I made a little promise when I started this Substack that I wouldn’t fall back on just sending out links to things I’ve written elsewhere. But in the emails I get every time a new person subscribes, I keep seeing the names of people—friends, relatives, old neighbors—whom I would lovingly refer to as “not particularly online,” which is to say folks who aren’t glued to my Twitter/Post/Mastodon feeds 24–7 waiting to see when the next piece drops. So in lieu of the traditional thread, I’m breaking my own rule to compile a list of some of the last year’s writing I’m particularly proud of. I came into 2022, frankly, at a bit of a low point, feeling creatively stagnant and a little frustrated, and I decided, Hamilton-style, to write my way out (which is, not incidentally, one of the reasons you’re reading these words in this place). I feel pretty good about some of the results, and I hope you like them, too.
The Best Final Shot of Any Movie in Years I went to Cannes for the first time this year, and a tip from the esteemed Guy Lodge steered me towards Charlotte Welles’ Aftersun, which ended up being one of my favorite movies of the year. I was especially moved by its final shot, which not only knits together the movie’s multiple time frames but makes the reason for its elusive, fragmented structure devastatingly clear. After seeing the movie three times and spending several months letting it sink in, I wrote about that final shot and how it’s foreshadowed all through the film, in ways that only become apparent the second time through.
Nope, Explained (Sort Of) Jordan Peele’s Nope left viewers with a lot of questions, and I answered some of them, while pushing back against the idea that any good movie can be reduced to the whats and the whys.
On The Rehearsal There was nothing I enjoyed thinking about this year more than Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, an elusive semi-documentary series in which Fielder offers people the chance to workshop important life events through the use of extravagantly detailed simulations. (In the first episode, he builds an exact replica of a Brooklyn bar to help a man practice a difficult conversation; when production shifts to the West Coast, he has the entire bar disassembled and shipped there.) The series actively courts the uncertainties and the ethical conundrums of documentary-making and reality TV, and it broke a lot of people’s brains, including mine. But on some level it’s also just a poignant show about the anxieties of being a parent.
The Dropout, or How Girlboss Anthems Created Elizabeth Holmes I had a blast digging into how the Hulu series about Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes uses music cues to suggest how decades of self-empowerment anthems, from Missy Elliott’s “We Run This” to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” might have given people the wrong idea about just how much success they actually deserve. Any day I can write about my undying love for the music of Kelly Clarkson is a good day.
Hugh Jackman’s Music Man Removes the Classic Musical’s Racist Subtext. What’s Left? I’ve seen more theater since Broadway’s post-pandemic reopening than at any time in my life, but it can be tough to find the right way to write about it for an audience outside of New York. When I realized no one had written about, or even noticed, a significant change in the Broadway revival of Meredith Willson’s iconic show, I jumped at the chance.
How Netflix’s The Adam Project Dishonors a ’90s Icon Catherine Keener’s turn as the villain in this utterly negligible time-travel thriller gave me a chance to rewatch several Nicole Holofcener movies and Being John Malkovich, and for that I will always be grateful.
The Netflix Aesthetic Speaking of Netflix, I wrote about it several times this year, including this piece on how its most expensive movies have gone from auteurist dream projects like The Irishman to nondescript sludge like The Gray Man, and what that means for the future of streaming filmmaking (tl;dr, nothing good).
Barbarian and the Return of Un-Elevated Horror The rule for horror movies is that they open big and die fast, so when the news broke that Barbarian was actually adding 500 more screens in its third week of release, I took off work a little early to check it out. What I found was a smart, structurally inventive thriller that takes itself just seriously enough, and contains perhaps the funniest moment in any movie of the last year.
Why You Won’t See Harvey Weinstein in She Said The filmed version of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book was a box office dud, but I thought it was a solid journalistic procedural with some very smart choices, among them the decision the way it depicts Harvey Weinstein without ever making him a character. I got to work in Kitty Green’s The Assistant, one of my favorite movies of the last several years, too, and finally confirm that the scene where Julia Garner’s character report’s her Weinstein-like boss’s behavior to Matthew MacFadyen’s hostile HR manager is so true-to-life it’s actually used in sexual harassment trainings. (Because I’m a marketing genius, I also wrote about a movie no one saw to launch this site.)
For All Mankind Is the Show Gets How Stupid Death Can Be I haven’t thought about my teenage obsession with space exploration in a long time, but this alternate-history series brought it all rushing back, with its story of a world where losing the race to the moon prompts the U.S. to keep pushing forward, all the way to Mars (and, given that it’s been renewed for a fourth season, perhaps even beyond). I’m particularly fond of the way it illustrates the dangers of outer space by having characters die in stupid and arbitrary ways, although I’m glad I wrote this before the third season finale, which was catastrophic in more than one sense.
Having just written about The Problem With Top 10 Lists, I’m a little chagrinned that this list turned out to have 10 things on it, but I promise I didn’t do it on purpose. Here’s to better things in 2023. See you next time.