Alex Halpern and James Franco in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (image: alamy.com)Michael Walsh’s Anti-Satanic Verses
Saint James battles the sorcery of Hermogenes, an emissary of the Devil. Colorized version of a 1565 engraving by Pieter van der Heyden, school of Bruegel the Elder (alamy.com).The Shape of Water: Non-Potable
Netflix Defends the West(ern)
Don’t Be True to Yourself
Fantastic Mr. FoxAre you being true to yourself? Should you? Better question: What in the world is a true self, anyway?
Wonder Woman: A Movie About Men
Some of my best friends are men, so no offense. But Wonder Woman has me asking, what’s the point? What good are they?
Disney’s Cheap Grace
A Musth See
It’s probably a drag being a liberal, always boycotting things. A Progressive friend who was surprised by my politics once asked me how I could like Radiohead so much, considering its front man Thom Yorke is such a leftist. It seemed a logical error (the “moralistic boycotter’s fallacy”?). I don’t judge songs by the artist’s favorite color, either. The fact is, conservatives can’t afford to discriminate merely to maintain moral cleanliness. I wonder whose music my friend might allow me to enjoy. Kid Rock? (Blah.) Rush? (Eye roll.)
And anyway, even if an artist’s politics do affect his art, what a spiritual poverty to entertain, or be entertained by, only what confirms one’s convictions! As a psychological fact, for many the private determines the political; must we also allow the partisan to constrict the personal?
So-So City
Did you ever catch yourself dreaming, adrift in la-la land—only to wake up to your own, personal so-so city? A consoling (but sophistic) thought: The number of possible worlds is infinite, so there’s some possible You out there for whom your daydreamt world is actual. Isn’t it nice to know a parallel possible You gets to really enjoy it? You could equally conjure up a possible world that is worse—and in that case, so much the better for actual You.
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land shows how imagining possible worlds uplifts, and disappoints, human life. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) fall in love, but ultimately the film is more about human la-la lands, symbolized by the Los Angeles in which Seb and Mia are trying to make it—he as a nostalgic jazz pianist bent on opening his own club, and she as a barista/actress infatuated with images of old Hollywood.
Manchester By the Sea: Dark, Beautiful, and Real
Every person undergoes traumatic experiences. Their quantity and quality vary, but once suffered, these experiences are incorporated into the person, usually invisibly to the rest of us. When they are not hidden enough, we may wish a person would just get over it already. Yet we marvel, when a person calmly reveals some past trauma, at the human ability seemingly to tuck such things away.
Kenneth Lonergan’s magnificent film Manchester by the Sea—poignant, funny, tough—portrays the human limits of this ability.
