The 10 Best Movies of 2023
There’s a theme surrounding my top 10 but I can’t put my finger on it
- Disclaimer: after due consideration, I have decided to leave all of the Wes Anderson projects off this list. I wanted to write about Asteroid City along with all of his shorts but it started to become too long, and will probably do a separate write-up at a later date
10. Past Lives
Directed by: Celine Song
Love, an emotion that transcends time and space, has been the muse for poets, musicians, and philosophers throughout history. Yet, within the vast spectrum of love, there exists a poignant melody, a song of heartache and longing.
What ifs as metaphorical scabs that you catch yourself mindlessly picking at. Blood that stains in the shape of your former ambitions. Hiding the sting behind a mask of tranquil affirmations that “This is my life. This is the way things were meant to be”. Discarding the popular idea that your younger self resides within you, safe and warm and protected by your decisions. Picking up the permanence of abandonment instead. Leaving your younger self on the corner of the street, not hearing their wailing over the cityscape, the cacophony that beckons you towards your future. Acceptance because the alternative is devastating. The creeping horror of complacency, of imagining your younger self seeing you now and being let down, saddened, terrified, by who you’ve become.
I think like many people I have certain friendships in my life that have since faded, that I silently grieve. It is difficult to move past the pain of no longer seeing them and sharing our lives. Time is supposedly a healer but just as I think I am healed, I discover evidence of the emotional scars left behind. Past Lives is a film that I think will fundamentally change the way I view these friendships. Celine Song showed me that past friendships are moments in time of two people, that no longer exist. It’s okay to grieve, to be thankful for what once was, and to move forward.
Words hanging unsaid above our heads, their shadow blinding us to the chances right in front of us. Saying “Bye” instead of “don’t go”, instead of “I’ll miss you”, instead of “I wish you could stay”, instead of “you have changed me”, instead of “I love you”.
Loving your best friend (which is the case for Nora Moon and Hae Sung) unveils a dimension of emotional richness and complexity that transcends traditional definitions of friendship and romance. It invites individuals to explore the boundaries of their feelings and challenges societal norms about the nature of love. In this uncharted territory, where friendship and romance intertwine, the journey is marked by courage, vulnerability, and the potential for a love that transcends the ordinary, forging a connection that is both enduring and extraordinary.
I’ve spent this past year struggling with decisions I’ve made, and whether they were ultimately the right ones. There’s so much of who I used to be, even up until a year ago, that I miss with every fiber of my being. But then, on most days, I think about how proud I am of myself, what I have accomplished and all of the people who care for me now. How younger Chandler would be ecstatic if he knew the experiences I’ve had. After a tumultuous year of heartbreak, drugs, and rehab, I can’t help but feel that maybe I am in the right place.
9. Anatomy of a Fall
Directed by: Justine Triet
There is an injustice in the dispensation of justice. Right or wrong; a delineation so simple as to be understood by a mere child. Perhaps, only a child — blind to the complexities that govern adult choices, and all the grey in between them.
The best aspect of this courtroom drama is how patiently it reveals its intention to show how a microscopic lens on a relationship can be uglier and more hurtful than existing in the relationship itself. That level of scrutiny over an argument or the cloud of doubt over an unknowable intent. Sandra Hüller is great but I was immensely impressed by the arc and performance of her young son, Milo Machado Graner, who is having to navigate an adult methodology of poking and prodding for truth and one answer is that his mother is a murderer and the other is that his father, whom he was closest to, committed suicide.
Justine Triet’s film has all the trappings of a whodunnit but it’s mostly about how people change. And how we look for evidence of why they changed — even though it never adds up to a single moment like a crime of passion can do. For Hüller and her now-deceased husband, it’s the change that comes from love turning to resentment for feeling trapped by another person’s choices. For Graner, it’s the change of seeing his parents as deeply flawed humans who shielded him from so much pain they experienced together. It’s not a dissection of a fatal fall from a window. It’s everyone falling from grace very publicly and especially in the (already clouded from an accident) eyes of a child. It’s not a stirring film but it resonates and ripples with truth. Including how it leaves the audience wondering past the ending if mother or son were fabricating things to control a narrative that is so much more expansive — from first love to fall — and cannot be solved without evidence. Much like the feelings of love itself. There is no evidence. Even actions can have unknown and selfish ulterior motives.
Some very interesting directorial choices from Triet, too, like using a flashback for half a scene but then letting an audio recording exist like it would for a juror for the points without talking. She constantly chooses to listen rather than show or tell. It perhaps doesn’t come what you want it to be — much like the disappointed reporters on the steps of the courthouse — because it resists that urge. It is a marriage. With photographs of happier times. Headlines for the worst of times. But only the mind can hold how things happened, both the good and the bad. Holding love that’s insufficient in regards to evidence. But it’s there. Despite all of the worst things that can be submitted.
So much of life is complicated and ambiguous. I’m often suspicious that anyone saying otherwise is selling something. And I often find stories that tell us otherwise to be sometimes entertaining but mostly trite.
Anatomy of a Fall finds its core in this naturalistic world of the agonizing ambiguity of our limited individual perspectives. Where most stories (crime dramas especially) dangle ambiguity around and then entice us with narratively constructed (but unrealistic) relief from that ambiguity, this film finds its dance with the pain of this ambiguity itself.
8. The Killer
Directed by: David Fincher
David Fincher’s The Killer is a film of superficial sublimity and narrative simplicity, a real letdown from the director of Se7en and Zodiac — or, rather, it is ostensibly these things. The more I thought about it, the more it turned out to be a tricky bastard, the kind of work whose self-awareness and formal facility hark back to the postmodern American penmen of the 1960s like Barth and Coover, a pop-art genre piece with Pale Fire–esque playfulness and murder and the muscle of a Samuel Fuller film, albeit more ostentatious.
It wastes no time flaunting its style, opening with a medley of striking wide-screen shots placed with precision and lit with a lyricism whose beauty hints at melancholy, of Michael Fassbender sitting, stretching, looking out the window through which sun flows in an unsullied stream into the spartan room, always stoical (DP Erik Messerschmidt is simpatico with Fincher’s aesthetic affinities, his preternatural virtuosity with digital filmmaking, having previously worked on Mank and Mindhunter). Fassbender’s hitman is going through the by-now routine process of preparing for his hit as he narrates with such repose it almost feels apathetic. From the rather mundane prattling and Fassbender’s unperturbed movements around the empty room, we know that he’s done this a million times, and we sense that he’s grown disillusioned. If Kevin Spacey’s John Doe in Se7en is an eccentric ideologist who views killing as the lord’s work, a killer imbued with purpose, Fassbender is a killer adrift in a pointless slipstream of violence, a man who pulls a trigger without feeling or meaning.
He talks a lot, but never really says anything of specificity or profundity, no poetic turns of phrase, mostly reiterating milquetoast aphorisms (“Empathy is weakness,” he opines more than once, something Fincher’s detractors often say of his films). He narrates unrelentingly, pontificating on this banality and elucidating on that particular detail of his work. His placid intonations initially reminded me of the strained irony and slick, vacuous reveries of Spacey’s character in American Beauty, a film that tries so desperately to be taken seriously it smothers you with its adolescent epiphanies.
I won’t say much of the plot — which, in one sense, is tepid and doesn’t matter much, and in another is the vital ruminations of a man reconciling with being middle-aged disguised as disposable Netflix entertainment. But one specific moment warrants a few brief words: When Tilda Swinton appears late in the film, we get the required dramatic two-shot scene of philosophical badinage and a metaphorical story told solemnly (Fassbender’s performance here has the same hopeless exhaustion as in The Snowman, albeit here the movie doesn’t suck). It’s television filmmaking. But you just can’t write Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker off, even though the problems are purportedly obvious; the formal prowess on display from everyone deserves serious attention, but more than just that is how the film fails to impress in any traditional way, and coming from an iconoclast who relishes turning trashy paperbacks into incisive pop-art just makes it all the stranger.
There are parts of the film that are almost hackish (e.g. actually printing the word “Epilogue” on screen as Fassbender summarizes his recent revelations), and Fincher is Hollywood’s great adaptor of stupid source material, certainly no hack. It’s after the film ends and you’re back on the Netflix menu screen that the whole of the picture becomes clear. This is Fincher’s therapy session, a display of formal and narrative genius that masquerades as generic claptrap, punctuated with Fincher’s flashes of pizzazz, but almost always in a manner devoid of his sui generis style, as with a fight that apes Paul Greengrass’ shaky cam of the second and third Bourne movies. How does this assembly of talent do that? Fincher is taking the trashy plot aspect of his career and slitting it belly-open to show us what’s inside. Making a movie this brilliantly while never really showing any kind of soul is an act of introspection. This is technical proficiency in self-examination and self-defense by attack.
Fincher has always had a fondness for trashy material, finding in the unsophisticated tales of murder and mystery opportunities to explore his passions, like broken men looking for renewed purpose in life and badass women proving to be unlikely heroes, the appeal of violence and the consequent rippling effects. Like Claude Chabrol, Fincher uses spare, seemingly simple genre stories and techniques of classic Hollywood filmmaking to ruminate on his passion for the medium, to scrutinize his singular approach to cinematic storytelling. Fassbender’s stony-faced cipher harks back to Lee Marvin’s terse intensity in Point Blank, and the inner erosion of the amoral man has some thematic and narrative similarities to Killing Them Softly, another elegiac crime film of modest scale shot in stylish widescreen.
As the film unspools, with unusual rhythm and pacing, it almost seems as if Fincher is purposefully underwhelming us, emphasizing the wrong beats, and paying inordinate attention to the wrong details, all while Fassbender drones on with his unamazing wisdom. Even the name of the film is bland and used three decades earlier by John Woo. We get the expected scene of our killer sojourning around a beautiful European city and a deft fight scene that’s shot with a handheld camera (fairly rare for Fincher). And all of it, while so adroitly realized, is perpetually anti-climactic, a sequence of scenes so accomplished in every minute way that you have to be a little impressed that Fincher has made something so familiar, so inexplicably devoid of anything that could be iconic — and, of course, you have to ask yourself why. The Killer questions its existence, as we all at some point do.
7. The Holdovers
Directed by: Alexander Payne
To be lonely is an easy thing, being alone is another matter entirely. To understand this, first one must understand the difference between loneliness and being alone. To be alone means that you are not in the company of anyone else. You are one. But loneliness can happen anytime, anywhere. You can be lonely in a crowd, lonely with friends, lonely with family. You can even be lonely while with loved ones. Feeling lonely is in essence a feeling of being alone. As thought you were one and you feel as though you will always be that way. Loneliness can be one of the most destructive feelings humans are capable of feeling. Loneliness can lead to depression, suicide, and even raging out and hurting friends and/or strangers.
The second major problem with loneliness is that it can be a very difficult feeling to lose, especially if it has already progressed into depression. There are, of course, drug therapies, but unless the problems are hormonal or chemical in nature, they will not serve the purpose of treating the longer-term problem. The proper treatment of loneliness must begin with an examination of the causes, or perceived causes, of these solitary feelings.
Generally, almost all loneliness can be traced back to low or below “average” self-esteem. Chronically lonely people will usually have low opinions of themselves. They may think of themselves as unintelligent, unattractive, broken, unwanted, not worthy of good things, no good, unable to do anything right, and/or socially isolated. Unlike many other emotionally hurting people, the chronically lonely usually know what is wrong, but like many others, they don’t believe they can do anything to fix it, or, circling back to the low self-esteem, they may also believe they are not worth happiness.
It takes the strong support of a good friend(s) or other loved one(s) to help the lonely conquer their feelings. Simply trying to counteract the low self-esteem verbally will not do it, though, for in their state, they will see the person as just trying to be nice or spare their feelings. The lonely must be shown in more subtle, yet clear ways that they are not the useless person they perceive themselves to be. For example, with a person who feels particularly unloved and unwanted, someone close to them should try to take a little extra time to spend with that person and try to set aside a little extra time to talk to the person.
Nothing special needs to be said or done, simply spending time, willing and without having been asked, allows the lonely one to see that they are loved. That they are worthy of being associated with and that there are people who like spending time with them. For those who feel they are unintelligent or unable to do anything right, a special effort must be made to ensure that they see their talents. Helping them to find projects and hobbies that utilize and show off their talents is one great way to help them boost their self-esteem.
The lonely are not incurable, so long as they have a loved one willing to take the time and commitment involved in helping them when the loneliness hits. Chronic, reoccurring loneliness is a treatable, surmountable emotion so long as someone cares enough to help their friend in need. The hardest things for a person to do alone are break an addiction and recover from physical, spiritual, or emotional pain.
There are certain moments in my life where when I experienced them at the moment my thoughts at the time were, “Man… I got nothing to live for.” often, when I reflect on those moments I think to myself, “Man… those were some of the best days of my life!” this movie brought to mind several of those moments.
I however wish I could feel that last sentiment to the fullest. I have friends, yes, my roommates have been there for me when I need companionship or comfort, and I know by now they are extremely annoyed by it (but they love me nonetheless). But the other half of my friends, those who have been by my side throughout the atrocities of film school and beyond, have been crumbling before my eyes. Plans that are never seen through, texts that don’t get a response, memes that don’t get a reaction, the list goes on and on. I stand idly peering through a window as I watch every one of them enjoy their current lives, sharing a laugh, like boarding a helicopter to go on a ski trip.
I view myself in Angus’s shoes, his parents forgetting him over the Christmas holiday, while his friends get the privilege of relishing in the fact they can get what they want during that period. Paul Giamatti symbolizes my roommates, at times reluctant to be with me, but over time are there to understand and view beyond a narrow myopic lens of sorts.
Paul Giamatti for best actor.
6. Poor Things
Directed by: Yorgos Lanthamos
The most monstrous of all fates is the lack of agency over one’s destiny.
…
A young woman strays away from God. She rejects her sheltered upbringing. She discovers pleasure through an exciting relationship with a troublesome man. She self-actualizes through sex work, queerness, and socialism. She returns with a fondness for her God and with a new balance of power outside of male subjugation.
The movie was made in a lab as a parable of the viewer’s choosing. It’s easily mappable to whatever they care about most. I gravitate towards a deconstruction-of-faith narrative because I have a limited imagination and I’m addicted to making things about me. So yes, Bella Baxter is a portrait of every post-Evangelical girl I know. Part of the post-evangelical girl journey is a latent adolescence. Part of adolescence is indulgent reflection, working out some things many people did years ago.
The de-churched spend their lives shaking off the scripts that would compel us to resent our bodies. There is no more perfect vessel in which sin may thrive than the human body. Now, apart from the twisted moralism of our culture, it would seem we’re supposed to love our bodies. Now we lose the shackles of contemporary Puritanism we were born in and enter into liberty.
The self-forgetfulness of sex is a wonder. You cannot see yourself. You’re not thinking about your stomach and whatever its shape. You don’t imagine your ass at a distance or your open mouth and how clumsy it all must look. At best, you’re just captivated, momentarily redeemed. It is annoying how often true intimacy can function as defibrillator paddles on a numb soul. You’re still alive and it’s good that you are, someone just told you so with their whole physical being. We’re supposed to be touched and worshipped.
But today, tragically, I am more aware of my body than I have ever been in my life. I wish it wasn’t so. My body exists in that same mental category as money, something I need as much as I hate thinking about. I might be further along the sliding spectrum of dysmorphia we all find ourselves on from time to time.
While I try to compartmentalize my body away on the shelf, it seems inextricably tied to everything that will ever happen to me. It is not an incidental vehicle for the mind and heart. My mind and heart will not matter if my body is not beautiful, I tell myself. Mundane decisions become chain reactions that get me closer to or further away from a dream of who I could become.
The revelation of self-love eludes me in a way it hasn’t for those I most admire. Bella ends up reclining in the comfort of her backyard. She’s surrounded by her community, her teacher turned husband, her lover turned friend, and her book. She needs nothing but wants much. I do myself a disservice by making my value contingent on my reflection in the eyes of others. As much joy as I find in reliance on them, I’d love to rely even more on myself. I want to know on a molecular level that I am not made whole by popular vote but by the fact of the matter. I’d like my exercise and my food to be a true expression of self. I’d like the taming and delight of my body to be a joy. I wish to be body…positive? Neutral? Transcendent? Whatever we’re supposed to be, I wish to love and be loved in this way.
5. Oppenheimer
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Morality is a Human Invention
To approach the subject of Morality, one must first gird himself well, for the road is a difficult one. The perennial questions often revolve around what is Right and what is Wrong, so an explanation here is difficult at best, and futile, at worst.
The genealogy of morals finds its antecedents and roots in religion, which takes an amoral “Social Contract,” and quickly transmogrifies it into a system of Good and Bad. The social contract is necessary for any civilization to occur, as anarchy, (i.e. the absence of a governing body,) is the antithesis of civilization. All the civilizations of history have been governed by a body, be it a plutocracy, oligarchy, democracy, dictatorship, etc. Even third-world tribes of Africa and South America are governed by a patriarch.
So a social contract, where I do not kill you, in exchange for your oath not to kill me, is irrefragably a necessary component of society. But Morality, and a “higher” code of ethics, communicated to men by “God,” has always tainted the social contract, turning a simple system based on instinctual, pleasure/pain drives, into a complex mire of evil transgressions against the Almighty.
When it comes to the “chosen” men who provide moral interpretations, I am hesitant to put my faith in a corruptible, inherently selfish man. The proponents of any morality seem to always claim a connection to the Almighty God, who created the world, but I have never had these rules communicated to me by God. Should I trust a body of men, (i.e. the religious body,) which has always and without fail been highly contemptible, selfish, and power-hungry? Should I live according to the dictates of such men as the Medieval popes, who possessed harems, murdered competitive clergy members, raped nuns, molested children, and slaughtered Jews? Should I trust morality as preached by Jim Jones, David Koresh, or the father of the Atomic Bomb?
It’s exceedingly rare for a subject like nuclear ethics to enter the zeitgeist, but with his critically acclaimed blockbuster Oppenheimer, writer-director Christopher Nolan has accomplished this feat. Perhaps it has something to do with the moment — nuclear-armed Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine persists, and with extreme weather and UFOs in the headlines, the worldwide public might be somewhat primed to be entertained by a movie about people grappling with the possible end of the world. With its somber and dark tone, Oppenheimer is the perfect counterpoint to the other summer blockbuster, Barbie, which masks its social commentary behind a pink, beachy aesthetic.
Most dramatists are drawn to a later chapter of Oppenheimer’s life — his postwar activism when he used his renown to lobby for world peace. His promotion of open scientific sharing with the Soviets at the beginning of the Cold War, his condemnation of the arms race, and his objections to the development of next-generation thermonuclear weapons fanned suspicions of his disloyalty. The resulting revocation of his security clearance in 1954 left him a broken man.
The appeal of this narrative is obvious: hubris leads to downfall, and the idealist is martyred at the hands of cynical political operators. Nolan’s Oppenheimer foregrounds the drama of the tormented tragic hero from the start, opening with a similar epigram as its source material, the Pulitzer-winning 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” The very structure of the film insists on the primacy of the personal over the scientific, unfolding as a series of flashbacks from 1959 — the year it comes to light that Oppenheimer’s downfall was engineered by a vindictive colleague.
It’s the most intimate, claustrophobic use of such an epically scaled format we’ve ever seen, serving as both a tormented subjective abstraction of history and an earth-rattling realization/culmination of it through a whirlwind of colliding and collapsing (subatomic) details. Historical documentation merging with frightening psychological intimacy, the thrill of scientific invention haunted by its devastating military application, a man who once saw visions of a world that buzzed and hummed and glowed now sees one that screams and burns into nothingness… Energy and paradox, gravity and light, space and force, science and politics, man and machine all turned into the most depressed, sensorial, dread-inducing summer spectacle that’s maybe ever been conceived of. Nolan’s obsession with chronological cross-cutting impressionism and fatal, bombastic mechanized paradoxes all arrive at a vivid, purgatorial black hole of an ending. One that reads as both all-consuming paranoia flooding after so much compartmentalization and simply the natural, apocalyptic endpoint of tracing these events we’ve just witnessed to their logical conclusion.
4. All of Us Strangers
Directed by: Andrew Haigh
Grief can be an unexpected visitor, knocking on your door even after three decades have passed. you thought you’d moved on, thought you were finally okay since it happened so long ago.
Grief arrives in diverse forms, sometimes seeking solace in shared company, too afraid to confront the solitude of the night.
Other times, grief walks alongside you as you revisit the familiar halls of your childhood home. You try to remember old conversations, saying words you wish you had said if only you had more time. grief becomes your silent companion, holding your hand in the presence of a friend it calls missed chances.
And then there are those moments, in the middle of a weekday, in the crowded confines of a cinema, when grief recognizes you in a sea of faces.
You try to elude its grasp, but today you’re too tired to resist. grief seeps in slowly, finally catching you in the last fifteen minutes of the film. you somehow expected it, but your tears still flowed just as effortlessly. As the credits roll, you silently pray for its departure, but grief, as always, is persistent. so you carry it home, its presence a domineering force that keeps you awake in the depths of the night.
Grief makes sure its existence is known, it's thumping a constant reminder of its presence. It whispers, “I am all you have,” leaving you trembling with fear or pain, the lines between the two too blurry to distinguish.
You try to check your phone, seeking solace in the wee hours of the morning because you’re too afraid to face the solitude of the night. And then you realize it: grief and loneliness have become you, and you’ve never been this terrified.
…
As we grow into the ages our parents once were, our maturity contextualizes so many of the choices they made when we were young. It can be both difficult and incredibly rewarding to bridge these adult conversations with our parents, but what do we do when our parents are no longer with us? How do we heal and navigate these complex questions with only our own limited, skewed perceptions to lead the way? All of Us Strangers hauntingly depicts this process of discussion in absentia, and it further fascinates with its specificity of gay loneliness. Adam’s imagined reactions to his coming out and confrontations of the prejudice of the dead meaningfully complicate these ghostly encounters. The concept here is lofty and abstract, but the conversations that build the film are thoroughly grounded in truth.
Stories are subconscious retellings of our traumas and desires. Past, present, and future shed boundaries in the imbrication of their tenses there. While places are dredged from the riverbed of memories for a rendezvous between the living and the dead, the train of engulfing thoughts hurls past the imposing urban concrete of loneliness towards the hazy suburban field of longing. The previous house still stands. Childhood is regained in its yard, those rooms, this bed. Childhood is lived once more and prolonged enough to forge some sense of closure and reconciliation, some alternate, imperfect reality where pieces unresolved are eventually put together to impart some semblance of having what was never had. Below sprawls the hunger for the unpossessed, the inexperienced. And the apparitions emerging from them always wait, always welcome the mourning guest.
A figure of the mind is not only a projection of one’s struggle or failure. They are not only a drawn picture of an anguished scream melting in a glassy puddle of a partially accepted identity. They are also these gentle arms reaching out as the sun sets, as the night deepens and tosses to an early morning, pulling the waist and the neck and the leg under the warmth of a feverish night, where the strobe of sadness evaporates in the rush of profound wanting. And in its wake, exhausted bodies lay awash with the seminal fluid of momentary ascension to pleasure, before they are swayed in tears wiped and kissed in perpetual devotion against the hard work that is tenderness to the lover, to oneself. All the running away ends in the courage to face the phantoms of our fears, our miseries, in giving parts of ourselves, in being honest. All the running away ends when we let go of ourselves to the solace of our imagination. After all, even though it may only be in your head, that does not mean it cannot be true. As La Rochefoucauld once said, “Neither the sun nor death can be stared at with a fixed gaze.” Bodies decay, they die, but love transcends the unfathomable cosmos. Love transcends time.
Internalized homophobia is particularly difficult for Adam to combat as he sees what he was warned against coming to fruition. He understands that there is a vibrant social scene of gay men where he lives, and the daily bigotry he once faced has heavily faded away. However, the lifelong anxiety of being closeted combined with his eternal grief creates such a hesitance toward falling in love. How could he bear to let Harry inside and risk losing yet another person? This hesitance breeds greater loneliness and estrangement, which ultimately reinforces the notion that this life he leads will forever be lonely. The intimate, sensual conversations between Adam and Harry build a beautiful sense of trust, and the ones between Adam and his parents rebuild a long-lost sense of hope. All of Us Strangers renders its many conversations and moments of reflection as genuinely revelatory and deeply moving.
3. Killers of the Flower Moon
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
I did not know how to approach writing about this movie so here are some links from Osage members discussing it:
2. Maestro
Directed by: Bradley Cooper
Overwhelmed is the best word I can find. Love and desperation, your art, and what matters most. Forgiveness and thoughtful, supporting and contrasting.
A close-knit loving bond between two people can begin with a friendship. Whether it is a friendship between two males, two females, or one male and one female, these friendships will develop into love. In no way is it a romantic love, but this type of love connects and bonds friends. Friends may move away or friendships may wane, but the love between the two people burns on forever. Romantic love is a love that not every person will experience. It is a type of love that is not there at the beginning but grows within the individual. When one finally finds the love they have been looking for, one can not imagine life with anybody else. Romantic love is a connection between two souls that is captured with a feeling that is not only felt within the heart but within the body as well. I’ve been in love with a girl for about a year; I can only imagine what it might be like to be in a state of co-dependency type of love forever. Guessing from my sister’s relationship with boys, it seems like a big headache instead of a wonderful feeling.
Love can be destructive if it is not contained, or expressed towards the right person. In the books “Christine”, “Natural” and the poem Daemon Lover we see that love can be destructive especially romantic love. We do not choose the people we love, but we should love wisely. Love should be directed towards something/ somebody that has our best interests at heart. In The Natural, Roy Hobbs was destined for greatness, but he was not able to realize his lust for Memo, who was a negative influence in his life. Lemon Iris offered Roy Hobbs true love, and a chance of happiness in life but he did not see it. People are usually hooked to things that end up being their downfall, for instance, drug addicts are addicted to drugs, such that they fail to recognize how it is destroying their lives. Just like Roy Hobbs in The Natural, most of us fall in love with the most beautiful people not because they have our best interests, and we end up disillusioned about love and life. Love should serve our good interests and it should bring out the best in us, which was not the case for Roy Hobbs. Love does not conform to popular cultural beliefs, and true love is usually in our best interests.
Love has lost its value in our lives. The current society has been nurtured by violence. Most Americans are entertained by violence. Violent films and video games are people’s favorites. Statistics have shown that going to war in Afghanistan can be deemed safer than living in Chicago. This makes us wonder, have people forgotten about the value of love in society? Only in America that a toddler can access a gun. Bills are being passed to legalize harmful weapons, which are used to kill. People’s values have become so accustomed to violence and hate that they cannot give a chance to love.
Not only do we see a decline in the level of love in society, but even romantic love is slowly dying. America seems to be experiencing higher divorce rates than before. The society seems to be condoning divorce rather than putting in place measures to prevent them. Most kids are being raised in single families or dysfunctional families. The society has developed a different set of values that have changed how people perceive and love each other. Love is no longer accorded the seriousness it deserves, there would be fewer divorces, less crime, and a more peaceful society. Materialism in current society is at its peak, and it is not the simple materialism we see in the movie Christine. People have become so obsessed with attaining the best cars, money, fame, and power that they forget. American society is a man-eat-man society, people would do anything to attain certain material things. Popular culture values materialism, status, and immediate gratification of needs at the expense of moral values and love.
The value of love in society should not be underestimated as love is the glue to our society. The foundation of a civil society is reason and love. Modern society is made up of different people who have their agendas, which makes it easy to be caught up in disagreements and conflicts. Without love and reason, people would be easily caught in pursuing their agendas without caring about the consequences for others.
Love is not just a theme in movies and literature, but it is the utmost theme in life/ society. With a firm sense of the value of love, each one of us is capable of showing, attracting, and maintaining love. Love is accompanied by an equality-consciousness that fosters self-empowerment, and does not focus only on an immediate circle of family and friends. Love is like a rose, the beauty of love cannot be described, but its stems are filled with thorns. The above articles and movie adaptations have shown us that love comes with jealousy, hatred, and conflicts, but that should not make us give up on love. According to Shaye Smith, love is a garden that fades away when you let it go. Betrayal, lies and indifference make love fade away.
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief. There are few and far between in regard to remedies for grieving. The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief — But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love, especially the love you had for others. Although, grief is itself a medicine. When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure. Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
I don’t know if Bradley Cooper viewed love in the same lens as I did experiencing this movie but I guess that’s just my interpretation.
Lost my shit at the Snoopy cameo though.
1. The Zone of Interest
Directed by: Jonathan Glazer
The home of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss is alive with sensory activity. The family’s dog plays with the children and barks in response to the snarls of prison dogs on the other side of the wall. The flowers bloom thanks to Hedwig’s diligent labors in the garden and breathe in heavy, ashen air. The baby cries — in delight or horror? What the family senses around them and how they sense it is ambiguous. Living outwardly blissful lives in a house that shares a boundary with Auschwitz, do they see the plumes of smoke that streak their skies with gray? Do they perceive the infernal glow that casts their bedroom in an orange blaze? Do they hear the gunshots that ricochet several times per hour, meters away from them as they cook, clean, and throw parties in their backyard?
Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, made sure to keep a “critical distance” from their subjects — watching them with a static camera and allowing them to move about the house undisturbed by the production. What this makes for is quite claustrophobic — endless shots of the family and their staff walking through doors, sidling past their dog, or pushing past each other. The result is calming, and hypnotic. These lives, free of worry about the world outside the house, are monotonous and familiar. The repetitive shots, paired with a heavy score and eerie soundscapes, comprise two films. As Glazer puts it, “One is the film you see, and the other is one you hear.” The horror of Zone of Interest is not sensational or eye-catching. It is remarkably, frighteningly regular.
Writer-director Jonathan Glazer interrogates the Hösses’ domestic lives and their perceptions like an engineer troubleshooting the sensors on a faulty fire alarm. Although his subjects are historical — Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (played here by Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, respectively) lived on the outer perimeter of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, with Rudolf the top commandant in charge — he trains a modern gaze on them, deploying visual and sonic technologies picked from a 21st-century arsenal. During filming, Glazer and Żal placed several cameras in the set, modeled down to the inch as a replica of the Hösses’ actual home. They coordinated the cameras with a system of cables, relying on focus-pullers working remotely from the basement, and captured scenes in multiple locations throughout the house in simultaneous, uninterrupted takes.
Adding to this strategy of alienation, the film’s soundtrack and visual footage were developed separately — sound designer Johnnie Burn called them “film one” and “film two” — and were merged only at the end, so that each could not influence the other. Consequently, despite its intimate access to the home’s interior, the eye of the camera feels eerie and inhospitable. Small acts of resistance punctuate the clinical vision of quotidian complicity captured by these lenses: we see several scenes in which a young Polish girl infiltrates the camp to hide apples for prison laborers to find. Glazer refrains from giving her gestures heightened narrative status. Instead, he shoots her nighttime escapades with an infrared camera. Through that lens, we see her the way border monitors today see undocumented migrants: as balls of heat passing through restricted areas.
The Hösses’ bourgeois lives have fed narrative interest before, notably in Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same title (of which this film is a loose adaptation), and the 2008 drama The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which contorted historical facts to glorify values of compassion and friendship. In the landscape of Holocaust films, The Zone of Interest is neither a tearjerker seeking to inspire lofty feelings of universalism (as could be said of Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful) nor a self-consciously courageous confrontation with the facts (as could be said of Night and Fog and Son of Saul). Glazer’s film sidesteps long-standing debates over the unrepresentability of the event, probing instead how people might have perceived these horrors as they took place.
The film takes no great interest in the psychology of the protagonists, their moral culpability, their exemplification of the banality of evil, or the other myriad bafflements that have stumped legal jurists, historians, and philosophers for the greater part of the past century. Instead, it asks how a middle-class German couple’s perception of the violence unfolding before their eyes, ears, noses, and hands came to be configured in a specific, monstrous way — a question that turns its attention from the individual in a vacuum to the individual as embedded within a larger social (and physical) architecture. Rather than wondering about isolated people who choose to be cruel and those who choose to be humane, The Zone of Interest conducts an inquiry into our selective experience of sensory data and the ethical implications of that selection.
Glazer’s precise spatial and sonic scaffolding suggests that the Hösses have become exceedingly good at compartmentalizing violence. Hedwig, who has a taste for furs and lipstick, receives shipments of clothes, jewelry, and cosmetics from “Canada,” a euphemism she uses to refer to luxury goods pilfered from Jewish households. There are long sequences in which Rudolf moves from room to room turning lights on and off, shutting and locking windows and doors. Segregating his duties by room, he performs the role of benevolent patriarch in the dining room, draws up genocidal plans in the study, and fucks the maid in the basement. In one early scene in the film, an encounter with the material residue of the Holocaust threatens the tidiness of the compartments they’ve devised. On a fishing trip with his kids down the river, Rudolf finds his family wading through something ghastly in the water: ash and human bones. Revolted, he cuts the excursion short, paddling his children home in a frenzy, where the women spring into action, laundering clothes and scrubbing the kids clean.
Alternately, it’s possible to read these characters as people suffering from a form of hyperesthesia, a neurological condition in which sensory perception is so radically overloaded that the brain no longer registers information but instead destroys it. Twice, Glazer makes use of the same minimalistic, expressionistic gesture. In the first scene, Rudolf considers the violence he is implicated in, wearing a stoic look; the screen fades to white. In the second, Glazer shows the image of a red rose; the screen fades to red. These sequences mimic the process of increasing the sensitivity of photographic film to light. When the film is oversensitized, it can no longer record light information: the negative burns and the photograph comes out monochrome. At a cocktail party filled with high-ranking personnel, Rudolf confesses to his wife over the phone that he is too preoccupied with the logistics of how he would gas everybody in the room to enjoy the occasion. A final explanation, at least for him, is that his work has turned his ways of reasoning and feeling into the indifferent functionality of a gas chamber.
There are resonances between the production work that was done for The Zone of Interest and the modeling done for contemporary investigations of hate crimes and state terror. In 2006, 21-year-old Halit Yozgat, the son of Turkish immigrants, was murdered by the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Underground at his family’s internet café in Kassel, Germany. Later, it emerged that there were deep ties between the German police and the NSU. Present at the café at the time of the crime was a German intelligence officer who subsequently denied hearing the gunshots, smelling the gunpowder, and seeing Yozgat’s body. In 2017, the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture built a 1:1 physical model of the café to test the intelligence officer’s claims, using materials vetted by acoustic experts to imitate the properties of the space. They concluded that his testimony was likely false.
On their faces, these investigations — though fictionalized, The Zone of Interest counts as one — put people on trial for blatant denialism. More profoundly, they put systems on trial for producing the conditions under which denialism appears plausible to those who internalize it. In 2021, anthropologist Callie Maidhof attempted to parse how people living in the shadow of Israel’s Separation Barrier, a present-day manifestation of extreme architecture, justified it to themselves. She conducted her fieldwork in Alfei Menashe, an Israeli settlement on the western edge of the West Bank. She was surprised to learn in speaking with settlers that they “barely gave [the Separation Barrier] a passing thought.” Alfei Menashe, which has the look of any Midwestern American suburb — with prim fruit trees, fences, SUVs, swing sets, and dogs — lies a wall away from settlements densely packed with Palestinians living under subhuman conditions, where the air is regularly polluted with the stench of tear gas and tires burnt in protest of the occupation. Maidhof argued that, to get by, Israeli settlers practiced a strategy of “unseeing,” which was “not a lack of vision,” but rather “a perceptual practice that makes and remakes space,” so that certain things lying in plain sight could be ignored.
Watching The Zone of Interest and practicing good aesthetic habits — to the extent that aesthetics is about attainment to looking and noticing — thus becomes an ethical position. Throughout the film, the viewer comes to hang onto every reverberation in the soundtrack, implicated as they are in what they discern. Sound, which we are so accustomed to canceling as “noise,” becomes precious. Was that metallic clatter from benign work being done on the house or forced labor in the camp? Was that youthful cry joyful, from the gathering in the garden, or despairing, responding to the cruelties of Auschwitz?
Honorable Mentions: Beau is Afraid, Wonka, Fallen Leaves, Theater Camp, Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning P. 1, Perfect Days, Godzilla: Minus 1
