callousness. Again—accurately capturing the spirit of this lost world.

The Northman is the movie I was most excited about going into the spring of 2022. And while I might have enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick more as rock-solid entertainment, The Northman satisfies my most niche historical and cinematic interests like no other film. It’s brilliantly executed and deserves a watch.

You can read my full review from April here.

Three runners-up

In addition to my three favorites, all of which came out in the late winter or spring, here are three good, solidly-made movies I saw that didn’t quite rise to the top. Like my top three, I happen to have already reviewed all three of these in greater detail here on the blog. Links are included with each short recap below.

Devotion—The story of two fighter pilots in the newly integrated US Navy, Devotion follows wingmen Lt Tom Hudner and Ens Jesse Brown—one white aviator, one black—as they get to know each other, testing and pushing one another until a deep bond of friendship grows between these two quite different men. All this plays out as the Cold War slowly escalates, culminating in Hudner and Brown’s deployment to an aircraft carrier providing close air support to Marines in the first terrible winter of the Korean War. It’s here that Hudner and Brown’s skill as aviators and their devotion to one another as wingmen and friends will be tested.

Glenn Powell, who plays Hudner here and another naval aviator, Hangman, in Top Gun: Maverick, was a producer on Devotion and clearly learned a lot of lessons about how to shoot aerial sequences with real aircraft from his experience on Top Gun. So it’s unfortunate that Devotion and Top Gun: Maverick ended up coming out the same year, as I’ve heard several unfavorable comparisons between the two. Devotion is a different kind of movie, with a statelier pace and a greater emphasis on character drama, but it is well-crafted, well-acted, and handsomely shot and both deserves and rewards viewing.

You can read my full review of Devotion—a dual review with Glass Onion—here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean play is a fast-moving but stately and intensely moody film. The acting is excellent, but the real draw is the film’s style, an atmospheric throwback to impressionistic black-and-white silent films complete with stagey sets and dramatic high-contrast lighting, all of which intensifies the drama of murder and deception and the pervasive eeriness of the story. This adaptation captures the mood of Shakespeare’s play better than any of the other film versions I’ve seen.

You can read my full review of The Tragedy of Macbeth from January here.

Glass Onion—This is the one exception to my statement above that I saw nothing released on any streaming service, but that’s only because Netflix gave this a short theatrical run ahead of its streaming release. This is apparently a trend, and I hope it continues. Glass Onion is a lot of fun (though I erred in my review when I wrote that it was probably the most fun I’d had at the movies that year, as that distinction obviously belongs to Top Gun: Maverick), with the same whimsical, trickster style of Knives Out but more outright comedy. Writer-director Rian Johnson deftly satirizes the fatuity and self-congratulation of modern day influencers—whether tech billionaires, do-gooder leftist politicians, celebrity fashionistas, or the rise-and-grind types hawking male-enhancement drugs—and the intricate overlapping construction creates genuine mystery, surprise, and humor. I have a few reservations and misgivings about Glass Onion, but as pure entertainment it was a rare treat.

You can read my full review of Glass Onion—a dual review with Devotion—here.

New to me

While most of the movie year was a bust for me, I did see some great old films for the first time. These were the best—or at least most entertaining—of the lot:

The Beast—This is a lesser-known 1988 film directed by Kevin Reynolds, who would go on to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a few years later. The Beast (aka The Beast of War) takes place during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and begins with a platoon of Russian T-55 tanks destroying an Afghan village. The tankers wantonly murder civilians and try to torture information out of a tribal elder by slowly rolling over him—from the feet up—with one tank. After the massacre one tank becomes separated, and its efforts to escape hostile territory as well as violent disagreement among the crew form one half of the film’s story. The other half follows Taj (Steven Bauer), now the Khan of the tribe attacked at the beginning of the film, as he and a band of mujahideen seek revenge. The two stories intertwine suspensefully, converging on the character of Koverchenko (Jason Patric), a Russian tanker tested both by his commander, the violent Daskal (George Dzundza) and the mujahideen. Both a harrowing small-scale war film and an intense, well-acted character drama, The Beast was the best surprise of my year and deserves to be much better remembered.

Dunkirk—Not to be confused with the more recent Christopher Nolan film, this 1958 Ealing Studios film starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee retells the title story of collapse, retreat, desperation, and rescue in the traditional style one would expect from the late 1950s, and it’s excellent. Well-acted, told on a grand scale, and moving between multiple stories that converge in the evacuation, Dunkirk gives the real events well-rounded and unsentimental treatment and represents old-fashioned war movies at their best. Far from being superseded by Nolan’s more stripped-down modern action-thriller, this Dunkirk holds its own. The result is two movies about the same events in two dramatically different styles. The two complement each other well and would make a great double-feature for fans of film history, action, or war movies. Regardless, this Dunkirk is well worth seeing for its own sake.

The Mummy—I have a set of the classic Universal monster movies on Blu-ray and have been working through them for Halloween over the last few years. I had seen Frankenstein and Dracula before, but this year I finally got to the original 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. Slow, quiet, and straightforwardly told, The Mummy nevertheless achieves a wonderfully eerie atmosphere—helped in no small part by Karloff’s creepy and tightly controlled performance as Ardeth Bey—and steadily builds tension from beginning to end. This was one I didn’t expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did, and I look forward to revisiting it.

Grizzly—I’m not going to pretend that this movie is good, but it was highly entertaining. (See my carefully qualified introduction above.) Grizzly is an obvious, beat-for-beat knockoff of Jaws, but instead of a shark in the ocean the threat is a bear in the woods. The woods in question are those of Rabun County, Georgia, and part of the fun for me was spotting all the recognizable local places used in the film (e.g. the Rock House in downtown Clayton, an intersection on the Tallulah Gorge Scenic Loop used as the entrance to a fake national park, and the driveway and lab room of my childhood doctor’s office, a moment that gave me the willies because the perspective in the film was exactly that of a patient sitting down to get a finger prick). Also, my dad is in it as an extra. I gather that RiffTrax has done one of its commentaries on Grizzly, and that sounds like it’d be worthwhile. I’d recommend this as a potential Lousy Movie Night classic.

Special commendations—TV

I long ago gave up on most TV shows, not out of the indifference I plummeted into this spring but out of the inability to pick where to start. There’s so much TV out there. And a TV show takes up hours and hours and hours of time I’d rather spend on reading, or playing with my kids, or watching multiple movies. But, given the dearth of good stuff at the theatre, this year my wife and I did get into two excellent shows that provided some of the highlights of our 2022.

“Ghosts”—This is the original BBC series, though there is a recent American adaptation. “Ghosts” follows the centuries’ worth of dead people who have, for whatever reason, not departed the once-stately Button House in the English countryside. There’s a decapitated Tudor nobleman, an early 1990s Conservative MP who died in a compromising situation and so dwells in eternity with no pants, an infantile Georgian lady, a genteel Edwardian lady who falls screaming from an upstairs window every night, a Scoutmaster who died in an archery accident, a Romantic poet killed in a pistol duel, a stalwart British Army officer from the Second World War, a basement full of medieval plague victims from a mass gave under the foundation, and—reaching way, way back—perhaps my favorite character, a caveman.

As befits a show developed by and starring the “Horrible Histories” team, “Ghosts” is hilarious, packed with wit, slapstick, and lots of great historical humor. All these characters from many time periods, plus the two new owners of the house, make a wonderful ensemble, with a rich variety of personal foibles, conflicts, affections and rivalries, and running gags. The show also proves surprisingly moving at times, as in an episode in which the Scoutmaster’s now-elderly widow and son make their annual visit to the house.

My wife found “Ghosts” on DVD at our local library and we watched the entire first season in a few days, stopping ourselves after two episodes each night so that we didn’t stay up until the wee hours binging it. I can’t attest to the other seasons of the show, but season one was a great show that was funny without being mean-spirited, dirty, or insulting to your intelligence. We look forward to watching more.

“Bluey”—Let me repeat what I said about Top Gun above: the hype is real. “Bluey” is a pure delight—a kids’ show that isn’t insulting or annoying, that prizes playfulness and imagination, that showcases a loving, functioning family in which all the members love and respect each other, and that is beautifully animated. It’s also so well-crafted and -written that it works on multiple levels, so that in my family, all three kids—ranging in age from three to seven—as well as my wife and I can enjoy the show together and get different things out of it. (Favorite line: Bandit, the dad, while plunging the toilet: “What are these kids eating?” Based on a true story.)

And speaking as a father, I appreciate seeing a show in which the dad is fun but not an idiot, and has a relationship of mutual love, respect, and hard work with the kids’ mom. That’s vanishingly rare in modern entertainment, and one of the many, many things that make “Bluey” special.

What I missed in 2022

Movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons—including not wanting to pay for a half-dozen streaming subscriptions and finding Redbox a bit of a pain—I didn’t get to. I’m hoping to see these in the new year.

• Operation Mincemeat—Based on the excellent Ben MacIntyre book, a fascinating true story performed by a great cast.

• Munich: The Edge of War—Based on Robert Harris’s novel, a political thriller with personal stakes in a crucial historical setting. Jeremy Irons looks like an inspired choice to play Neville Chamberlain.

• See How They Run—Looks like a charming historical whodunnit. My wife and I actually made plans to see this but it was gone from cinemas before we could make the arrangements for a date night.

• Nope—I still haven’t seen any of Jordan Peele’s films, but this one involves—or at least appears to involve—UFOs, and is supposed to have smart and hard-edged satire.

• Amsterdam—An intriguing premise and kooky characters hooked into a fictionalized version of a fascinating true incident—the “Business Plot” to overthrow the US government.

• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story—I love Weird Al and, far from a straightforward musical biopic, this looks like an appropriately irreverent parody of what is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre in Hollywood.

• The Banshees of Inisherin—Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, two favorites who have previously starred in one of my favorite films, In Bruges, reunite with that film’s director for this dark comedy about a man from a small Irish village who inexplicably but very pointed ends his long friendship with another.

• The Menu—This didn’t look like my kind of thing when I first read about it, but I’ve added it to the get-around-to-eventually list on the strength of favorable comments from friends.

• All Quiet on the Western Front—A new adaptation of one of my oldest favorite novels, and the first in the novel’s original language. I eagerly anticipated this when the first trailer finally dropped but, since then, have had a number of the film’s major departures from the book spoiled, so I’m somewhat more hesitant about it now. Still hoping to see it at least once in the days to come.

So, again, there may be several more great movies out there leftover from 2022 that I’ve simply missed, but I’m going to have to overcome quite a lot of weariness and inertia to seek some of these out.

What I’m looking forward to in 2023

I’m afraid my superhero burnout and general apathy continues as I look ahead at 2023’s release schedules, but the few films I look forward to I really look forward two. In order of anticipation, from highest to lowest, they are:

• Mission: Impossible—Dead Recoking Part I—I don’t see how this could be terrible. Cruise, McQuarrie and company have been on a roll for the last several films in this series. I’ll be there opening weekend.

• Oppenheimer—It’s striking to me that Christopher Nolan, out of his twelve films, has made three superhero movies, three near-future sci-fi thrillers, three crime films, and three historical films. And out of this last category, two out of the three have centered on crucial events from World War II. I’m very curious to see how he approaches the seemingly uncinematic story of the Manhattan Project’s R&D of the atomic bomb and J Robert Oppenheimer’s role in it.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—Please don’t be terrible. At least be better than the CGI in the trailer.

• Dune: Part Two—Villeneuve’s Dune was one of the most pleasant surprises for me at the movies in the last several years, and as a result I am, to my continuing surprise, quite looking forward to Part Two.

• Napoleon—Ridley Scott has a shaky relationship with historical fact but his movies are always breathtaking to behold, and Joaquin Phoenix, who brings a nigh-insane sense of drive and intensity to every part he plays, should do something interesting with old Boney.

These are the ones I am actually excited for, but let’s hope that, as in any moviegoing year, there will also be some nice surprises along the way.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the top, despite my overall negative impression of film and the film industry in 2022, the good things I saw weren’t just good, but excellent. I gladly recommend any of the films praised above. Here’s hoping for much more like them in 2023!

Five years of blogging

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. Five years—half a decade—does not amount to much in the end, but this website and blog began in a time that now feels utterly remote to me. I had just started a new job, my first full-time teaching position, and was getting used to a commute I could now do in my sleep. Sarah and I only had two kids, one only a few months old. We weren’t quite aware of it just yet, but we were outgrowing our apartment. And the year before, I had self-published my first novel and a novella I had whipped up in two weeks. There was kind enthusiasm among friends but few sales.

I created this website to coincide with and, hopefully, help promote the release of Dark Full of Enemies, a novel which had itself lain dormant for almost five years, from its completion just before Sarah and I got married until that winter of 2017. I had written but not yet finished revising Griswoldville, and I hoped a website would help with that project, too.

It may surprise y’all, now, but I almost deleted the blog option when I first started building this site. I had even scoffed when I saw it on the default version of the template. Thanks, but no thanks, had been my attitude. I don’t want to get fired for something I write there. And who reads blogs, anyway?

But I hesitated. I had run a blog in college, one of those free blogging sites that one now only encounters in the dirty alleys and out-of-the-way park benches of Google searches, and I had found it great fun. This remembrance also brought to mind the diary I had kept for four or five years, daily from January of 2008 through most of grad school, then sporadically, catching up when I missed days here and there, and finally sputtering out sometime in the years between grad school and marriage.

What that Blogspot page and the diary had in common, though, that made me hesitate to write off blogging on this new site, was practice—both in the sense of training and in the Alasdair MacIntyre sense of a life-shaping routine. A regularly maintained blog is good practice.

When I had kept that blog during and just after college, I had also produced one almost complete World War II novel as well as the manuscript that became No Snakes in Iceland. When I had kept that diary, I had also finished No Snakes in Iceland, put it through its first rounds of readers and revisions, and written the rough draft of Dark Full of Enemies. Habitually writing something, I decided, would prepare me for the day I need to write the important thing.

And so here I am.

I have no regular schedule and no real plan. I just know that I need to write here occasionally, often enough to keep limber, the same way I need exercise. (More than ever, in fact.) Five or six posts a month feels, to me, like I’m staying on track. And I have no set topic. This blog, to borrow a concept from Alan Jacobs, whose blog I regularly read, is a commonplace book, and so whatever catches my eye, interests me, irritates me, makes me stop to think, or that I enjoy and want to tell others about may wind up here.

So now, half a decade after launching this blog, my wife and I have three kids, we live in a house in a slightly more country part of a crowded county, I have published two more novels and yet another is going through the usual cycles of hibernation, reading, and revision—and I have hundreds of posts here. (I have the specific number written down in my office at school, and am now on Christmas break. Excellent foresight.) These have been fun to write—good practice, just as I’d hoped, as well as a place to ruminate and occasionally just vent—and have connected me to some good people whom I might never have “met” otherwise. I am deeply grateful.

A few statistical giblets for those of y’all who are interested:

Traffic to my site, most of which goes to the blog, has steadily increased every year since I started. In 2019, with two years to get established, the site got over 6,700 distinct visits. In 2020 that nearly doubled to over 12,500. In 2021 it doubled again: 25,390. And already this year, with a couple weeks to go, it’s received 36,000. Pageviews are even higher, though I am no web analytics expert and can’t tell you much of what this signifies. Now all I need to do is turn this traffic into book sales!

At any rate, the website and blog have served their purpose: I am getting practice, and people are reading and, occasionally, seeking out and buying my books. And I’m most thankful for that.

Again, I’m thankful for those of y’all who regularly read what I post here, especially considering what an idiosyncratic jumble of topics it must seem to be, and thanks most of all to those who have reached out over the years. Hearing from y’all has been an encouragement, a fun source of conversation, and it has made me a better writer. Just last week one of y’all caught a glaring error in my post about run-on sentences, which I was able to fix—or at least slap a Band-Aid on.

I’m looking forward, God willing, to five more years of writing practice here! Thank y’all for being here, and thanks, as always, for reading.

2021 in movies

Dang, the pickings are slim, aren’t they? 2021 was an even worse year for movies than 2020 if, like me, you’re completely burned out on Marvel, aren’t going to see a movie simply because it has an ideologically or politically correct message, and don’t pay for any subscription streaming services.

Nevertheless, I did get out to theatres a number of times and also caught some good films on home video afterward. But that was not nearly as often as I would have liked. So, rather than a top five, any movie I liked made it into the post this year.

Dune

Oscar isaac as Duke Leto Atreides in Dune

Certainly the best film I saw this year, Dune is an excellent movie in its own right as well as a skilled and well-crafted adaptation of Frank Herbert’s elephantine sci-fi novel. The cast, design, cinematography, special effects, music—all are excellent, and all contribute to an involving, exciting film of operatic scale and epic scope. I look forward to Part II.

I say all of this as someone who originally did not have much interest in either the book or the movie, as I explain in my full, much more detailed review, which you can read here.

No Time to Die

Rami Malek as Lyutsifer Safin in No Time to Die

Dune was certainly the best film as a film that I saw this year, but I think the one I enjoyed the most was Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, No Time to Die.

The longest and heaviest of the series so far, No Time to Die pits Bond against Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), an eerie supervillain with an interest in virology, nanotechnology, and poison who has plans both for his own old enemies—not only Bond, but Quantum and SPECTRE—and for the world. Safin’s plot places Bond’s last serious girlfriend, Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) in harm’s way, and Bond is called out of retirement for a mission he may not be up to, either physically or emotionally.

No Time to Die, as I wrote after I saw it, “is a whole lot of movie.” It’s overlong, overcomplicated, and needlessly develops continuities with the previous Craig films, especially Spectre, and I feel like the impact of its big action finale and especially its surprising ending were diminished by some of these story choices. But it also features seriously good action, a good villain, great locations, an intriguing and all-too-real premise, and Craig in his best form as Bond since Skyfall.

A solid ending to Craig’s tenure. I rank it in the middle of the pack, below Skyfall and Casino Royale and above Spectre and Quantum of Solace. You can read my full review here.

The King’s Man

The Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) confronts Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) in The King’s Man

I saw and really enjoyed Kingsman: The Secret Service when it came out in 2015, but did not see its sequel. This was a franchise I’d enjoy if I ran across it—or whenever the mood to watch the first film’s “Freebird” sequence struck. Then, lo and behold, a trailer appeared for The King’s Man, a prequel set during World War I and starring Ralph Fiennes and looking like a jazzier, more masculine version of the Western Front hijinks in Wonder Woman. I was sold.

I’m glad to say I saw The King’s Man earlier this week, and it’s a hoot—a mostly light-hearted historical fantasy romp through some of the big names and a whole lot of the fashions and hardware of the 1910s. This is Pirates of the Caribbean for World War I.

The King’s Man centers on the Duke of Oxford (Fiennes) and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson). Following a prologue set in a Boer War concentration camp (the friend who saw it with me, who lived in South Africa for some years, remarked: “Didn’t see this coming”), in which Oxford and son lose their wife and mother to Boer snipers, we catch up with them in 1914 as tensions escalate throughout Europe. Oxford is a dedicated pacifist who refuses to allow Conrad to enlist; Conrad bridles at his father’s principles and the damage they do to their public reputation. But Oxford is adept at pulling strings and using connections, especially Lord Kitchener (Charles Dance), and this aptitude and the skills of some of his household staff (Djimon Hounsou and Gemma Arterton) create not only unofficial capacities in which Conrad can serve, but creates a network of intelligence and special operations that evolves, by the end of the war, into the Kingsman organization we know from the other films.

This organization becomes important as one of the only bulwarks against a mysterious group of international terrorists who meet, Blofeld and SPECTRE-style, in a faraway hideout to plot against the major powers, and the Kingsman’s contests with the mystery archvillain’s agents take up much of the runtime. Along the way there are some outlandish operations, a lot of Bond-style globetrotting, a ton of cameos from real historical figures from the era, and even a genuinely surprising tragedy that sets the finale in motion.

This movie is all over the place, with wink-wink broad comedy—as in a sequence in which our heroes, misled into thinking that Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) is homosexual, attempt to seduce him, a sequence that turns into a bizarre healing ritual for Oxford’s maimed leg and finally a swordfight/Cossack dance set to the 1812 Overture—interspersed with dark, realistic war scenes. A hand-to-hand fight in no-man’s-land between two groups of trench raider is particularly harrowing. There’s potential for mood whiplash here, but you know what? It worked for me. It was so outlandish, so outrageous, and so daring that I was glad to go along for the ride. I do not say this often, so take note—check your brain at the door. It’s worth it.

The King’s Man offers an additional layer of fun for anyone versed in World War I history. Though the history here is grossly oversimplified—you’d think, based on this, that the only countries involved in the war were Britain, Germany, and Russia—a ton of real events are worked into the fantastical conspiracy framework of the movie, and numerous historical figures appear, including Lord Kitchener, Rasputin, Erik Jan Hanussen, Mata Hari, Gavrilo Princip and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson (seduced and blackmailed by Mata Hari, making the retrieval and destruction of a Woodrow Wilson sex tape an important plot point), and—in my favorite bit of casting in a long time—Tom Hollander as King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II. None of it is very accurate, and it halfheartedly tries to work in an incoherent pacifist message, but it’s a hoot, and I and the buddy I watched it with enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Check out The King’s Man if you’re up for an outlandish historical action-adventure with a dash of the fantastical and a Monty Python-style grasp of history.

The Last Duel

Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and his wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) in The Last Duel

I left my copy of the book this film is based on in my office over Christmas break, so I can’t attest to the film’s total accuracy (especially since I’m an Early Medieval guy, not a Hundred Years’ War guy), but I was really taken with The Last Duel.

Briefly, The Last Duel begins with the last judicial duel or trial by combat ever fought in France and backtracks to tell us how the two knights involved, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), got to this point. And it tells us three times—first from Jean de Carrouges’s simple, noble perspective as a loyal but often aggrieved retainer; second from Jacques Le Gris’s corrupt, self-aggrandizing, and considerably more carnal perspective; and finally from the perspective of Marguerite de Carrouges, Jean’s wife. Marguerite claimed to have been raped by Jacques, and as Jean pressed his suit and Jacques continued to deny the rape had ever occurred—variously stating that it either never happened or was a consensual affair—Jean asked for a trial by combat, a survival of ancient Frankish custom that put the judging of who was telling the truth in the hands of God. Survive, and you were exonerated. The stakes are not only high for the two knights involved, one of whom, according to the terms of the custom, must die for judgment to be rendered, but for Marguerite, who will be executed as a perjurer should Jean be killed.

I’ve made no secret of my distrust of Ridley Scott when it comes to handling historical material, and given the way the film was marketed and talked about—as if it were some kind of medieval #MeToo manifesto or damning indictment of medieval Christian patriarchy or whatever the bugbear of the day is—I was pleasantly surprised with how good The Last Duel was. The film, which is structured in three “chapters,” one for each major party’s perspective, presents each chapter straightforwardly, dropping the viewer into the complicated world these characters inhabit and letting us experience all of that well before the incident that leads to the dueling ground. Inheritance and dowry, the pressures of lordship and producing an heir, the difficulty of managing estates and fielding armies, the roles of law and custom, interfamily rivalries and dissension even within families, shifting alliances and damaged reputations—all factor in and influence the proceedings. It’s a remarkably evenhanded treatment of a complex alien world for a filmmaker who has previously had no problem manipulating the past to make it either more familiar or more useful for his purposes. I credit the writing, which Damon and Affleck had a hand in and which is better than some of Scott’s other historical films.

The Last Duel is, unsurprisingly given Scott’s strengths, a great-looking film. I have quibbles about costuming, combat, the way some of the characters talk, some of the inevitable Dark Ages stereotypes, and even breeds of dogs (a Boston terrier in the 14th century? really?), but overall the film is visually stunning and has a feeling of tactile reality to it that I wish more historical films could manage.

The performances are also excellent—crucially so, since the three different versions of events we get must have both striking and subtle contrasts. Jodie Comer as Marguerite has earned effusive praise, and while she was very good, I was honestly much more impressed with Damon and especially Driver. Both do a lot of subtle work differentiating their characters across the three versions of events, and do so in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself or require explicit explanation. Jean de Carrouges comes across as a relatively simple, shallow, but driven and honorable man; Jacque Le Gris, even in his own version of the story, as a dissipated but worldly and intelligent striver. The movie doesn’t uncomplicate these characters looking for easy bad guys, which I appreciated.

There are other things I could quibble with. An early line from Jean’s mother, that “There is no right, there is only the power of men” is shockingly un-medieval, and some of the legal talk, especially regarding the startlingly brutal punishments for crimes, is oversimplified and misleading (as is pointed out in this piece at Slate, of all places). But I think the film’s biggest misstep comes with the beginning of Marguerite’s perspective. On the title card for “Chapter III: The Truth According to Marguerite de Carrouges,” as the title fades out only “The Truth” remains for a moment. This choice wrecks a lot of the ambiguity the film has thrived on up to this point, and suggests that we can confidently know what happened to these real people in this real incident. (We can’t.) It also plays into the tired feminist trope of women being the only truth-tellers, especially since, in scenes of Marguerite sorting out her husband’s estates’ finances and managing the household and farms (as if this was somehow exceptional for medieval noblewomen, all of whom had vast domestic authority), it suggests Marguerite is the only intelligent and capable person in a world of brutish warriors. Again, a tired feminist trope.

But that aside, I found myself deeply involved in The Last Duel and admired its careful, largely hands-off storytelling approach. And the duel, when it arrived, proved powerfully cathartic.

The Last Duel is a worthwhile if flawed adaptation of a true story with great attention to the complex social world in which these events took place. It’s grim, especially considering the nature of the crime against Marguerite, which we’re presented in two different versions, and its conclusion is brutal, but it’s a worthwhile historical film of the kind they’re making less and less of.

Luca

Luca and best friend Alberto in Luca

Luca is Pixar at its finest—bright and inventive, with beautiful settings and animation, good music, and a fun story made fresh and meaningful by the characters and their relationships. I also appreciated, as with the next film I’ll talk about, the relatively low stakes. Three friends want to win a race so they can use the cash prize to buy a motor scooter. Refreshing.

Two adolescent boys testing boundaries, visiting parts of town they shouldn’t, making new friends, keeping secrets, and setting themselves magnificent goals—this could be Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn or another number of other literary friends, and Luca draws deep from the well of young male friendship.

While the friendship between young sea monster boys Luca and Alberto forms the core of the movie, alongside a deepening connection between Luca and the vivacious human tomboy Giulia, the relationship that most powerfully spoke to me was that between the homeless, parentless, aimless Alberto and Giulia’s father Massimo. The way the taciturn Massimo senses Alberto’s need for masculine guidance, discipline, and work—that is, for a father—and selflessly moves to meet that need brought to mind the multiple generations of aimless, fatherless boys and men our society produces now and left me wanting to be more like Massimo. It’s a quiet but moving subplot that really deepened the film, and parallels Luca’s own quest for education of the book-learning variety. Both boys end the film having been given tools to meet needs they didn’t even know they had, and both receive these things through relationships.

The voice acting is good and the Italian scenery beautiful—not to mention all the pasta, which is the most delectably animated food since Ratatouille. But most of all it’s pure fun, poignantly evoking the joys of childhood friendship on the terrifying cusp of adulthood and speaking to the need we all have for both peers and parents.

Paw Patrol: The Movie

If you have kids, you don’t need me to name all these characters for you

You know what? I’m thirty-seven years old. I have three kids between the ages of two and six. So yes, I saw this. And I mostly liked it.

Paw Patrol: The Movie takes Ryder and his team of pups away from their usual jurisdiction of Adventure Bay to the much busier, more bustling Adventure City, where the nefarious Mayor Humdinger has just managed to be elected mayor on a technicality. Local pup Liberty calls the Paw Patrol about this emergency (about which more below) and the crew removes to Adventure City where they set up in a Stark Tower-style headquarters and work to ameliorate as much of Humdinger’s chaos as possible. There’s a strong taste of the superhero movie to these proceedings. Perhaps my favorite incident involves Humdinger’s unveiling of a new L-train with loops in it, a bit of infrastructure that goes spectacularly wrong very quickly.

You can probably tell that this is a lightweight movie, and to that I say: Please, sir, can I have some more? The story unfolds at precisely the kid-friendly nonsense level of the TV show—the only thing that matters is that there are emergencies to which the pups can respond with their infinite variety of vehicles. I found it refreshingly low-stakes.

Paw Patrol: The Movie is like a supersized episode of the TV show with a much bigger budget and, therefore, strikingly better animation. The pups in this movie have actual fur, and their environments are much more detailed and vibrant. There are even slow-motion action sequences for added drama, as when Chase, the police dog, risks a dangerous leap for a rescue, which elicited a “Whoa” from my kids.

There were only two flaws—for me, an adult viewer of Paw Patrol: The Movie. The first was the relative sidelining of much of the cast in order to develop a tragic backstory for Chase. We learn that he is hesitant about going to Adventure City because he was abandoned there as a (even younger?) pup. Standard stuff for fleshing out a ninety-minute movie, but part of the charm of the show has always been the variety of the characters. Here, Zuma (something like a Coast Guard dog) and Rocky (who drives a recycling truck but whom I always call a “garbage dog”) are virtually background characters.

The other flaw—again, for me, an adult viewer of Paw Patrol: The Movie—was the new character, Liberty. Liberty is the worst. In her first scene she physically threatens a man for littering, she breaks any rules she doesn’t agree with, and she calls the Paw Patrol—emergency services—because she doesn’t like the outcome of an election. Hmm. She then spends the rest of the movie insinuating herself into the Paw Patrol, claiming to be an “honorary member,” and is rewarded with her own membership and set of vehicles at the end. She’s constantly irritating, and the only redeeming factor is the way Ryder acts weirded out by her. Her sass and entitlement also throw into relief the idealistic way the normal cast are presented on the show: as good-natured and selfless public servants, something I never thought to admire in such a silly children’s entertainment before. Here’s hoping the show leaves Liberty in Adventure City.

If you have kids of the right age, this is a fun, charming, big-budget version of something they’re already sure to enjoy, and I’m happy to recommend it on those grounds.

New to me

Cliff Robertson in 633 Squadron (1964)

With the theatres a waterless wasteland in which the only movement to be seen is the lonely rolling of superhero tumbleweeds, this turned out to be a great year for movies I’ve been meaning to see for a long time. This was especially the case with war movies, as you’ll see below.

The Dam Busters (1955)—A classic of the war movie genre and an excellent dramatization of one of the most daring and dangerous missions of the Second World War. It’s well-acted and produced, featuring lots of great aircraft and aerial photography, and despite the limitations of the 1950s British film industry’s special effects, the miniatures, slow motion, rear projection, and optical effects like animated tracer rounds are still effective. And though the film doesn’t cover every loss on the night of the operation or give attention to civilian casualties as a result of the flooding caused by the raids, it still ends on a reverent downbeat note, a moving acknowledgment of just how much this technically accomplished and ingenious operation cost. An engaging and powerful true story well told.

633 Squadron (1964)—I was interested to check this film out because of its odd connection with The Dam Busters: both were inspirations for Star Wars, something that is blindingly obvious if you watch both films with that in mind. (See here and here.) As it turns out, 633 Squadron, though a fictional story, is by turns a fun and gripping evocation of the daring and skill required of the pilots of the British Mosquito fighter-bomber. Cliff Robertson, as an American volunteer leading the squadron, is very good in an understated role, though West Side Story’s George Chakiris is absurdly miscast as a Norwegian resistance leader—casting made yet more ridiculous in that this obviously Greek man is paired with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Austrian actress Maria Perschy as his sister. Regardless, this film is a good deal of fun, has a lot of excellent aerial photography using both models (not always convincing, but effective enough) and a fleet of real Mosquitos collected for the film. It also has a grim, heavy ending comparable to its much better cousin The Dam Busters.

13 Minutes (2015) and The 12th Man (2017)—Two excellent foreign films set in and around World War II. The first is a German film about Georg Elser, a lone-wolf assassin who attempted to kill Hitler with an elaborately engineered time bomb in the early days of the war. The second is a Norwegian film about the harrowing survival of Jan Baalsrud, the sole survivor of a botched commando raid. Both are true stories, and both are excellent. I watched these during my quarantine back in the spring; you can read my thoughts on both of them here.

Max Manus: Man of War (2008)—An excellent action movie about Norwegian resistance fighter Max Manus, who had extraordinary guts, having volunteered to fight for Finland during the Winter War before undertaking resistance operations against the Nazis. In one incident, Manus was wounded and captured and escaped by flinging himself through a hospital window to the street several stories below. Brings home both the courage and ingenuity of the resistance as well as the cost and, all too often, the futility of these operations.

A Night to Remember (1958)—An unsentimental, well-acted, and well-produced film about the sinking of the Titanic that also manages to be more comprehensive than any other film version. Despite its disadvantages in terms of special effects, I’d recommend A Night to Remember over James Cameron’s bloated, cliched turkey of a movie any day. I was so moved by A Night to Remember when I watched it back in the spring that I made sure to review it; you can read that full review here.

Tremors (1990)—My first memory of Tremors is of one of my cousins telling me—nearly thirty years ago—about a scene in a movie where Reba McEntire runs from a monster into a room full of guns. That made an impression, as did the Jaws-ripoff poster at the video store nextdoor to the BBQ restaurant in Wiley. Long story short, I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to seeing this, but it’s a hoot, and a high-quality hoot—funny, well-written, well-cast, perfectly structured, and perfectly balancing comedy, horror, and action.

Near misses

Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd in News of the World

Here are three movies I’m calling “near misses,” because while I liked elements of them, they had enough flaws or I had enough misgivings about them that I couldn’t wholeheartedly enjoy or recommend them.

• The Lighthouse—A brilliantly acted, oppressively atmospheric, and beautifully produced movie that is nevertheless too in love with itself for its own good. Part of my quarantine viewing this spring.

• The Green Knight—See my remarks on The Lighthouse above. In addition to entirely too much regard for its own artfulness, The Green Knight also fails as an adaptation, as all of the changes made to what is rightly regarded as a masterpiece diminish the story and its themes. Read my full review here.

• News of the World—This is my favorite of the three films I’m lumping into this category, and I expect it will grow on me. But while it’s an accomplished movie, beautiful to look at and brilliantly acted by Tom Hanks and the young Helena Zengel, I found that, like The Green Knight, where it deviated from its source material it did so to its story’s detriment. In this case, that was a lot of socially aware posturing of the kind that clearly appeals to director Paul Greengrass—we get a lynching in the first five minutes, eliminating a black character who is an actual character in the novel rather than a literally faceless victim, and later there’s a whole sequence of labor relations drama that feels like something from the 1970s rather than the 1870s—but that distracts from the emotional core of Paulette Jiles’s straightforward but subtle and powerful novel. (Coincidentally, I reviewed and recommended the novel in the very first post on this blog four years ago today.)

What I missed in 2021

Three movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons, I have not gotten around to yet:

• The Little Things—A serial killer mystery from John Lee Hancock, director of The Blind Side, The Founder, and an underrated masterpiece that I seize every opportunity to stump for, The Alamo. Hope to catch this in the new year.

• Spider-Man: No Way Home—As much as I’ve criticized the unceasing flood of superhero movies, the only one that caught my interest this year was this third installment in the Marvel-affiliated Tom Holland Spider-Man series. Word from friends and family is that it’s a lot of fun, but I still haven’t seen it and have been content to catch the first two—Homecoming and Far From Home—on video later. That will probably be the case here.

• The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo project (rumor has it that brother Ethan is done making movies, which I dearly hope isn’t true), an artsy black-and-white adaptation of my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays, apparently got a very limited arthouse release at Christmas but will only be available to us plebs in January. I’m looking forward to it.

What I’m looking forward to in 2022

Though I’ve bemoaned the state of movies and filmmaking a lot, especially this year, I do find there is much to look forward to—and if you look at what I was looking forward to a year ago, you’ll see that at least some of those turned out to be excellent! Hope springs eternal.

• The Northman—A Viking Age revenge drama that, to judge from the trailer, takes its historical setting and the alien worldview of its characters more seriously than usual. You can read my reactions to and observations based on the first trailer here.

• Munich: The Edge of War—An espionage drama, based on the novel Munich by Robert Harris, set against the backdrop of the 1938 Munich Conference. 1917’s George Mackay plays the lead, with Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain. Disappointed to learn that this will be released by Netflix in the US; hoping for a release on home media somewhere down the line.

• Operation Mincemeat—A true story, previously told in the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, when parts of the operation were still protected secrets, this film is based on the deeply researched and highly readable book by Ben Macintyre and should tell the whole story: how British intelligence mounted an ambitious but morally dubious disinformation campaign by fabricating a false identity for the corpse of a homeless man, planting documents on his person that would lead the Germans to move military resources away from the target of a coming Allied attack, and depositing the body off the coast of Spain where it was sure to be discovered. Great cast including Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen (or, as I am already calling them, the dueling Darcys) and Johnny Flynn as Ian Fleming. Another movie that the abominable Netflix has scooped up.

• Lightyear—Pixar gives us the movie that inspired the toy line from Toy Story—or something. Looks like it could be delightful.

• Death on the Nile—Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot returns in this big-budget, ensemble cast sequel to his Murder on the Orient Express. This film has already been delayed several times; hoping the studio will finally bring it out in the new year.

• Top Gun: Maverick—Ditto the above. Just release the thing already.

• Mission: Impossible 7—A dependably solid franchise, with excellent action and stunts. Hoping for more in the same tradition.

• Downton Abbey: A New Era—Guaranteed date night success.

Conclusion

Looking back at all I’ve written about, maybe 2021 was a better year for movies than I initially gave it credit for. At any rate, I watched a number of worthwhile, entertaining, enjoyable, or thought-provoking films this year, and I hope you’ll check some of these out, too.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes at the movies for 2022!

2020 in movies

It me. Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse in Autumn De Wilde’s ADAPTATION of Emma

I originally had an introduction here in which I surveyed theatre shutdowns and the unwelcome pivot to streaming, but that was windy, pessimistic, and irrelevant. So I scrapped it. Here instead, without further introduction, are are my favorites movies of 2020:

Tenet

The Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) in Tenet

Tenet is the biggest what-might-have-been of the year, Christopher Nolan having decided to make the most extreme form of the kind of convoluted brain-melting movie he is reputed to make, only to have the COVID epidemic keep people far, far away from the box office.

It’s a shame, because while Tenet is flawed—too loud, too complicated, and too visually confusing for its own good—it is very, very good, with some great action set pieces and excellent performances by the supporting cast, especially Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh. (How good is the cast? They make you believe all of this “temporal warfare” and “inverted entropy” makes sense. An overlooked accomplishment.) Tenet is also great to look at, with beautiful large-format film cinematography and some great locations. I was fortunate enough to see this, one time, in theatres. I was the only one in the whole place.

Read my full review of Tenet, in which I elaborate on all of these themes, on the blog here.

The Vast of Night

Sierra McCormick as switchboard operator Fay in The Vast of Night

I’m not sure when I first heard of The Vast of Night, but I decided to check it out thanks to RedLetterMedia, who reviewed it some months ago. This was my surprise hit of the year.

Set in a small New Mexico town in 1958, The Vast of Night follows two characters—high school electronics enthusiast and part-time switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) and smalltown radio DJ Everett (Jake Horovitz)—on the night of the local high school’s biggest game. Fay has received some strange calls at the switchboard and captured some odd radio signals, and with Everett, who plays a recording of the noise on the radio station, thus prompting calls that might provide leads, they set out of investigate the origin of the sounds. The military? The Russians? Something else? Something not of this world?

The Vast of Night entranced me from the beginning. The characters are fun and the dialogue snappy and humorous. And for a low budget independent film it is visually striking, with excellent cinematography (especially Steadicam work, with long shots swooping across the basketball court or down entire city streets), and sets and costumes that evoke the time and place wonderfully well.

But what makes The Vast of Night especially good, and makes it feel so accomplished, is its perfectly calibrated and controlled tone. It captures precisely the strange combination of suspense, tension, and eagerness that comes with listening to a scratchy, staticky radio signal waiting to hear… whatever is out there. The thrill of the encounter with the creepy. Anyone who has hunched over a computer speaker late at night trying to hear a sample of otherworldly audio knows this feeling. The best example comes in a one-shot scene that is a subtle, low-key masterpiece, in which Fay works the switchboard, talking, questioning, listening, trying to check her equipment for problems, trying to connect or reconnect with people, and always, always returning to the mysterious signal to listen—all while the camera, with glacial patience, pushes in to a closeup.

The Vast of Night keys up our anticipation from the beginning and plays it perfectly. It’s wonderfully done, and a lot of fun if you grew up on “Unsolved Mysteries” or “The Twilight Zone,” or if you just enjoy a trip into the uncanny.

Since I imagine fewer people have heard of The Vast of Night, check out the trailer here. For a taste of the film’s slick camerawork and beautiful sets, check out this four and a half minute shot from near the beginning of the film. And here’s an interesting video featuring the film’s director, in which he comments on that scene at Fay’s switchboard and how the film uses sound to build tension.

Greyhound

CDr Krause (Tom Hanks) on the deck of the KeelIng in Greyhound

This is a movie I’d been looking forward to for some years, ever since reading the novel it’s based on: The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester. You can read more about the book in my 2018 year-in-review here.

Greyhound takes place across about forty-eight hours of the life of Commander Ernest Krause, captain of the destroyer USS Keeling, as he strives to protect the merchant vessels of an Allied convoy from U-boat attack. This film offers a stripped down, mostly unromanticized glimpse of life during World War II without a lot of Hollywood exposition or stock characters or cliched plot elements to get in the way. That requires the viewer to pay attention and keep up, something I always appreciate in a movie. Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed us, but drops us into a situation as it happens and involves us first as witnesses, eventually as participants.

Tom Hanks wrote the script himself and his performance is the centerpiece of the movie. It’s excellent, and it’s a shame Greyhound didn’t get the big-screen release it deserved.

Read my full review of Greyhound on the blog here.

Emma

Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse and JohnnY Flynn as Mr Knightley in Emma

This most recent adaptation of Emma snuck into theatres right ahead of all the shutdowns, but my wife and I didn’t get to watch it until it arrived in Redbox in late Spring. It was worth the wait.

Like previous film adaptations of what is perhaps Jane Austen’s best novel, this Emma has beautiful costumes and cinematography, gorgeous locations in the English countryside, and a bright, energetic color palette, all of which make the film visually stunning from beginning to end. Like other adaptations, this Emma streamlines, condenses, and rearranges things to keep the film a manageable length. Unlike other adaptations—at least the ones I’ve seen—this Emma is an overt comedy, amplifying and exaggerating the comedic elements of the novel, especially the characters and all their foibles. It’s hilarious.

But it’s also quite moving and retains the strong moral core of Austen’s original, since it doesn’t shy away from exaggerating the weaknesses of Emma herself. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma as a spoiled but immensely self-assured rich girl, one with some fine qualities but a long way to go toward maturity. The zest with which Taylor-Joy plays Emma—matchmaking with the hapless Harriet (Mia Goth), flirting with Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), and trading zingers with Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn)—makes her negative qualities, her self-absorption, her obliviousness toward or outright disdain for others, and most famously her cruelty, all the more cutting. Which also makes Mr Knightley all the more attractive, given his earnestness, his sense of honor, and especially his charity toward others.

The litmus test for any adaptation of Emma has to be that scene. You know the one—Emma’s joke at Miss Bates’s expense, and Mr Knightley’s epic chewing out of Emma. This film’s version is perhaps the best I’ve seen. The painfully mixed emotions of everyone involved are expertly portrayed.

The performances are excellent across the board. Taylor-Joy does an excellent job making such a difficult character sympathetic, and Mia Goth’s Harriet is adorably dense and vulnerable. The comedic standouts are Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse, who spends half the movie in a wonderful comic ballet of footmen and folding screens and imaginary drafts, and Josh O’Connor as a Nosferatu-like Mr Elton. I laughed every moment he was onscreen. But perhaps my favorite performance was Flynn as Mr Knightley. Flynn is striking in appearance but not classically handsome—in the way the excellent Jeremy Northam’s Knightley was, for instance—and so what attracts us to him is precisely his goodness.

I wondered, when I saw the trailer for this version of Emma, why we needed another one. The last couple years have been crowded with high-profile remakes, often with some faddish social agenda glommed on, usually disappearing fairly quickly. This one should last; it approaches the story respectfully but from a newer angle, making it fresh and fun—a reminder of why people love Jane Austen. I’m glad they made it, and especially glad I saw it. Check it out if and when you can.

The Outpost

Scott EastwooD as ClinTon RoMesha in The Outpost

Based on Jake Tapper’s book, The Outpost tells the stories of Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) and Clinton Romesha (Scott Eastwood), two US Army soldiers who earned the Medal of Honor during the siege of Combat Outpost Keating in 2009.

The army built COP Keating in a mountainous province of Afghanistan but sited it very badly, with virtually the entire interior of the outpost visible from the mountains above. Everyone who entered it became a target—fish in a barrel. We see numerous small Taliban assaults on the outpost early in the film, but when a large force of insurgents, having probed the outpost’s defenses for months, mounts a huge and well coordinated attack, the result is a bloody battle in which COP Keating’s garrison is badly outnumbered and vulnerable from every direction. Not only the heroic efforts of Romesha and Carter but the teamwork of all the men in the outpost and pilots who bring much-needed close air support save the day, though not before eight men have been killed and dozens wounded. The Outpost dramatizes all of this exceptionally well.

Director Rod Lurie stages much of the film in long, unbroken, naturalistic shots that follow the characters around the outpost, giving the viewer a good sense of the geography of the location—always important in this kind of story—as well as subtly involving us in what’s happening. When lulls or mealtime or the boring, routine work around the outpost turns in an instant into combat, the transition is startlingly immediate. Everything feels intensely real.

The performances also help sell what’s happening. Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones are good in the lead roles, as is Orlando Bloom is a small part near the beginning of the film. The supporting cast is also good, and we get a good sense of the camaraderie of the men in the outpost as they shoot the breeze, rag on each other, and switch—again, instantaneously—into combat mode.

The Outpost is a gritty, unromanticized look at modern combat and well worth checking out.

A Hidden Life

AugUst Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter in A Hidden Life

Though A Hidden Life was screened at some film festivals in 2019, I’m treating it as a 2020 movie since it was not widely available until last year. I’m insisting on this because it was by far the best film I saw in 2020, a movie that made me weep and that I’ve meditated upon ever since.

A Hidden Life tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who, when called up for military service by the Third Reich during World War II, refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. For this he was imprisoned and beaten, his wife and daughters were ostracized from their small, tightly knit rural community, and he was eventually executed for treason.

That’s the outline of the story. What Terence Malick’s film of this story does is bring us into Jägerstätter’s life, allowing us to feel the strength he draws from his relationship with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), the love he has for his home and his daughters, and the power of his faith in God. It also lets us experience how, once he has made up his mind to refuse the oath to Hitler, something he, a faithful Catholic, believes he cannot do, first local peer pressure attempts to accomplish what the omnipotent Reich seems too distant to do—force him into line—and then how the authorities themselves come down on him. The slowness with which the process plays out is painful to watch; even more so are the suspicious and finally angry glances that Jägerstätter’s neighbors direct toward him and his family. And then there is the prison, the trial, and the wait for the guillotine.

The film takes its title from a line in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The hiddenness of Jägerstätter’s life and sacrifice are what have stuck with me ever since. We all imagine ourselves, especially in this self-congratulatory age, taking heroic stands, changing minds, changing the world, even if it takes our deaths. But what if our deaths accomplish nothing? Multiple characters, even those sympathetic to Jägerstätter, remind him of this throughout the film. Would we really follow our faith all the way to the guillotine if there were no grand speeches or multitudes of people whose minds were changed? If no one ever knew our names? If it meant the ruin of our families and the orphaning of our children? If it meant losing?

A Hidden Life left me powerfully convicted.

The film is beautifully shot, with gorgeous Alpine scenery, and wonderfully well acted. But one recurring image, with or without actors in it, conveys Jägerstätter’s moral center: the faithfulness of work. The fields around Jägerstätter’s village are the site of constant labor. Agriculture demands constant care and attention no matter what you’re growing, and it is often thankless, those who receive the benefits forgetting immediately what it took to produce it. It is the same, Jägerstätter’s story shows us, with faith. We live in a pragmatic age, where even the faithful strive for purely earthly ends and equate righteousness with success. But we are not, after all, called to “accomplish” anything; we are called to be faithful, to do the work. A Hidden Life is a beautiful, powerful, and much needed reminder of that truth.

The ones that got away

Here’s a handful of movies from 2020 that I missed but still hope to see in the new year:

• Soul and Onward—I have zero interest in jazz, the most precious of all musical genres, and am heartily sick of 80s nostalgia, but I love and trust Pixar and really liked the looks of both of these, especially considering the talent involved.

• Mank—David Fincher’s telling of a (questionable) behind the scenes story of the writing of Citizen Kane, shot in glorious black and white and featuring a great cast.

• Hillbilly Elegy—Shot partly in my home county in Georgia and based on one of the best and most important memoirs I’ve read in the last ten years. Glenn Close looks amazing in this.

• I’m Thinking of Ending Things—This isn’t ordinarily my kind of movie, but I want to see this purely on the strength of its bizarre trailer.

• The Call of the Wild—Distracting CGI dog notwithstanding, this is based on an old favorite by Jack London and I’m up for anything with these kinds of desolately beautiful landscapes.

• Fatman—Mel Gibson as an ornery old Santa defending himself from a contract killer? Reviews were not good but I cannot not see this.

• Mulan—I’m generally against Disney’s live action versions of its animated classics, as the tendency is to make them slavishly faithful, shot-for-shot remakes. This approach loses the magic of the originals—which were conceived of and designed to be cartoons—in the translation from animation. The most successful so far have been the handful that have had enough confidence to depart from the cartoons and develop enough of their own personality, style, and tone to work as independent adaptations of the same stories. Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella successfully did this. Mulan, based on the trailers, looked like it could. I’ll be interested to find out if it did.

Discoveries

These are films that came out before 2020—one of them over 90 years before—but that I watched for the first time last year. Presented in approximately ascending order, certainly with the best last:

The Hunley

The Hunley is one of the many TNT original movies through which Ted Turner worked out his Civil War obsession during the mid-90s. (Others: Ironclads, The Day Lincoln was Shot, Andersonville, and Gettysburg, which got a theatrical release.) Somehow the film slipped me by until years later. I’m glad to say I’ve finally seen it.

The Hunley tells the story of the Confederate submarine of the same name, famous as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. The movie does an excellent job conveying the hard work and claustrophobic conditions of manning the sub, and the viewer has to marvel at the effort put into mastering the use and maneuver of the craft by its doomed crew. Despite some tonal missteps in the final scene, some dodgy late-90s CGI, and an obviously lower budget than films like Gettysburg or Andersonville, The Hunley was well acted and gripping throughout, with enough narrative surprises to keep it interesting. Donald Sutherland has an especially good moment as Gen. PGT Beauregard in which he takes this effete Louisiana Frenchman and reveals, however briefly, the man’s hidden depths.

A historical note: The Hunley was produced just before the wreck was excavated and removed from the ocean for preservation, and so twenty years of subsequent research has revealed a lot of things not known at the time the film was made. So while much of what the filmmakers came up with out of necessity has been disproven, it’s still an entertaining imaginative dramatization of an important event in Civil War and naval history.

Last Stand at Saber River

Another late-90s TNT original, this is an adaptation of my favorite of Elmore Leonard’s Western novels. Wounded Confederate veteran Paul Cable (Tom Selleck) returns to Arizona territory with his family to find that unscrupulous Unionist ranchers (David and Keith Carradine) are squatting on his land. The showdown between these two sides is further complicated by a one-armed storekeeper (David Dukes) who is up to more than selling dry goods. The film departs in some regards from Leonard’s excellent short novel, primarily by introducing a lot of marital strife into Paul’s relationship with his wife (Suzy Amis), which shortchanges the strong and sustaining relationship in the book. Nevertheless, this is a beautifully shot Western with a lot of good tension and strong performances and successfully translates the dramatic plot developments of the novel’s final act onto the screen.

The Great Train Robbery

A light-hearted Victorian-flavored heist film starring the late great Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Lesley-Anne Down and written and directed by Michael Crichton, based on his own novel. Very loosely based on a real incident, The Great Train Robbery is the story of a plot hatched by career crooks to steal a shipment of gold bound for the Crimea. This gold being the army’s payroll, the shipment is heavily guarded before and after it’s put on a train for the coast, which means forming a multi-part scheme to get all the access and equipment necessary to steal it. And it will take no small amount of guts, too, as—even with all the other pieces in place—the only moment it is feasible to swipe the gold is on the train as it speeds through the countryside.

The Great Train Robbery is fun throughout, with interesting characters, humorous situations, and a generous helping of wink-wink-nudge-nudge comedy thrown in—a cross between Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, and one of Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther movies. It’s also very suspenseful, and Connery’s stuntwork aboard the train at the climax was excellent. The Great Train Robbery is a well-crafted heist comedy set in a period one doesn’t often associate with plots of this kind—it’s worth checking out.

9. April

This excellent Danish war film follows a lieutenant (Pilou Asbæk) and his platoon of bicycle infantry through Denmark’s one-day war against the Nazis as they try to halt the German advance into their country. A well-produced and well acted grunt’s-eye-level film about an often forgotten part of the war. You can read my full review on the blog here.

Come and See

The story of a boy who, at the height of the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, leaves his family to join Communist partisans and fight the Germans, Come and See is a hallucinatory living nightmare of a film, one I think everyone should watch at least once. You can read my full review on the blog here.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

The best of this batch of “discoveries,” this 1928 silent film depicts the trial and execution of St Joan of Arc (Falconetti). This hypnotic film is told through a series of agonized closeups and energetic tracking shots and follows St Joan through questioning by a kangaroo court, imprisonment and the threat of torture, and her final moments on the scaffold. It’s a haunting and powerfully moving depiction of martyrdom. Like A Hidden Life, I could think about nothing else for hours after I watched it. Highly recommended.

What I’m looking forward to

Daniel Craig as 007 in No Time to Die

To end things on a hopeful note, here are the movies I’m most looking forward to this year. Many of these are actually 2020 movies which have, owing to COVID, been bumped back to 2021. I’m hoping for some return to normalcy and for the survival and revival of theatre-going, and I hope a few good films like these will help.

• No Time to Die—Top of the list for me. Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, with Ralph Fiennes returning as M and some especially stunning visuals in the trailers that have been released so far. Also interested to see Remi Malek as the villain. With Craig stepping away, I hope they’ll hand the series off to Tom Hiddleston or Michael Fassbender while they’re young enough to take a good run at it.

• Top Gun: Maverick—I have almost no sentimental attachment to Top Gun, but I like a couple of Kosinski’s previous films and all the aerial stuff—apparently shot for real as much as possible—looks great.

• Dune—The okayest sci-fi/space fantasy epic in history gets a high-powered filmmaking team for this adaptation.

• Death on the Nile—Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery, starring himself as Hercule Poirot. I really liked the style of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and its lavish, old-fashioned sensibilities—especially its large format film cinematography—so I’m hopeful that this film will continue in the same vein.

• The King’s Man—I liked Kingsman: The Secret Service quite a bit, so I’m looking forward to this lush World War I-era prequel that makes full use of the elegant leather, canvas, and polished oak aesthetic of the period, not to mention cameos from major real life figures. Brilliant casting: Tom Hollander plays cousins King George V, Czar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’d pay just to see that.

• The Last Duel—Ridley Scott returns to the Middle Ages for a story of grievance-fueled judicial dueling. I’m sure it’ll be visually stunning and historically atrocious, as per usual with Scott, who never met a medieval stereotype he didn’t like, but I’m interested to see Adam Driver in one of the lead roles.

• Mission: Impossible—Libra—My favorite action series is set to return with two more films shot back-to-back and released in consecutive years.

• Sherlock Holmes 3—This film is still in pre-production, but I’m hopeful. I quite liked Robert Downey Jr’s take on Holmes, especially the chemistry of his friendship with Jude Law’s Watson. I could take or leave some elements of the earlier two movies but I enjoyed them throughout and have been wishing for a third. Here’s hoping.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll check these movies out if you haven’t seen them, and that you’ll get as much enjoyment out of watching them as I did. And let’s hope we can start returning regularly to theatres soon. While I’m thankful for home media, watching a Blu-ray or streaming to a small screen can never replace the communal experience of old-fashioned filmgoing. Something else to look forward to with hope in the new year.

2020 in books: non-fiction

All other things being equal, this was an excellent year of reading. I read more books this year than I have in any other year since I started keeping track—so many books, in fact, and so many good books, that I’ve split my usual end of the year “best of” post into multiple chunks to keep it manageable. Today, let me present my favorite non-fiction reads of 2020. I’ll tell you a little more about what else I have planned at the end.

As usual, keep in mind that these are my favorites, which I have defined previously as “those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.” I had a hard time narrowing it even to the ones you see in this post. You can see a list of everything I read in 2020 at my Goodreads challenge here.

Top ten non-fiction reads of 2020

First, my nine favorites, presented in no particular order. My favorite read of the year enjoys its own subsection further below. Suffice it to say that I’d recommend any of these:

The Making of Europe, by Christopher Dawson—In this classic study of the Early Middle Ages, Dawson argues that far from being a radical break with the classical past or a “dark age” that set Europe back, the period from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to the 11th century was crucial to the emergence of a unified Western civilization, a civilization that synthesized the seemingly disparate elements of Greco-Roman antiquity, the king-led warrior culture of the Germanic tribes that had destroyed Rome, and, as both solvent and glue, Christianity. While The Making of Europe was originally published in 1932 and is therefore dated in some regards, the overall argument Dawson presents holds up well—as do the good writing and magisterial overview of the period.

Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy, by Luke Daly-Groves—I mentioned this book in a special post commemorating the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s suicide back in April. This is a very good recent book that takes Hitler survival conspiracies seriously enough to subject their many varying claims to disciplined historical analysis. They don’t hold up well. Daly-Groves does an excellent job building upon and updating the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose Last Days of Hitler is in my “honorable mentions” below, and presenting a case sympathetic to those intrigued by the rumors of Hitler’s survival but uncompromising in its intellectual rigor. It’s also terrifically readable—an excellent introduction to this material and this kind of historical detective work.

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray—This book illustrates the danger of the perfect epigraph. The GK Chesterton quotation that opens journalist Douglas Murray’s meditation on the controversies and cancel culture surrounding issues of race, feminism, homosexuality, and the transgender movement says everything: “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” (And, in the first of many instances of Murray’s wry British humor, he follows this up with the chorus of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” which enjoins the listener to “look at her butt” no less than six times. From the sublime to the ridiculous indeed.) In all of the four areas Murray concentrates on, vocal minorities of activists have, in the last few decades—or even much more recently than that, in the case of the final issue—committed not only to believing in new, untested, highly theoretical ideologies of “social justice” but also to enforcing those programs, reshaping reality to align with their ideologies, and cowing all opponents into submission. We are living with the results, and—as he makes clear in a new foreword added to more recent post-summer-of-2020 printings of the book—what he describes here isn’t over yet. I don’t agree with all of his premises or all of his conclusions, but Murray examines these issues carefully and with uncompromising intellectual honesty, and that makes it well worth reading.

Labels, by Evelyn Waugh—I’ve read almost all of Waugh’s fiction in the last couple years but had as yet read none of his travel writing. I decided to fix that this summer. Labels, Waugh’s first travel book, is a record of his journey along the coasts of the Mediterranean—from the Riviera to Egypt, Crete, Istanbul, Greece, Italy, Spain, and more—in early 1929. Three things make Labels a great read. First, Waugh’s humor, which had me laughing out loud more than once. Second, Waugh’s absolute refusal to be impressed with the things that usually impress tourists, which offers many opportunities for acerbic commentary on tourism and makes his appreciation of a handful of things all the more meaningful. And third, the poignancy of knowing what would happen to the world in the fall of 1929, which not only made trips like this impossible for many people, but surely closed many of the hotels, restaurants, casinos, and other local establishments not long after Waugh had passed through to record them for us. Check this out if you want a wry and beautifully written window into a lost world. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, by Régine Pernoud—No period of our own history gets dumped on or dismissed as often or as readily as the Middle Ages. French archivist and historian Regine Pérnoud’s little book Those Terrible Middle Ages! offers a spirited counterattack, not only debunking the most common misinterpretations or outright lies about the Middle Ages (e.g. medieval people believed women didn’t have souls, or engaged in witchhunts, or had no understanding of science or art) but also offering positive examples of medieval life and culture as critiques of the supposedly more advanced and sophisticated modern world. Her writing is engaging, fun, and animated by a concern for the truth about the past that is sadly as lacking today as it was in Pernoud’s 1970s.

Breaking Bread with the Dead, by Alan Jacobs—Jacobs’s wonderfully titled book is a plea for narrowminded modern people to broaden their “temporal bandwidth,” to reach out to and learn from past people rather than dismissing, ignoring, or—as we’ve seen a lot this year—condemning them. Jacobs argues that doing so is a remedy to the anxiety and distemper of our times. It’s excellent—a short, readable, and well-argued little book. I intend to reread it soon.

Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors, by Adrian Goldsworthy—One of my favorite historians for years, with this dual biography Adrian Goldsworthy looks beyond the Roman world to ancient Greece. Goldsworthy argues persuasively that the career of Alexander the Great was made possible by his father Philip, and so to study the former requires understanding the latter. It’s an excellent look not only at two charismatic, aggressive, and driven men but at their entire world and the world their strivings created. Goldsworthy writes lucidly, making complex subjects like Greek city life, domestic arrangements, political alliances, and especially military campaigns from the operational level to the battlefield understandable and even exciting. He also shows admirable restraint and circumspection when it comes to the many controversial topics surrounding this period and these men—for instance, the fates of various rivals or members of Alexander’s family, Alexander’s or his mother’s involvement in Philip’s assassination, the exact cause of Alexander’s death, or, perhaps most famously in our sex-obsessed times, Alexander’s purported bisexuality. Goldsworthy refuses to argue dogmatically for conclusions where the evidence is garbled, contradictory, or simply nonexistent, explaining the possibilities but always making it clear what can and, most critically, cannot be known. This is a balanced, readable, and engaging book and I’ve already eagerly recommended it to friends and students.

From Bauhaus to Our House, by Tom Wolfe—Discovering a remaindered copy of Wolfe’s final book (see below) at a discount bookstore got me on a Wolfe kick for the first time since college. This was the best of the batch of short, barbed journalistic works I read. A spirited attack on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House chronicles the way ideology took over the architectural profession, its crown of victory being the cityscapes of ugly, unsustainable glass boxes which we now enjoy in every crowded and inhuman urban environment in the world. This is Wolfe at his finest, writing with infectious energy and withering irony. I read this shortly after rewatching—and blogging about—the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary Why Beauty Matters and the two, different as they are in tone, dovetail nicely. Short Goodreads review here.

Digging Deeper: How Archaeology Works, by Eric H Cline—Eric Cline is a biblical archaeologist who has done field work all over the Near East and published a number of books, including the excellent 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which I mentioned here earlier this month. A modestly sized handbook, Digging Deeper collects sections from Cline’s longer book Three Stones Make a Wall and expands upon them, answering the questions most commonly asked of archaeologists. Cline’s writing is engaging and winsome, and he makes the hard, complicated, and very, very slow work of archaeology comprehensible. I highly recommend this if you have any interest in archaeology at all. Short Goodreads review here.

Honorable mentions

Before I get to my favorite read of the year, let me mention a few other books. I read so much good stuff this year that the above “best of” list proved very hard to narrow down. This handful of honorable mentions or runners up began as a list of three, then expanded to five, and finally ten. I present these in alphabetical order, as they were all good and I don’t want to imply any kind of ranking beyond that of “honorable mention”:

Becoming CS Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1898-1918), by Harry Lee Poe—A well-researched look at the years of CS Lewis’s life most commonly neglected by biographers, his childhood and adolescence. Goodreads review here.

Cannae: Rome’s Greatest Defeat, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Excellent short account of one of the most famous and consequential battles of the ancient world. Short Goodreads review here.

Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed, by Larry J Daniel—Part campaign history, part examination of leadership, part topical and sociological analysis, this is a very good history of the Confederate Army of Tennessee from its beginnings to its destruction. I found the chapters on logistics, food, medicine and surgery, and the soldiering life particularly good. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, by John Cleese—A fun little gift book by my favorite Python. Cleese seeks to find a place for both head and heart in the creative process and offers a number of helpful tips, all of which is buoyed by his fun, lighthearted approach.

Dead Mountain, by Donnie Eichar—A really intriguing and briskly written examination of a bizarre unsolved mystery from Khrushchev-era Russia: the disappearance of a team of hikers in the Urals, their frozen bodies eventually being discovered in strange circumstances. Fascinating. Much more detailed Goodreads review here.

The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police, by Frank McDonough—A good short history of the rise, organization, and functioning of Nazi Germany’s secret police. McDonough cuts through the legendary image of the all-powerful, all-knowing Gestapo to the reality—understaffed, spread too thin, originally made up of more or less disinterested beat cops but gradually taken over by younger political fanatics, and heavily reliant on tipoffs from narcs who, more often than not, gave them bad leads. An informative and carefully researched read.

John: An Evil King? by Nicholas Vincent—A great entry in the Penguin Monarchs series. Nicholas Vincent’s 100-page capsule biography of the worst King of England wears its deep research lightly and conveys not only the particulars of John’s life but the political and cultural landscape in which he lived and reigned. It’s excellent. Gooodreads review here.

The Kingdom of Speech, by Tom Wolfe—Wolfe’s final book, a waspish attack on the Darwinism through speech, a uniquely human phenomenon that has never been adequately accounted for by Darwinian theory. This and From Bauhaus to Our House above are the books that made me realize that what Wolfe most relished was to deflate the pretentions of cliques—in this case, the 19th century clique of aristocratic Darwinists and the 20th and 21st century clique of Chomskyites, both of whom have worked from their titled sinecures to destroy or coopt the work of field researchers.

The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper—A historic examination of a historic event. Trevor-Roper was an Oxford historian who worked for British intelligence during World War II. Immediately after the end of the war with Germany, Trevor-Roper was assigned to ascertain what, precisely, had happened to Hitler. The first edition of this book was the result. The edition I read was the seventh, and includes several forewords and introductions from across the fifty years following Trevor-Roper’s investigation in which he updates the information he had originally collected. The result is a great piece of historical detective work and an inside look at how an historian acquires, assesses, and weaves evidence into a coherent narrative. Worth your while. Longish Goodreads review here.

Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective, Ron Dart, Ed.—A good set of essays responding to different aspects of Jordan Peterson’s thought and teaching from a variety of angles and perspectives. Worth your while if you’ve been looking for a thoughtful and religiously orthodox engagement with this latter day virtuous pagan.

Favorite of the year

I’m going to cheat a bit now, and recommend my two favorites of the year, making this top ten a top eleven. Consider it a bonus.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

One of the best books I read in grad school was David Bentley Hart’s badly titled Atheist Delusions, in which Hart argued that, “[w]e live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution—social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual—the immensity of which we often only barely grasp,” and that this revolution is “perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West.” That revolution is Christianity, which remade the Western world from top to bottom.

Tom Holland’s vaguely titled Dominion is built upon the same thesis—indeed, Atheist Delusions is cited in the bibliography—but where Hart’s book is dense, tightly argued in sometimes highly technical language, and narrowly focused on the early centuries of that transformation, not moving much beyond late antiquity in its coverage, Holland’s is dynamic, epic in scope, and ranges from the origins of Hebrew religion to the present day. It is also, as is typical for Holland, engaging from beginning to end and utterly readable. I have often recommended Atheist Delusions, but Dominion possesses a sweep and accessibility that make it a valuable successor to that book.

Beginning with Judaism and the emergence of Christianity, Holland follows this new faith as it slowly transforms and reshaps the world in which it arrived. He capably contrasts Christianity with the Greco-Roman paganisms we think we know (they’re about a lot more than mythology) and shows how radical a departure Jesus’s message was. Christianity made slavery impossible and made elites accountable to more than their own lusts. It raised doubts about war and gave a new meaning to heroism, elevating the humble and weak and casting down the mighty. Along the way he offers striking and vividly written vignettes of major events and personalities from over two thousand years of Western history, ranging from kings and emperors to martyrs, poets, monks and nuns, philosophers and scientists, and ordinary people.

Holland argues that Christianity laid the groundwork for life as we know it today. Even non-Christians—and Holland is not a Christian—who are concerned with “justice” and “equality” root their notions of those concepts in Christian teaching, which offers the only successful means of making those concepts coherent. Without Christianity, there is no notion of human equality of any kind, much less that espoused by the UN Declaration of Human Rights or modern day Woke activists.

What the moderns don’t understand, Holland shows, is that we abandon Christianity at our own peril. Because of the high ideals of its teaching, Christianity comes with built-in tensions—between equality and poverty and maintaining some kind of order, for instance—that require constant reform and rejiggering. Strip out the Christianity and these tensions dissipate, leaving us with something veering toward brutality in one direction or the other, a point one of the characters profiled by Holland late in the book, Friedrich Nietzsche, understood better than anyone since.

I don’t agree with all of Holland’s conclusions, and I think he sometimes overstates the importance of particular parts of these tensions—especially where the primitive and voluntary socialism of the early Church is concerned—but the book is a brilliant tour of select currents in the Christian tradition and is well worth reading. It’s also beautifully written and structured, using a nesting series of threes and sevens (three parts, each with seven chapters, each with three subsections) to give a Christian shape even to the organization of the book, and with the vignettes and profiles leading from one to another in a series of setups and callbacks that give intimacy to the sweep of his narrative.

It’s an accomplishment, and I hope to reread it soon.

Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, by Wilfred M McClay

This is the best one-volume history of the United States I’ve read in some time. McClay’s Land of Hope offers a balanced and carefully crafted history that moderates the worst tendencies of a lot of other such recent histories—jingoistic, uncritical admiration for everything America has ever done on the right, self-loathing denunciation and scolding on the left. Striking that balance is especially important nowadays, as the two sides I just mentioned have both sought to make history a weapon, simplifying and exaggerating—if not outright making stuff up—in order to have politically helpful narratives to which they can appeal.

McClay begins with pre-history and an in medias res leap into late medieval Europe, arguing that the histories of America and Europe, especially in the early going, are inextricably intertwined. From there he follows European exploration and the establishment and growth of the various British colonies, and does a good job exploring the diversity of who came to these colonies and why—aristocratic Anglican adventures and planters (Virginia and Carolina), religious autocrats seeking to remake the world (Massachusetts), persecuted religious minorities (the Quakers and Catholics of Pennsylvania and Maryland), and humanitarians (Georgia). These first chapters are especially strong, as are McClay’s carefully balanced examination and explanation of the crisis born with Independence from Britain, the political, cultural, economic differences embedded in these quite different but now united colonies that would grow and bloom and bear fruit as the Civil War.

Land of Hope continues right up to the present—that is, the present of 2019, when the book was published. One wonders what the last three pages or so of this book would look like if McClay could update it for this year. But in addition to the measured, balanced approach he takes throughout, McClay also takes pains to explain that the closer we get to the present, the harder it is to maintain or even to have a proper perspective on events. Everything is too recent.

This is perhaps why the last chapter or two are the weakest of the book. Putting together a survey of all of American history is difficult, and so one has to be selective. Mostly I think McClay selects well, though in the first half I wish the many Indian Wars, which varied immensely in scale and ferocity but played out over decades and consumed a great deal of the United States’ resources and imagination, to say nothing of blood, got more time than they do. But in the last few chapters the history becomes almost entirely political and economic, focusing on who won elections and what policies they tried to enact. This is hard not to do (speaking from classroom experience), but a history of the recent past that moves from stagflation to Donald Trump without mentioning the sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade, or the radical transformations that have been worked on American culture and society is going to be incomplete.

But again, that’s a niggle. Ideally, Land of Hope will be a starting point—it is an “invitation” after all. A properly curious reader or student will not stop with this book, and its warm, engaging style, careful structure, and evenhanded treatment of even the most controversial moments in American history make it an excellent introduction indeed. McClay ends the book with a brief meditation on what a rightly ordered American patriotism—a patriotism that takes account of America’s flaws as well as its ideals—should look like, a good sendoff for a very good book. The highest praise I can give this book is that I wish I could teach from it.

For more, and for a sample of McClay’s excellent writing, see my blog post about McClay’s use of narrative, an approach I wholeheartedly endorse, here.

I’d recommend both of these for sweeping, elegantly written accounts of important ideas and events, and to help make sense of where we are now—which is the whole reason we study the past in the first place.

Classics

These are great books from the ancient and medieval worlds that don’t feel like standard “non-fiction” to me, but which I want to acknowledge as part of what made this year’s reading good. There’s a reason these have stuck around—they’re all great.

• The Life of St Francis, by St Bonaventure, trans. Ewert H Cousins

• How to Run a Country, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Short Goodreads review here. Election day blog post about this here.

• The Secret History, by Procopius, trans. GA Williamson

• Strategikon, by Maurice, trans. George T Dennis. Short Goodreads review here.

• Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, trans. Lewis Thorpe. Goodreads review here.

• The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by Bede, trans. Goodreads review here. A semi-humorous blog post inspired by a story Bede tells in his history here.

• On the Ruin of Britain, by Gildas, trans. John Allen Giles.

• How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. See rereads below.

• How to Think About God, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Goodreads review here.

Many of these medieval texts I revisited—or read in their entirety for the first time—for a podcast series I’m involved in. Looking forward to telling you more about that in the future.

Rereads

Per CS Lewis, “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” This is a habit I’ve been trying intentionally to develop more in the last couple of years, and this year, in addition to favorite novels, I revisited a lot of old non-fiction favorites. I say revisited because several of these were audiobooks, which feels like cheating to me. I’ve marked the books I listened to—via Hoopla, a wonderful service—with an asterisk.

• How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. One of my favorites by Cicero. Full review on my blog here.

• The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer.* Short Goodreads review here.

• Saint Francis of Assisi, by GK Chesterton*

• Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by GK Chesterton.* Short Goodreads review here.

• Eugenics and Other Evils, by GK Chesterton.* Goodreads review here.

• On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner. Short Goodreads review here.

• The Defendant, by GK Chesterton. Short Goodreads review here.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you’ve found at least one book here that sparked your interest and that you’ll seek out in 2021. Coming up in the next couple of days I’ll go through my favorite fiction of 2020, as well as, for a special post, all the books by the late Roger Scruton I read over the last twelve months, an act of piety on my part for a great mind gone too soon.

Thanks again, and happy New Year!

Chesterton on fools

In honor of April Fools’ Day, here’s a quick batch of thoughts on fools and foolishness from GK Chesterton, a man who knew a thing or two about the topic—and also how to enjoy what he often called the “topsy turvy,” which is the essence of the holiday.

Alas, not everyone is a fan of April Fools’ Day. I’ve already seen warnings on social media regarding the precisely proper ways to celebrate it this year, admonitions so stern and moralistic I started checking the posters’ profile pictures for ruffs and broadcloth. I’ve also seen some deeply wise people suggesting we not fool around at all, reminding us that we have apparently evolved beyond the examples of those who survived the plague and religious persecution and the death camps and the gulag and can—and should—now hang up our humor and adopt a properly modern attitude of lugubrious, sorrowful navel-gazing. Which brings me to this line, from “The Neglect of Christmas,” 1906:

“There are those who dislike playing the fool, preferring to act the same part in a more serious spirit.”

Let the reader understand. And there’s this, from “A Defence of Heraldry,” collected in The Defendant, 1901:

“We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.”

Being foolish is not a choice. There is, indeed, no other option.

Chesterton will begin to make a lot more sense to you once you’ve reckoned with his thoughts on two categories of people: madmen and fools. Madmen, those afflicted with any number of the insanities that have created the modern world, are the tragic endpoint, and much of his writing was concerned with outlining, arguing against, and rescuing people from madness. We are susceptible to madness because we do not begin as a tabula rasa of sanity and then fall away into madness, but begin predisposed to it because we are all, in fact, fools.

This is not the kind of everyone-is-an-idiot cynicism of some modern thinkers and most middle school malcontents. It is not even necessarily a bad thing. That’s because it stems from Chesterton’s beliefs about mankind as informed by Christian doctrine. From Heretics, 1905:

The weak point in the whole of Carlyle’s case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men.

Chesterton saw the Socratic truth that wisdom must begin from a recognition of one’s own foolishness, a foolishness shared with all of mankind and therefore not just the basis of any real equality but also of any real wisdom. From his 1910 book What’s Wrong With the World, in a passage on the ever-relevant topic of modern education:

“We shall certainly make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy.”

This fundamental fact—that we are all fools, disguise it as we may—is also the basis of our one true hope, since only Christianity can acknowledge this universal human defect and not just offer a solution to it but make it one of the instruments of our redemption. From his great 1908 book Orthodoxy:

Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the grey ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one’s self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go—as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, quâ man, can be valueless. Here again, in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

No one is too big a fool to be saved. As Chesterton knew, it is the engine of redemption and the acknowledgement that we are fools is a step toward sainthood. Indeed, the foolishness of holiday and ritual are part of the making of saints. Again from Heretics:

“A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.”

A good reminder in this self-serious age. Don’t listen to the scolds. Be foolish, and even more importantly, be willing to be fooled. The more that we can do this, the more that we can take ourselves lightly—which, according to Chesterton, is why angels can fly—the more of us that can take that one small step called humility, the closer we fools will draw each other toward salvation.

2019 in Movies

Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out

Back in the spring I looked ahead to the scheduled summer releases and realized that, with one or two exceptions, I wasn’t looking forward to anything. If, like me, you’re almost totally burned out on Marvel, the summer of 2019 was a bust, and I was beginning to think that 2019 would be another lean year for movies the way last year was. But, lo and behold, after some solid stuff in the spring and a dry spell during the summer—which I used to write the rough draft of my next novel anyway—fall and early winter turned out to be delightful. It ended up being hard to choose what to include here. It was a good year for movies—at least for me.

Two notes before I launch into my favorites of the year:

• First, this is a list of favorites. I might give some opinions on superlatives below—best acting, best made, etc.—but I’m mostly assessing these movies as favorites, as the movies I either most enjoyed or got the most out of, not necessarily making claims about which are the best of the year.

• Second, I’ve actually written about several of these movies before on this blog, so for any film for which I’ve already written a review, I’ve kept my recap here short and included a link to the full review elsewhere.

So here, in roughly ascending order, are my seven favorite movies of the last year:

Richard Jewell

Paul Walter Hauser as Richard Jewell

I remember the to-do surrounding the 1996 Atlanta Olympics quite vividly. The logo and obligatory weird mascot were everywhere, the torch passed through my hometown on its way to Atlanta, and my family watched the opening ceremonies and as many of the events as we could. I also remember the bombing.

Richard Jewell narrowly focuses on the title character and what happened to him as he worked security over the first few days of the Olympics. Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a former security guard and sheriff’s deputy, hopes to get back into law enforcement if he can do well enough with his gig doing security at a concert venue in Olympic Park. Clint Eastwood, directing from a script by Billy Ray, carefully reconstructs the events of these first few days, and the scenes surrounding the bombing are tense and shocking. Jewell’s role in saving lives is made clear and the media adulation that unexpectedly envelops him for a few days is made bittersweet by what we know is coming. Especially poignant is the pride Jewell’s mother Bobi (Kathy Bates) takes in her boy.

The bulk of the film follows the FBI’s bumbling investigation into Jewell following a tip from a former employer, the leak to the media via AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), and the vicious trial-by-media that ruined Jewell’s life for months as newspapers and TV networks dogpiled him. Jewell fights back by calling on lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) and the two form a testy friendship as Jewell tries to understand what’s happening to him and Bryant tries to keep Jewell, a believer in law and order who “was raised to respect authority,” from being so obliging to the FBI, who are using his attempts to be forthcoming to railroad him.

The film is full of good performances. Sam Rockwell, good in everything he’s ever been in, is a standout as Bryant. Kathy Bates is excellent as Bobi Jewell, an authentic and sympathetic portrayal of an ordinary Southern woman unprepared to live under the scrutiny of both the media and the federal government, unable to comprehend the callousness of both and the injustice being done to her son. But the best performance in the film is Hauser as Jewell. Hauser is 100% authentic. His accent, the cadence of his speech, his understated sense of humor, his posture as he stands or sits—all are dead-on, as is his attitude toward the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, best described as a worshipful camaraderie that takes a severe hit by the end of the film. I know people just like this. It’s outstanding, and while Hauser’s isn’t the flashiest performance of the year—for that, see below—it’s certainly among the best precisely because it’s so real.

Richard Jewell, we realize toward the end of the movie, bewilders the powerful because he’s a man without an angle. He did what he did because it was his job and he wanted to help people. The tragedy is that the powerful in our world—the feds, the media—can’t understand this kind of goodness. For that reason alone, Richard Jewell is an important movie to watch and a fitting tribute to a decent man.

The Highwaymen

Kevin Costner as a weary Frank hamer in The Highwaymen

The Highwaymen inverts the usual retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story by focusing on the lawmen who tracked down and killed them rather than the bandits themselves. More a police procedural than an action movie, the film follows aging Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault as they are specially deputized to deal with Bonnie and Clyde’s unique style of interstate violence. The two lawmen, relics of the not-quite-vanished age of the frontier, doggedly track the crooks up and down the highways of Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Louisiana, always traveling in the wake of their thefts and murders. Their frustration and the toll of life on the road mounts, and when we reach the final confrontation on a lonesome road in the piney woods of Louisiana (shot in the actual location, dressed by the set designers to its 1930s appearance), the expertly heightened tension is almost unbearable.

Directed by John Lee Hancock (who directed the underappreciated masterpiece The Alamo) and starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, both excellent as the taciturn Hamer and the damaged and worn out Gault, this is a handsomely mounted, well acted, atmospheric drama that rightly depicts Bonnie and Clyde as destructive thugs without glorifying the means used to take them down. Indeed, the film is comfortable allowing some ambiguity—at least among the characters—about the nature of law enforcement, crime, and personal responsibility, and ends not on a note of triumph but of resignation. It’s almost worth watching just for its wordless final scenes, an eloquent condemnation not of criminality but of celebrity worship. It’s great.

My friend Coyle Neal of The City of Man Podcast and I recorded an episode about The Highwaymen after it came out in the spring. It was a fun discussion. You can read a few notes about that, and listen to the episode, here.

Knives Out

Daniel Craig and Ana de armas investigate foul play in Knives Out

A carefully plotted murder mystery with a colorful cast of characters and a good dose of humor, Knives Out is the most fun I had at the movies this year.

After elderly mystery-thriller writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found with his throat cut the morning after his birthday party, private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives to consult with the police to find the murderer. Murder? A straightforward interpretation of the death scene would indicate suicide. But Blanc is convinced otherwise after interviewing the many members of Thrombey’s self-serving and duplicitous family and enlists Thrombey’s personal nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), to help him untangle what happened that night.

Knives Out owes a lot to the mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, with a stately house full of despicable characters, one of whom must have done it, dedicated but unimaginative traditional cops, and a private detective with keen insight and… eccentricities. The setting, a real house in rural Massachusetts, is interesting and the characters are all wonderfully played. Plummer is good in flashback scenes and Ana de Armas brings a freshness and innocent goodness to Marta that serves as a striking contrast to the various members of the Thrombey family. Daniel Craig is especially good as Blanc, affecting a Southern accent that one suspects Blanc might be overplaying as a bit of investigative sleight of hand. Among the family, Michael Shannon as Harlan’s publisher son and Toni Collette as a dippy “influencer” type and natural health nut are standouts, as is Chris Evans, arriving late as the purported black sheep of a family where the whole flock is already pretty black. Everyone is just slightly over the top, which is part of what makes the movie fun instead of being a slog through a bunch of miserable suspects (compare another mystery in which Christopher Plummer plays a weary patriarch and Daniel Craig the detective, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

I don’t want to give anything away because the film is well constructed to supply surprises. I went in cold, not knowing much about the movie and not really interested given director Rian Johnson’s reputation following The Last Jedi. But my wife and I heard enough good things about it via word of mouth that we gave it a shot for date night and had a blast.

Midway

The USS Enterprise under fire in Midway

Midway emerged as an unintentional star of my blog in the second half of the year, as my notes and worries about the first trailer got a lot of traffic and my eventual review was one of the most popular posts this month.

Because of the trailer I went to see Midway reluctantly but was almost totally won over. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it does what it sets out to do and—what was important to me—respects the real men who fought at Midway. It provides a solid overview of the events between Pearl Harbor and Midway—roughly the first six months of American involvement in World War II—and capably and vividly dramatizes the stakes, both militarily and personally, for the men involved, as well as what it took to rise to the occasion and fight back. It has some overacting, weak dialogue, and dodgy special effects, but the things I hope to see in a historical film are all there. It’s worth your time.

You can read my full review of Midway, written to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day a few weeks ago, here.

Joker

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker

Now that the pearl-clutching fainting couch furor over Joker has proven to be overblown, I hope people can untwist their knickers and revisit and reassess it. This movie deeply impressed me, and after I saw it I spent the next several days mulling it over. Joker is not an enjoyable or fun superhero romp—this is no popcorn movie. But Joaquin Phoenix gives the best performance of the year in the title role and the film built around him is a carefully and sharply constructed character study.

Joker offers another origin story for Batman’s archenemy, a man who has no certain or canonical past, a point exploited by Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. Here, the Joker begins as Arthur Fleck, a man with severe mental problems who has been turned out by the system due to budget cuts, an issue that will recur before the film is over. He works a humiliating job as a clown for hire to take care of his mother, an invalid with—we will learn later, if we don’t infer it before then—even worse mental problems than Arthur’s. Weak, ineffectual, and above all pathetic, Arthur deplores the ugliness of Gotham City and its people but recognizes himself as an utter nullity. Then a chance encounter on the subway gives him a taste of the influence and power to be had from using violence to inspire terror, and we watch this put upon, seemingly gentle man turn toward and embrace the ugliness. The film begins with Arthur crying over the world; it ends with him laughing as that world burns.

There’s a lot to admire in Joker, but it does have its weaknesses. Some of its themes are pretty obvious if not clumsy, especially where mental health and the class conflict within Gotham is concerned, the series of humiliations Arthur endures sometimes feels as though it’s on autopilot, and I never quite believed Robert De Niro as the Carson-like late show host who is first Arthur’s idol and then his nemesis. The film also develops a subplot surrounding Arthur’s mysterious parentage—his mother tells him that he is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne, which would make him and Bruce half-brothers—that, while building to an important payoff, drags because the truth never feels in doubt.

But the film’s technical aspects, especially its cinematography and set design, are spectacular in their grime and bleakness, and this careful attention to the reality in which Joker takes place—an early ‘80s Gotham City modeled on the collapsing late ‘70s New York City—makes the violence feel that much more shocking and disturbing. Only a handful of people die in Joker, and none of them is thrilling or exciting and all feel like unalterable, irrevocable acts. (Compare the violence in any of the Avengers movies.) Furthermore, there a lot of nice touches in the details, such as Arthur’s poorly conceived clown makeup (I learn from reading about John Wayne Gacy that professional clowns frown upon—sorry—sharp corners for their painted smiles; the sharp angles make them look sinister). Hildur Guðnadóttir’s droning string score also adds to both the grind of living in Gotham and the dread and tension that build up through the second half of the film.

But the standout, what makes Joker so excellent, is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. Arthur’s transformation from a man who can barely muster enough strength to pull a coherent sentence together to someone embracing meaningless violence is only believable because of him. “I don’t believe in anything,” Arthur says at the end of the film, not as a declaration but as an explanation. He smiles as he says it, and through Phoenix we see how he reached this point. In any other hands this would have gone wrong. He’s the reason to see this movie, and the reason it works.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Leonardo diCaprio as rick dalton and brad pitt as cliff booth In once upon a time in hollywood

Here’s a strange circumstance: me enjoying and commending a Quentin Tarantino movie. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with his movies since I first saw Reservoir Dogs in college, and while I liked Inglourious Basterds with some reservations and grudgingly admired the craftsmanship and humor of Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to my surprise, totally won me over.

I won’t get into the plot, but the film follows fading Hollywood star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman-turned-gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) across a few days in the spring and late summer of 1969. Dalton, desperate not to become a has-been, is struggling to remember his lines as the baddie in the pilot of a TV Western and Cliff, out and about on a variety of errands, has a series of run-ins with a creepy hippie girl and her “family” of cronies. The hippies turn out to be the Manson Family and Dalton, we see, is the next door neighbor of Roman Polanski and his luminous wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whom we see in occasional cutaways as she drives around Hollywood, sits in on a screening of one of her own movies, and parties with friends.

There are plot-driven stories and character-driven stories, and while I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fits within the latter category, it’s also a uniquely setting-driven story. I haven’t seen a time and place this lovingly recreated since Zodiac—which, interestingly, begins at exactly the same cultural moment, just farther north in California. Tarantino’s Hollywood is beautiful, vibrant, but it’s also deeply historical—everywhere beneath the glossy present of 1969 are relics of what was and the slowly cohering image of what will be. Rick and Cliff are poised precisely at this point of balance, burdened not with the past—those were unapologetically the glory days, now patinaed and given over to hippie squatters—but with an uncertain future.

This is probably the best made movie of the year—gorgeously shot on film by Robert Richardson, with beautiful and intricately detailed sets and costumes that vividly evoke the era without wallowing in a cartoon version of it. The performances are all outstanding, even down to the bit players, for whom Tarantino shows affection, and this is the first Tarantino script where I didn’t feel like it was grossly overindulgent. The film is long, it lingers, lets us stew in the Hollywood of 1969, but it’s all exactly right. It doesn’t whip us along from one plot point to the next but is the first film in a while that just allows us to live in a scene. By the time the film ended I felt like I knew this place and these people.

Without spoiling anything, I did want to nod to the film’s ending, which rewrites history in a way Tarantino has done a couple times now. But where I felt the ending of Inglourious Basterds, for example, trivialized some of the events involved, the ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood really made me think and reflect. I finished the film mourning real loss and grateful for the mysterious gift of life. I don’t think I can say anything more without giving it all away, but to finish a Tarantino film with this kind of uplift, catharsis, and affirmation of the good and the beautiful was a revelation.

Tarantino claims he’s done after his tenth movie. Let’s hope it’s another as good as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

1917

George MacKay ventures into no-man’s-land in 1917

I’m grateful I got to see 1917, as it only enters wide release in January. The film, set during World War I and directed by Sam Mendes, follows two ordinary English infantrymen on a mission through no-man’s-land and the abandoned German front lines to deliver an important message. This seemingly simple story is told in one fluid, non-stop shot that takes the viewer with the men into some of the most dreadful and dangerous conditions soldiers have ever had to endure. This technique keeps us that their level, down in the muck, reminds us that these men had to walk almost everywhere they went, and creates a heavy sense of dread as the men encounter new dangers—they can’t escape and the camera won’t look away. We’re in this together.

1917 is my favorite film of the year. It’s well acted and technically excellent and involves the viewer like few other war films I’ve seen. Its depiction of life on the Western Front is dreadfully real and offers a two-hour journey into this terrible lost world that should shock and move. It’s brilliantly done. See if it you can.

There’s a lot more to say about this film, but I’ve already written quite a lot about it. You can read my full review of 1917 here.

Honorable mentions

• Tolkien—An okay-ish but enjoyable dramatization of some of JRR Tolkien’s formative years that takes some serious liberties with the truth in order to force this real, unique man into a Hollywood mold. You can read my full review of Tolkien here.

• Downton Abbey—Essentially a jumbo-sized episode of the show with slightly slicker cinematography and a larger budget for extras, Downton Abbey was an enjoyable trip back to this world and these characters. You can read my full review of Downton Abbey here.

• Toy Story 4—A fun, poignant followup to the first three that takes the characters in some interesting new directions.

• Ad Astra—A thought-provoking and beautifully shot film with a small but very good cast—the standout being Tommy Lee Jones as Brad Pitt’s deranged or fanatical astronaut father—that just dragged for significant stretches.

• Shazam!—One of the most flat-out enjoyable movies I saw this year, a straightforwardly comedic superhero movie with a fun premise and a winsome lead performance by Zachary Levi.

• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker—I didn’t intend to write anything to contribute to the current Star Wars poo typhoon, but I did want to mention that I’d seen this. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as I’d heard, and I mostly enjoyed it until it began collapsing under the weight of its own nostalgia in the last third or so. Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac are excellent, the main reason any of these films have held together, and I wish they’d been better served by the scripts thrown together by the committees at Disney over the last several years.

Special mentions

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka In Tuntematon Sotilas

I wanted to make special mention of one film and two outstanding documentaries I saw this year. I mention the film separately because it technically came out two years ago but only became available in the US in March. That film is Tuntematon sotilas or Unknown Soldier, a Finnish film about a company of soldiers fighting Soviet Russia in the Continuation War. Adapted from the novel by Väinö Linna, Unknown Soldier is excellent, one of the best war films in recent memory. You can read my full review of Unknown Soldier, which I posted to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Winter War, here.

The first documentary I want to mention is They Shall Not Grow Old, directed by Peter Jackson. This documentary, which offers a window into the experience of British soldiers on the Western Front in World War I, was assembled from hundreds of hours of footage and oral history interviews in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Much has been made of Jackson’s “restoration” of the footage—he and his team slowed and stabilized the jerky silent footage, digitally removed a lot of grain, damage, or other artifacts, and colorized it—but it’s not a restoration per se. This footage hasn’t been restored to its original condition. Far from it. But it has been manipulated in such a way as to remove some barriers to a modern viewer’s understanding of what they are seeing, and that's a good thing.

The best aspects of the film, however, are probably auditory. First, Jackson’s foley artists provided ambient sound effects and professional lipreaders provided dialogue for footage that has, for a hundred years, recorded only the silent mouthing of long dead men. This alone makes the footage come to life in a way that startled me when I saw it. Second, every bit of narration in the film comes from a montage of real World War I veterans talking about their experiences, with no modern narrator or talking heads getting in the way. It’s excellent, and profoundly moving. You can read my full review of They Shall Not Grow Old here.

The second documentary is Apollo 11, which came out to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing. Like They Shall Not Grow Old, Apollo 11 avoids narrators and talking head interviewees. Instead, it very carefully sticks to contemporary film and television footage to tell the story of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins’s flight to the moon. The story is told in its editing, with the men who participated allowed to lead us through the story themselves, and the rich variety of footage used—launch preparations on Cape Canaveral, the team in mission control, the thousands of people packing the beach to watch the launch, the astronauts inside the command module and on the surface of the moon—gives us a sweeping look at the event that was the moon landing.

Especially noteworthy is Apollo 11’s use of some previously unreleased archival footage shot on 65mm film, giving sections of the documentary an astonishingly sharp clarity. It looks like it was shot yesterday, and when Armstrong or Aldin look into the camera you feel who these men were as men in a way that the scratchy footage used and reused for years on TV never could. It’s excellent, the best documentary on the Apollo program I’ve ever seen.

2019 films I missed but hope to catch in the new year:

• Avengers: Endgame—Yes, I’m burned out, and I have zero interest in Captain Marvel, but I do want to see the (sort of) end of this story. I’ll see it as soon as I can muster the energy to tap this on the screen at Redbox.

• The Irishman—Martin Scorsese’s much talked about return to the crime genre. I’m especially intrigued by the nonlinear structure and the extensive—and widely praised—use of digital de-aging technology to span the decades.

• Ford v Ferrari—The first trailer sold me. I don’t know much about cars or auto racing, especially the high-performance European variety, but this looks immensely entertaining and I do love a good car chase.

• Midsommar and The Lighthouse—Horror films that are long on mood and atmosphere. I’m especially interested in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s followup to The Witch, one of the most engrossing and eerie historical films I’ve seen in years.

• The Peanut Butter Falcon—A widely praised and sweet looking coming-of-age story about a Down syndrome boy escaping his prison-like care facility and learning independence and manhood from an unlikely mentor.

• Unplanned—Based on the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson and her turn from abortion to the pro-life movement. My friends at the Front Porch Show interviewed one of the stars.

• A Hidden Life—Terrence Malick’s biographical film about Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis. It looks amazing. Here Kyle Smith compares it to A Man For All Seasons. Alan Jacobs writes of its portrayal of the mysteries of faith and courage here.

Looking ahead

2020 has some promising titles. I look forward to Greyhound, Tom Hanks’s adaptation of my favorite novel of last year; the latest Bond film, No Time to Die; Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which seems to involve crime and reversing the flow of time, because it’s a Christopher Nolan movie; Kenneth Branagh’s second Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which was teased at the end of his Murder on the Orient Express; and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the weighty Dune, which I read for the first time this year. There’s probably plenty more, but these are the handful I’m most interested in right now.

I hope y’all enjoyed this year’s movies as much as I did, and, more importantly, I hope that y’all had a good year and that the coming year is full of promise and blessing. Thanks for reading, and happy New Year!

2018 in Books

Even if not for movies, 2018 turned out to be a great year for reading. Per my accounting on Goodreads, I read 95 books—a personal record. Most of it was good, a few things were great, and very few stinkers made it into my reading. You can see everything I counted toward my Goodreads reading challenge here.

For this year-in-review rundown of my reading, I’m going to try to keep things positive and focus on favorites. I use the word favorites purposefully—I’m not declaring these the “best” books of the year, but the ones I enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about the most, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.

I will address the two worst books I read this year, but I’m going try to keep it brief. Because that’s all they deserve.

I’ve sorted things into three broad categories: fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books. And because I can’t keep these things to a set number, you’ll find a top ten—in no particular order—with a few runners up in most of them. I also have a list of things I revisited.

Enjoy! If y’all are looking for something good to read in 2019, I hope you can find something in these lists.

Ten fiction favorites:

Last Stand at Saber River, by Elmore Leonard. An excellent western, pitting a Confederate veteran returning from the war with his family against a pair of brothers attempting to steal his land with the Union as their excuse—all of which an amoral storekeeper works to manipulate to his advantage. This might sound like a collection of western staples, but the plotting, pacing, characterization, and the strength of Leonard’s writing set this apart. A really good good guy, some really bad bad guys, and a wonderfully realized western setting. I enjoyed this immensely.

The Line that Held Us, by David Joy. A gripping tragedy set in the mountains and hollers of Jackson County, North Carolina. Dark and suspenseful but with some hope of redemption. This is one of the best novels I read this year; I’ve picked up Joy’s two previous books and hope to read them soon, too. Read my full review here.

Unknown Soldiers, by Väinö Linna, trans. by Liesl Yamaguchi. One of the best war novels I’ve read, Unknown Soldiers follows a Finnish machine gun company through the Continuation War against the Soviets (1941-44) and has a huge flock of finely drawn, interesting characters. Linna evokes every bit of the pathos and tragedy of modern warfare in a moving and action-packed novel. Read my full review here.

Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard. It is apparently the incorrect opinion among Leonard fans, but so far I don’t actually like his crime novels as much as his westerns. This is the exception—and I loved it. Freaky Deaky follows a pair of ex-hippie ex-lovers who try to revive their Weather Underground-style terrorism for fun and profit. A parallel plot follows Chris Mankowski, former Detroit bomb squad technician turned sex crimes investigator, as he begins a new relationship and crosses paths with the terrorists. It’s hard to summarize, but it’s wonderful to read and really funny. Here’s Leonard himself reading the first chapter.

Above the Waterfall, by Ron Rash. Perhaps my new favorite novel by Rash. Read my full review here.

The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh. Think Barton Fink crossed with Bernie. One of the funniest, blackest, most shocking comedic novels I’ve read, a blistering send-up of Americans’ unhealthy refusal to confront death. This was just the second book I read this year, and it was never in danger of being unseated from among my favorites. Read my full review here.

The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. I don’t think I’ll ever make myself watch the movie, but an old episode of the First Things podcast featured an interesting segment on the spiritual power and sacramental physicality—often manifested as grossness—in this novel. It’s not the best written piece of fiction you’ll pick up, but it’s gripping and powerfully creepy, building a deep sense of dread because of human weakness in the face of supernatural evil. Father Karras’s struggles with his own faith should prove familiar to a lot of readers, and the subtle grace that comes through and finally offers salvation and redemption makes the book moving as well. To summarize from my short Goodreads review: “Brutal, gross, terrifying, and—surprisingly—uplifting.”

The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin Jr. The most delightfully and wonderfully weird book I’ve read in years. Part Chaucer, part Narnia, part Lovecraft, the novel follows Chauntecleer, king of a barnyard full of animals, in a struggle against Wyrm, an ancient force that threatens to wreck creation. A strange and gripping meditation on good and evil, love, beauty, creation, leadership good and bad, and populated with strange and memorable characters. Perhaps my favorite is Mundo Cani, a depressed dog almost pathetically devoted to Chauntecleer but who possesses a surprising reserve of courage. If you want to read a fresh, beautifully written fantasy that is by turns charming and dark, but beautiful and weird throughout, definitely pick up The Book of the Dun Cow.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. A classic. I had only read the abridged, illustrated version as a kid and finally got around to the real thing this summer. That’s probably providential; it’s so good that if I had read it before I wrote Griswoldville I might not have tried. Read my full Goodreads review here.

Favorite of the year:

The Good Shepherd, by C.S. Forester. I picked this up because it’s the basis of Tom Hanks’s forthcoming film Greyhound. I’d never read anything by Forester—creator of Horatio Hornblower—and was blown away by this book. The story, set in World War II, follows Commander Krause, captain of a US Navy destroyer on convoy duty in the north Atlantic during the height of U-boat activity. As the novel begins, he comes to the bridge after a few scanty hours of rest. After his convoy blunders into the middle of a wolf pack, Krause will barely sit down, much less sleep, for the next several days.

The novel is intensely interior, with almost no characterization or backstory for anyone else on the ship. Even his own backstory—with a dead end position in the navy, a tragically failed marriage, and a transfer from San Diego—doesn’t come in until over halfway into the book. Things come to the reader as they come to Krause. Throughout, the reader thinks through what’s happening with Krause, doing the hard work of calculating speed, fuel, distance, the number of ships and depth charges remaining, where the U-boats are, how fast their torpedoes can travel—and on and on. It’s an incredibly cerebral novel that is also physically exhausting. I was tired when I finished it, a sensation I haven’t experienced since reading Deliverance ten years ago. It’s a rare accomplishment for a work of fiction.

The Good Shepherd is a great look at the guts and endurance it took to ferry supplies across the Atlantic during World War II, but the primary reason to read it is that it’s an excellent and unusual novel. It also has some wonderfully evocative religious overtones, as scripture springs uninvited into the devoutly religious Krause’s mind, sometimes in the middle of torpedo attacks. Check it out if you’re at all interested in the underappreciated side stories of World War II, or if you plan to see Tom Hanks’s film adaptation this spring.

Runners up:

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. A withering satire of the modern press, c. 1938, Scoop follows William Boot, a young man mistaken for his fashionable novelist cousin and sent to the impoverished African state of Ishmaelia to cover a war. Scathing in its critique of the media, modernism, statism, and propaganda, and also laugh-out-loud funny. Comparable to the earlier Black Mischief, which is also blisteringly satirical toward European hubris, but even funnier.

• A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh in a more morally serious mode, dramatizing the disasters unleashed on both the innocent and the guilty by selfishness and infidelity. Read my full review here.

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry. A hilarious dose of lighthearted, touching Christmas nostalgia from a kid’s-eye perspective—if that kid is young Dave Barry. A lot of fun to read aloud; I had to stop a few times to catch my breath, I was laughing so hard.

• Fools and Mortals, by Bernard Cornwell. An interesting departure for Cornwell, from sociopathic historical hardasses to the world of Shakespeare. Engaging, a brilliantly detailed historical world, a good plot, and, importantly, a lot of fun. I’ve previously blogged about it here.

• Gunsights, by Elmore Leonard. I believe this is Leonard’s last western, and he goes out with a bang. Exciting action and suspense, believable character-centered conflict, and a realistically detailed and well-realized historical setting, plus some barbed commentary on the way the media attempts to shape events in the name of coverage.

Ten non-fiction favorites:

Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw. An excellent look at Dante’s work by a scholar with a lifetime of experience, winsomely presenting Dante’s genius and beautifully written.

The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, by Carolyne Larrington. An excellent guide and introduction to the religious and mythic landscape of the Norse, with a careful presentation of often tricky or widely misinterpreted material by a good scholar. The best book of its kind that I’ve come across. Read my full review here.

Semmes: Rebel Raider, by John M. Taylor. A shorter version of Taylor’s biography of Raphael Semmes, a commerce raider for the Confederate navy whose activities severely disrupted Northern shipping and business. I enjoyed this little biography so much I wrote a very long review of it here last month.

Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen. A strong, much-needed, perceptive diagnosis that most of our proposed cures for the illnesses of our time are actually just part of the illness. Deneen daringly questions Lockean liberalism, especially the concept of the autonomous individual, and convincingly argues that both “sides” of our political divide today are fighting over the same vanishing patch of turf. I’ve previously blogged about this book here.

A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of England, by Marc Morris. A detailed and deeply researched new biography of Edward I. Worthwhile if you’re at all interested in High Medieval Britain, Scotland and Wales, or medieval kingship and military history at all. Read my Goodreads review here.

A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. A lyrical, wistful recounting of the author’s youthful walk across Europe from the English Channel to Constantinople. (This volume, the first of three, ends with his journey into Hungary.) Especially interesting as Fermor made his trip just as the Nazis rose to power, so this travelogue takes the reader through a lost world in more ways than one. You can read my thoughts on the book while I was reading it, with some generous excerpts of my favorite passages, here.

Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity, by Helen Castor. An excellent entry, brief but insightful, in the Penguin Monarchs series. Read my full review here.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson. I mean to review this more fully at some point, but this is a rewarding dig into what makes human beings tick and how to resolve some of the issues that plague anxious modern people. 95% common sense, eloquently expressed, supported, and argued for, with about 5% Jungian hoodoo that is nevertheless interesting. I think it says more about our culture than Peterson that he has become controversial.

Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age, by Alan Noble. A much needed meditation on Christian accommodation of the prevailing culture, resulting in a thin, shallow, brittle, commercialized, commodified faith that will not disrupt the world but follow after it, pulling on its apron strings. Concludes with calls for “disruptive” habits—personal habits, including even simple things like prayer before meals, and church habits, like more regular and more heavily emphasized sacraments and giving greater space to solemnity, reclaiming worship from the rock concert. Resonated quite a lot with what I had already read by Deneen (see above) and Scruton (see below), and with James K.A. Smith’s You Are What You Love, which I read a few years ago. Noble gave me a lot to think about, especially as troubled as I’ve been by the state of American Christianity for some time.

Favorite of the year:

How to Be a Friend, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. In the words of Albert Finney’s elderly gamekeeper in Skyfall: “Sometimes the old ways are best.” This is a new translation, in a nice bilingual edition from Princeton UP, of Cicero’s essay De Amicitia (On Friendship). I’ve been meaning to do a full review and recommendation since I read it, but unfortunately I finished it at about the busiest time of the semester. Suffice it to say that Cicero offers a lot of wisdom here that we could stand to recover or, at least, refresh ourselves on. True friendship is a discipline, something purposeful, and cannot demand evil, immorality, or injustice in its name. True friends should help each other to virtue—iron sharpening iron—which means that they should be devoted to something larger than themselves: truth. Good friendships, in Cicero’s estimation, must be founded on truth. In our “post-truth” age, this ancient message is the healthy counterprogramming we need. Pick this up and read it as soon as you can.

Runners up:

• On Human Nature, by Roger Scruton. An excellent series of lectures examining what it means to be human—that is, crucially, a person—and what obligations that places upon us. Insightful and especially relevant.

• The Demon in Democracy, by Ryszard Legutko. A powerful one-two punch with Why Liberalism Failed, Legutko’s book expands on Deneen by examining Western liberalism and Communism as rivals for the same basic ground, philosophically and politically speaking, which is why both tend toward tyranny, authoritarianism, and the suppression of traditional institutions.

• The Year of Our Lord 1943, by Alan Jacobs. An interesting look at the lives and thought of five Christian writers and their responses to the pressures of the Second World War. Read my Goodreads review here.

• Doors in the Walls of the World: Signs of Transcendence in the Human Story, by Peter Kreeft. A freewheeling discussion on our intuitions of transcendence through our lived experience. Read my Goodreads review here.

• Finnish Soldier versus Soviet Soldier: Winter War 1939-40, by David Campbell, illustrated by Johnny Shumate. A brisk, informative, lavishly illustrated examination of what combat was like during the Winter War. Read my Goodreads review here.

Worst reads of the year:

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. This book is garbage. A “hot mess” or a “dumpster fire” for the meme-addled. It’s a judgment on our culture that it’s become as popular as it has. Lazy, poorly written, overindulgent, philosophically and morally bankrupt, with insufferable characters, a contrived plot, and a completely phony moral platitude tacked on at the end, this book has skated by on the black ice of its pop culture “references,” the most vacuous and ephemeral brain candy available. Read some of my early reactions in my Goodreads review here. In April I was a guest on the Sectarian Review for a discussion of Ready Player One—primarily the film version; you can listen to that here.

The Terminal List, by Jack Carr. I wanted to enjoy this book, because it’s in a genre I’ve enjoyed and I was intrigued by the fact that it was written by a former SEAL. While true, its author’s service was essentially a gimmick used to sell the book, along with the handful of passages redacted by the Department of Defense. The “too hot for TV!” tactic. Unfortunately, this is a poorly written and plotted mess, with serious pacing, characterization, and tone problems, loads of typos (in a professionally edited and published book!), and sometimes incomprehensible description.

The biggest problem for me, though, was its complete lack of reflection on the meaning of its story. SEAL James Reece miraculously survives an ambush that wipes out everyone in his entire unit but himself and a buddy. Upon making it home, the buddy mysteriously commits suicide and Reece starts getting ominous results on medical tests. Then Reece’s family is murdered and he sets out for revenge. Turns out that the ambush was a setup to wipe out SEALs and other special forces personnel who had been illegally used for pharmaceutical testing, a project sending kickbacks to a powerful, ambitious, high-ranking female politician with her sights set on the White House. Doesn’t sound familiar enough? Well her husband is also a former politician who was disgraced because of sexual scandal. Hm.

Turns out everyone—including the SEAL commanding officer—was in on the plot, and Reece laboriously kills all of them, working from a list kept on the back of one of his dead daughter’s crayon drawings. Not only is it obvious and manipulative, it’s a chore to read.

This was a bad enough book for artistic reasons but it crossed the line into morally bad territory. What The Terminal List and Ready Player One have in common is a gross indulgence in fantasies that simply affirm or titillate the reader. In Ready Player One it’s an affirmation that all the ephemeral video game crap you love matters—matters more than anything else in the world! It then titillates its reader with the adulation and glory heaped upon its protagonist. In The Terminal List, it’s an affirmation that all your darkest suspicions about elites and globalists are true. The titillation comes in the elaborate and gleefully relayed revenge killings.

Carr invites us to participate in Reece’s campaign of gruesome revenge, which is otherwise fairly standard for a thriller, but by making his villains obvious proxies for real world people, he’s inviting the reader into an obsessively imagined murder spree—and invited them to enjoy it along with him. That’s not a good habit of mind to cultivate, and in Carr’s book the resentment—of the Clintons, of Washington insiders, of the objects of paranoia like Big Pharma, and even of fellow SEALs who just haven’t seen as much action as Reece—drips from every page. It’s not just a bad book, but an ugly one.

Read my much shorter Goodreads review here.

Rereads:

Old favorites that I reread this year. Several of these I revisited after more than a decade (or two). Others I listened to on my commute. All were worth it—check any of these out. They’re great.

• The Aeneid, by Virgil, trans. by David Ferry. A solid new translation in blank verse. I read this shortly after my grandfather died, just before Christmas 2017, and it resonated powerfully with me, something I blogged about here (the most popular post of the year, incidentally).

• The Earliest English Poems, ed. and trans. by Michael Alexander. A great collection of Old English verse, including riddles, epic (The Battle of Maldon), religious poems (The Dream of the Rood), elegies (The Seafarer and The Wanderer), and much more. Good translations with good scholarly apparatus like notes and introductions. Alexander’s translation of Beowulf is also worth seeking out.

• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Reread for the first time since high school, when I read it because Stephen King featured it so prominently in Hearts in Atlantis. Far, far more powerful than I gave it credit for back then. Justly regarded as a classic. Read my Goodreads review here.

• The Screwtape Letters and The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis. I listened to both of these as audiobooks. The Four Loves is an early version of the talks that eventually became the longer, expanded book of the same title, read by CS Lewis himself in recordings made for American radio during the 1950s. He’s great to listen to. The Screwtape Letters was the second audio version I’ve listened to, after John Cleese’s wonderfully manic and wrathful recording (now very hard to find). This version was read by prolific British actor Joss Ackland, whose wry, self-satisfied bass gave a new spin to Screwtape as the smug bureaucrat who can only be roused to wrath out of self-interest. A great performance of a great book.

• A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Also an audiobook, brilliantly performed—accents and all—by Barrett Whitener. Reading the book is indispensable—no performance can be as funny as how Toole’s book will play out in your head—but this was really enjoyable.

• The 39 Steps, by John Buchan. I reread this for the first time in ten years in preparation for a podcast discussion of Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation. The 39 Steps still works—a fast-paced adventure thriller that you can read in one or two sittings. You can listen to our discussion of the film, with reference to the book as well, here.

• The Perilous Road, by William O. Steele. Reread for the first time since perhaps fourth grade. My copy still had an old Garfield bookmark and a sheet of stickers in it. Anyway, a very good Civil War novel for children, capturing some of the messiness in the South, particularly in areas politically divided between secessionists and unionists. Read my Goodreads review here.

Favorites kids’ books:

Every night before bed I read a chapter or two to my wife from a book we’ve selected—something fun and relaxing, with a dash of adventure, often for kids or young adults. I also read a lot of picture books to my kids, which has been a refreshment after the last few years of Serious Adult Literature. These are the best of this year’s lot, in no particular order:

• The Door in the Wall, by Marguerite de Angeli. This was a nice surprise—a novel neither my wife nor I had heard of, that we only discovered while looking through a list of Newbery Medal winners (1950). This is the story of a spoiled noble boy crippled by illness who learns humility through acceptance of his condition and his submission to the practice of an art. Also nice as a medieval novel for young readers that doesn’t present a lot of Dark Ages stereotypes, but brings the reader into that world on its own terms. Read my Goodreads review here.

• Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen. A gripping adventure story, part Robinson Crusoe, part Jack London (take your pick), part Lord of the Flies. Hatchet tells the story of a boy, already stressed by his parents’ divorce, who finds himself stranded in the Canadian wilderness following a plan crash. I blitzed through this in a few days during breaks at work—it’s excellent.

• The Hawk of the Castle, by Danna Smith, illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. A medieval picture book about falconry, following a falconer and his daughter on a hunting trip. Based on the author’s own experience with falconry, and lovingly—and beautifully—illustrated. Read my Goodreads review here.

• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis. For whatever reason, I’m just now getting around to reading all of the Chronicles of Narnia, and this stands out as one of the best entries in the series (though my favorite is probably still The Silver Chair). An epic sea voyage with allegorical, chivalric overtones—one part Faerie Queene, one part Odyssey. It’s great. Reepicheep, the embodiment of honor and chivalry, is perhaps my favorite character, but everyone has a chance to shine in this one and some parts are profoundly moving.

• In Grandma’s Attic, by Arleta Richardson. A wonderfully fun, funny, and gentle collection of frontier stories presented as the reminiscences of a grandmother. Reminded me somewhat of Little House on the Prairie, but more episodic and with a nice dash of more specific religiosity. My wife’s grandmother read these to her growing up. There are ten in the series, so there’s plenty more to enjoy. Read my short Goodreads review here.

• Shakespeare’s Spy, by Gary Blackwood. The final volume of a trilogy following a young boy, originally tasked with stealing a well-protected copy of Hamlet, through his apprenticeship and finally membership in Shakespeare’s company of players. A fun, kid-friendly introduction to Shakespeare, drama, and the Tudor world. I’ve blogged about this series here before, in this post about Cornwell’s Fools and Mortals.

Favorite of the year:

John Ronald’s Dragons, by Caroline McAlister, illustrated by Eliza Wheeler. A beautifully illustrated picture book about the first half of JRR Tolkien’s life, from his childhood, through World War I, to his professorship at Oxford and the creation of The Hobbit. I’ve previously reviewed this wonderful book on the blog here.

Looking ahead:

I was going to conclude with a section on my two favorite new writers—meaning dead guys I’ve just discovered—of 2018, but this post is quite long enough. I’ve set myself a lower bar for my Goodreads challenge this year, for three reasons: my wife and I expect our third child this year, which will, naturally, affect my time—and sleep schedule; I aim to read a few longer, heavier books I’ve been meaning to get to; and I want to set aside time to work on new writing projects. We’ll see how all that goes this time next year. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting.

Thanks for reading! Happy new year!

2018 in Movies

Tim Blake Nelson as Buster Scruggs in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

2018 was not, by several reckonings I’ve read or heard, a great year for movies. There was a good bit of dreck, but a lot more sameness. Even the prestige Oscar-bait movies all look similarly tortured, similarly target the same progressive boogeymen, and look similarly self-congratulatory. And Lord help you if you’re pretty well burned out on superheroes. I’m getting close. I saw Black Panther, which was apparently a civic duty, but couldn’t muster the gumption to see Infinity War until this week. Still underwhelmed.

But there was good stuff mixed in there—and if you enjoyed the things I was just complaining about, more power to you! Seriously. I try not to begrudge people their entertainment, but I do wish we got more movies like the ones below.

Here are the five movies, in roughly ascending order, that I enjoyed most this year, along with a few honorable mentions and—to keep things positive—movies that looked good, that trusted friends recommended, but that I just haven’t had the chance to see yet.

A Quiet Place

John Krasinski in A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place proved the most pleasant surprise of the year for me. I’m not much for horror—and apparently neither is John Krasinski,* the writer, director, and star of the movie. I think that’s a strength. Krasinski’s entry in the genre emphasizes character over gore, relationships over creature effects, and atmosphere over cheap jump scares, the things a talented outsider can bring to freshen up a genre piece. As it happens, the few horror films I like are the ones that slowly build dread—a more powerful emotion than horror, I think—through character and atmosphere.

It helps that Krasinski has fashioned a classically cinematic movie. With the dialogue mostly stripped out, A Quiet Place has to rely on that ever rarer of commodities—visual storytelling. It’s a spectacularly well made movie, visually and technically, with an excellent sense of place (always an asset in horror, c.f. The Shining), and evocative sound design. But the real strength, what gives the technical accomplishments life, is the performances. Krasinski and his wife, Emily Blunt, portray a committed, nigh desperate couple trying to raise a family in a world controlled by unstoppable monsters with powerful senses of hearing. Krasinski and Blunt are excellent, as are the kids—almost always a weak point in this kind of movie.

A Quiet Place’s depiction of a family also sets it apart. The nameless family we follow through the movie is intact, led by a husband and wife who need and rely upon each other, as stable as can be expected, and attempting to carry on in the face of a situation in which other people would give in to despair. Indeed, we see exactly two other people in the film, one of whom has reached that point. The easy Hollywood route—the cliched route—with a screen couple in a situation like this would be to emphasize preexisting rifts and have plenty of screaming matches, maybe an adultery subplot, but Krasinski and Blunt emphasize—touchingly, movingly—the ordinary: a husband and wife looking after their kids and preparing for the arrival of another in a hostile world. Which is what men and women have been doing since Eden.

I think the film also does something interesting in exposing a philosophical fault line among its viewers. The people who asked, bewildered, “Why would you have a baby in a world like that?” don’t get it. The answer is Because life is worth it, utilitarian arguments be damned. It’s a terrifying and starkly beautiful vision. I’ll refer y’all to this outstanding piece by Sonny Bunch for more.

*I can’t talk about this movie without reflexively referring to Krasinski’s character as “Jim.”

The Death of Stalin

Adrian McLoughlin as Stalin, Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov, Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, and Simon Russell Beale as Beria in The Death of Stalin

The Death of Stalin could have gone wrong in so many ways, it’s amazing it works so well. Trickiest of all is its premise. This film stages the aftermath of the death of one of history’s greatest mass murderers—a man whose war against reality took the lives of at least twenty million of his own people; who oversaw one of the largest and most brutal concentration camp systems in the world; who led his country first into an alliance with and then in a war against Hitler, a war that killed another 11,00,000+ of his soldiers and as many as twenty million of his own civilians; who enslaved over half of Europe in a campaign of political suppression, ethnic cleansing, and murder—as a comedy.

There is a lot to laugh at in socialism or communism generally and even the Soviet Union specifically—the Russians under the Soviets had a famously mordant sense of humor—but the risk is that turning these events into effective comedy will trivialize Stalin’s unbelievable evil. Astonishingly, the film manages this tightrope walk brilliantly.

The director, Armando Iannucci, is also the creator of Veep, and so knows a thing or two about political satire. His approach to the humor of Stalin’s death is to play it straight—no one in The Death of Stalin is laughing about anything, and yet it is uproariously funny. The absurdity of life under communism, of the violent ideological whiplash caused by sudden reverses of supposedly infallible policy, of the grotesque toadying of Stalin’s subordinates even as the Man of Steel lies in a puddle of his own urine, of the comically self-serving narcissism of virtually every character—all factor into the comedy, not to mention the dark zingers the characters shoot back and forth and the Office-worthy awkward moments that ensue.

That both the comedy and tragedy work is due to the performances, which Iannucci’s documentary-style, improvisatory camerawork and editing allow to shine. Monty Python alumnus Michael Palin is an excellent Molotov, the most self-deluded true believer among the Soviet inner circle. Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter’s Lucius Malfoy) proves a delightfully crass and bro-ish Marshal Zhukov, the man who captured Berlin. Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough stand out in small roles as Stalin’s children, Vasily, who surely never forgot that his father refused a chance to exchange for him when he was captured by the Nazis, and Svetlana, who eventually defected to the United States. But the film’s strongest performances are the central three: Jeffrey Tambor as Georgi Malenkov, Stalin’s weak, malleable heir apparent*; Simon Russell Beale as Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD and a true devil in his own right, a serial rapist and mass murderer; and Steve Buscemi as a surprisingly great Nikita Khrushchev, a resentful, put-upon brute simultaneously chafing at and fearful of Beria’s power now that Stalin is dead.

While these magnificent bastards kiss butt, comically debase themselves, and jockey for a chance at greater control of the post-Stalin Soviet Union—and, to reiterate, this is all hilarious—The Death of Stalin never loses sight of the horrible, ironic tragedy of the story it’s telling. When Beria orders an end to political executions, one unlucky prisoner is shot after the order to stop is given and his executioner doesn’t quite catch it. While Beria plots against his rivals with an underling in the basement of the Lubyanka, prisoners are shot, tortured, and rolled down the stairs tied to logs behind him.

On a grander scale, The Death of Stalin portrays a system proclaiming peace at perpetual war with itself, that, in its pursuit of pure equality, has created the zero-sum game it accuses capitalism of creating. But it’s not just an indictment of a system, our culture’s current default critique of everything: The Death of Stalin depicts the rot of people, the moral decay of little daily choices, from Stalin and his lieutenants down to radio station managers and the lowliest Red Army privates. Everything in this film—everything—comes at someone else’s expense. It’s a nasty object lesson, but one we need more than ever.

The film does take historical liberties, but this isn’t the place for hashing that out. It’s worth watching, not only as a politically canny satire or historical comedy, but as an indictment against ideology, the abandonment of truth, and the worship of man in the place of God.**

*I watched The Death of Stalin for the second time while reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life a week or two ago. Afterward, I read this in his Rule 11: “And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

**The reaction of Khrushchev and company to the arrival of formerly exiled Orthodox bishops at Stalin’s funeral is worthy of a gang YouTube comment atheists, a subtle point of satire of its own.

Mission: Impossible—Fallout

Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible—Fallout

The best action movie of the year doesn’t feature any superheroes. Mission: Impossible—Fallout* is both a great new entry in one of the most consistently excellent series yet running and a solid sequel to the last one.

Since III but certainly since IV (Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol), the Mission: Impossible series has done two things exceptionally well: stage impressive practical stunts and make them matter to the plot. Far from the extraneous, time-wasting chaos of Transformers or self-indulgent cool of The Fast and the Furious franchises, Mission: Impossible’s action scenes advance the plot and are mostly real, refusing to lean on CGI as a crutch.

Fallout takes this to even greater extremes, with Tom Cruise doing scores of sunset parachute jumps to film the HALO dive sequence, racing against traffic in Paris for a motorcycle chase, doing his own helicopter flying, and actually dangling from a cliff over a Norwegian fjord (standing in for Kashmir) in the climax. The much ballyhooed shattering of Cruise’s ankle comes during a pretty standard footchase through London that, to the producers’, director’s, and Cruise’s credit, is far more exciting than it has to be.

And that’s what sets Fallout—and its predecessors—apart: the filmmakers care. You can’t take that for granted in our era of lazy cashgrabs and paint-by-numbers sequels.

It helps, of course, that Fallout has a good plot, with interesting development of the previous film’s villain (Sean Harris) and femme fatale (the excellent Rebecca Ferguson). Ving Rhames has an expanded role, as does Alec Baldwin, whose sinister bureaucrat from the previous film has an important role to play here. Henry Cavill, with his Justice League-wrecking mustache, is a physically imposing, resourceful, intelligent—and therefore threatening—villain. The film also resolves the Mrs. Hunt situation introduced in JJ Abrams’s Mission: Impossible III, explaining what happened to that hastily introduced and abandoned love interest, both paving the way for Hunt and Ilsa Faust to have something going on in future installments and giving the franchise a bit more of a solid footing, continuity-wise.

Well plotted, solid acting by a veteran cast (even Simon Pegg’s relative newcomer Benji has been in four out of six of these now), and exciting, believable action—you could do a lot worse for pure entertainment.

*They need to find a better way to punctuate these titles. I shouldn’t have to use order of operations to remember what goes where.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Benicio Del Toro as Alejandro in Sicario: Day of the Soldado

I love the last few Mission: Impossible films, but if you want that kind of thrilling action with a bit more real-world gravitas and ethical exploration, Sicario is the franchise to beat. Sicario proved a surprise hit when it came out three years ago, with an intriguing look into a complicated, morally dicey world given life by excellent writing and plotting. The writer, Taylor Sheridan, has emerged as one of most interesting talents in the last few years, with both Sicario films to his credit as well as Wind River and Hell or High Water. The performances were excellent as well, with Josh Brolin’s cagey CIA operative Matt Graver and Benicio Del Toro’s former cartel hitman Alejandro offering black and gray contrasts to the white morality of FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt, outstanding again). Thanks to the writing and performances and Denis Villeneuve’s direction, I’ve seldom been as tense as long as I was when I first watched Sicario.

This year’s sequel, originally simply titled Soldado, further complicates the world of the first film, first by expanding its scope, with events driven by terror attacks in middle America and Graver operating as far away as Somalia, and second by removing the first film’s conscience, Kate Macer. This film revolves around Graver and Alejandro, with side stories following an aspiring teenage sicario (Elijah Rodriguez) and the spoiled daughter (Isabela Moner) of a cartel don the US government has decided to take down. I don’t want to explain much more about the plot, but its tense blend of immigration politics, the war on drugs, government corruption on both sides of the border, the power of money, and the personal stakes involved in this kind of amoral Realpolitik challenge the characters to deal with the consequences of their actions. Even in a world already driven by revenge, Graver and Alejandro rely more and more on force—the only tool left to them, the laws all being flat. They ultimately choose different paths. I’m not sure either ends up happy about it.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado features a new director (Italian director Stefano Sollima) and cinematographer (Dariusz Wolski, replacing the legendary Roger Deakins) but the film is perfectly matched stylistically and especially tonally to the first one. If you’re looking for an engaging action drama that poses some hard questions about chaos, the line between good and evil, and our relationship to a government that increasingly solves its problems by killing people, Soldado is the next film you should check out.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Zoe Kazan as Alice Longabaugh in “The Gal who Got Rattled,” the fifth story in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is my favorite film of the year. Hilarious and moving, beautiful and bleak, eerie and warmly romantic, this film shows Joel and Ethan Coen at the height of their powers, masters of the film medium. And they not only demonstrate their virtuosity technically and artistically, but they show that, coupled with their storytelling skill, they have something to say. This is not just art for art’s sake.

This film is an anthology, a collection of six short stories—presented literally so, with a hand opening and turning the pages of an illustrated book of Western stories as the film progresses. Each is markedly different from the others in style and tone. The first, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” is almost a self-parody—intentionally so. Its verbose, aw shucks protagonist wends his way across a stereotypical Old Hollywood Western landscape, singing and engaging opponents in banter that shows off his vocabulary but that almost immediately descends into comical violence. The cherry on top is a country musical number with a tinge of the supernatural.

“Near Algodones,” about a hapless bank robber who isn’t hanged for a crime he committed but is for one he didn’t, is essentially an extended joke, complete with punchline, but it features a pinch of pathos at the end that prepares the way for the later stories. “Meal Ticket,” the bleakest of the set, is a mood piece. It follows a pair of traveling performers, an armless man who recites long passages from the classics (Harry Melling) and the man who cares for him (the great Liam Neeson, in an almost wordless performance). The story creates such a powerful sense of pathos and sadness, such a keen sense of the long years of this pair’s sad routine, that there’s almost no way it could have ended satisfactorily. It’s the most overtly tragic and least humorous of the six.

My two favorites come sandwiched in the middle. “All Gold Valley,” based on a short story by Jack London, tells the story of an old prospector (Tom Waits) seeking out and, despite some rather serious obstacles, finding a rich vein of gold. In this story the Coens show off their underappreciated skill of making people going through processes—just working on stuff—not only interesting but gripping (c.f. Llewellyn and Chigurh preparing their motel rooms in No Country for Old Men).

The longest, “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” based on a short story by Stewart Edward White, is the most sincerely moving. The story of a star-crossed man and woman on the Oregon Trail, it carefully builds a warm and involving relationship between two lonesome people who find, in each other, hope for something more. The landscapes—western Nebraska prairie—are stunningly shot and flat out beautiful. The performances by the leads—Zoe Kazan as Alice and Bill Heck as Billy Knapp—are wonderfully subtle and understated, as is that of Grainger Hines as Mr. Arthur, another in the Coens’ fine lineage of taciturn men who, when the crisis comes, get crap done. And Alice and Billy’s dialogue, in a sincerely presented religious conversation, introduce what I think is the heart of the whole film: the uncertainty of the ephemeral, fleeting world we travel through (what better image could you hope for than a wagon train?), an uncertainty that means our only hope can come in the world of the transcendent. The story tragically and movingly underlines the point at the very end.

The final story, “The Mortal Remains,” uses the Coens’ skill for humor and dialogue to cast the themes of mortality and the brevity of life in pretty stark relief, showing us out the door—quite literally—with a pair of closing doors, not to learn what happens on the other side in this life.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs offers not only a great set of varied but thematically unified stories, but it’s also a cinematic delight. Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, working with the Coens for the second time (after Inside Llewyn Davis) composes the vast deserts and grasslands beautifully. Look for the lone trees on the horizon in “Near Algodones” or the beautifully untouched, Edenic “All Gold Valley.” The standout is probably “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” with its gorgeous twilight wagon circle (see above) and a genuinely exciting and terrifying action scene—comparable to Rooster’s showdown in True Grit*—at the end. Carter Burwell’s score is also excellent, incorporating folk songs and western motifs while being wholly original and appropriate to the tone of each short.

I can’t speak highly enough of this one. If you haven’t seen it, go out and watch it as soon as you can. If you’ve already seen it, watch it again—it rewards reviewing.

2018 may not have had a lot of good movies, but its good ones were great.

*There are a couple of True Grit Easter Eggs—such as an appearance by Mattie Ross’s boarding house nemesis Grandma Turner—sewn throughout Buster Scruggs. It’s a lot of fun.

Honorable mentions:

First Man—A solid, unexpectedly emotional depiction of Neil Armstrong’s journey to the moon. I saw this film with several other dads and there wasn’t a dry eye among us at the end. The depiction of mid-1960s NASA is great and should deepen our appreciation for the men who flew to the moon on the power of vacuum tubes and reel-to-reel tape, and Ryan Gosling’s intensely interior performance is Oscar-worthy. Ignore the completely fabricated controversy—something I hope the trolls who ginned it up will suffer consequences for—and watch this when you get the chance.

Crazy Rich Asians—Romantic comedies, as a genre, have been in rough shape, torpedoed if not completely sunk by the deconstructive, improvised Apatow comedies of a decade and a half ago. Crazy Rich Asians stands to revive the genre. It’s light, fun, and follows interesting characters in an interesting and unusual locale. Its subtle explorations and affirmations of family, marriage, and fidelity are also welcome.

The Incredibles II—A worthy follow up to the original. If it lacks somewhat in freshness that can only be because of the flux of superhero movies that have arrived in the intervening years—something these characters probably helped make possible.

Outlaw King—The okayest historical epic in years. I eagerly anticipated this one and liked it, but couldn’t overlook some of its glaring problems, particularly in terms of pacing and characterization. And while it does have a few serious historical blunders, the film has its heart in the right place and is a more authentic depiction of the medieval world than we’ve gotten in years, and so I still appreciate it for what it is. You can listen to Coyle and I discuss the movie on City of Man Podcast here.

Ant-Man and the Wasp—Here’s my nod to Marvel. Ant-Man is a curiosity to me: I never look forward to an Ant-Man movie, and so far I haven’t made it to a theater for one, but I enjoy them a lot when I finally see them, and I enjoyed the heck out of this year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp. Maybe the low expectations are the key.

2018 films I missed but hope to catch in the new year:

• Ralph Breaks the Internet

• Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

• BlacKkKlansman

• Annihilation

• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

• Der Hauptmann (The Captain)

And finally…

Older movies I just saw this year:

Here are a couple of solid movies I saw this year and want to say a word or two of praise for. They are, by pure coincidence, all World War II movies, but pretty drastically different from one another.

1944—Perhaps the most unusual movie I saw this year, 1944 is an Estonian film that depicts both sides of the war, changing sides and perspectives completely at the halfway point. Estonia, one of the small, vulnerable Baltic states, was the object of Soviet aggression well before World War II, and when the Nazi-Soviet alliance broke down Estonian volunteers found themselves in both the Red Army and the SS. The film explores one of the war’s side stories—how a small country caught between two evil superpowers picks its poison. It’s a moving, unromanticized look from the vantage of a nation that will be defeated no matter who wins.

Talvisota (The Winter War)—One of the best war films I’ve ever seen. This is the story of a fictional squad of Finnish reservists called up to defend their country against Soviet invasion during the Winter War of 1939-40. Harrowing and unromantic. I wrote a lengthy Historical Movie Monday post on this film if you want to know more.

Darkest Hour—This technically came out last year, in late December, and I’ve already blogged about it, but I’d like to get one more good word in for it before the year is out. It’s great—a brilliantly cinematic drama with powerful performances. Watch it if you haven’t.

Looking ahead

I hope y’all have had a great year and a blessed Christmas holiday, and that you’ve enjoyed some good movies along the way. Thanks as always for reading, and I hope y’all have a happy new year!

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

“And I to him: ‘I am one who, when Love 
inspires me, takes note and, as he dictates
deep within me, so I set it forth.’”

— Dante, Purgatorio XXIV, 52-4

As a brief St. Valentine's Day greeting, I want to encourage y'all to pick up Dante this year. But why Dante—grim, vengeful medieval poet, the "great master of the disgusting" according to one 19th century poet—and why on the most romantic day of the year?

Poet of love

Beatrice leads Dante into the heights of heaven, an engraving by Gustave Doré 

While he's most famous now for Inferno, that book represents only the first third of his masterpiece, the Commedia, or Divine Comedy. So if you've ever been assigned the Inferno by itself or simply read it on your own (in which case, well done!), you've only read a third of his vision of love. 

Yes, love. Dante's Comedy has as its theme all kinds of love. His love of his hometown, Florence, from which he was exiled in 1302, is a poignant strain throughout, and the wicked so memorably punished in hell, we are reminded often, sinned because they loved the wrong thing or loved a good thing in the wrong way. Paolo and Francesca, adulterers punished together in the circle of the lustful, shift the blame for their sin to a bawdy love poem. And the mover and focus of much of Dante's journey is his famous beloved, Beatrice.

That's just a sampling. Love, as a theme, as a plot point, as a subject of conversation and debate, is present throughout. But all of these loves are subordinate to and—if rightly ordered—derive their ultimate meaning from "the love that moves the sun and other stars," the love of God. 

It's God's love for a fallen man that dispatches Beatrice—on behalf of St. Lucy, on behalf of the Virgin Mary, on behalf of God— to Dante as he wanders lost in sin at the beginning of Inferno. It's love that created Hell—a thought that makes moderns squirm—and love that sends sinners there and keeps them there. And it's love that changes and saves Dante, and grants him, in the last passage of the book, a vision of God himself. 

Dante's Comedy is the story of salvation, which means that it's the story of love.

So enjoy your chocolate (Lord knows I already have), enjoy time with your beloved, and celebrate love and the relationships that give us human creatures meaning, but consider as well the source of all love. And give Dante a shot. I think you'll be glad you did.

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

My recommendations

My favorite translation for pleasure reading is that by Anthony Esolen, available from Modern Library, but I've read and enjoyed many other good ones, including Mark Musa's heavily annotated one for Penguin Classics and Allen Mandelbaum's excellent but underappreciated translation for Bantam Classics. These are all readable, affordable, and easy to find. Enjoy!