Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is one of the greatest biopics ever made, but it’s also one of the most powerful statements to a fledgling film industry in recent memory. For one, it proves that theatrical releases are still king as it’s about to gross a billion dollars worldwide. More importantly, it’s an R-rated biopic with minimal CGI, centering on a serious subject matter that still impacts the world to this day. It was aligned with an aesthetically opposite film with similar intentions, with the hopes that more films like this are made possible in a landscape so saturated with franchises and IP. Now Nolan has become hope, the destroyer of all doom.
The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen
This memoir from Jonathan Rosen hits hard at the empty core of America’s treatment of mental health. The Best Minds follows Rosen’s best friend Michael Landor, who was struck by schizophrenia during a highly demanding job before his recovery opened up a path into finishing Yale Law School, much to the celebration of The New York Times. Only for that dream to be dashed by Michael murdering his tirelessly supporting girlfriend. Rosen crafts a fairly poignant and nuanced portrait of a troubled man, who sorely needs the medical attention that no one will understand nor provide.
James Blake’s Playing Robots into Heaven
A mixture of James Blake’s post-dubstep roots and the balladeering we know him now, All Robots Play in Heaven is a playful merger of the two eras resulting in James Blake’s most original music in such a long time. His singles Loading and Big Hammer is arguably songs that fit these two times separately, but it is tracks like Fire The Editor and Tell Me showing Blake promising a new path and it’s for the better.
Godzilla Minus One
Blockbuster budgets have become as incredibly bloated as ever, and as it comes from the edge of writers’ and creator’s strikes, there’s no excuse if that reaches more than $100 million and the overall outcome does not look good. This is why it’s refreshing that Godzilla Minus One is less than fifteen million dollars and has been smashing the box office in recent weeks. More importantly, the film shows what a great Godzilla movie can look back. The human characters are people you care about and Godzilla is finally back to his cinematic roots as a monster, designed in response to the trauma of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Asteroid City
Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is essentially the Barbenheimer movie you realize you would need. Not only does it bring his most ambitious scope, in terms of visuals and narrative, but the characters are more charming and melancholy and deeper as ever. When it comes to art, the truth, according to Asteroid City, can be manipulated and malleable. It’s an incredibly catharticl message about what people can do with the creative process.
John Wick: Chapter Four
This film is overlong, the world-building needs to be more organized. Yet I could forgive that since the action sequences are so greatly curated and well-directed you can’t find them elsewhere in any other action film this year. One of which is a long crane shot of Wick taking out baddies with a blaring shotgun that I felt was a homage to Hotline Miami. This should be the graceful send-off that John Wick deserves, but since there’s more demand for the franchise to continue, I believe it won’t be. Still, it proves how consistent and top-notch the gun fu
The First Slam Dunk
The First Slam Dunk is the origin story of Ryota Miyaki, the point guard of Shohoku High School’s basketball team. I rarely cheered on during a movie, but The First Slam Dunk, based on the popular manga from Takehuiko Inoue, makes me scream whenever the team finally catches up. Tightly based on one game and silky in its animation, The First Slam Dunk takes the time to explore each player’s demons; this is a great entry point to an otherwise popular franchise.
Beef
My piece in The Spectator is about how Asian Americans finally have its misanthropic moment. Beef is cathartic in a way that you don’t expect. Here’s what I wrote:
Holding its own in Netflix’s top ten, Beef rises to the occasion by not being the typical work of Asian-American entertainment. Watching the show reminded me of the characters in Wesley Yang’s essay collection The Soul of Yellow Folk. Yang presents Asians as people who do not easily fit into the ideological boxes America sets up or the cultural boxes their own families set up. Lee Sung-jin is hoping to explore Danny and Amy further. Whether or not he gets the chance, in Beef he has made something that’s in a class of its own.
Pluto
Naoki Urasawa’s riff on Astro Boy’s greatest arc is too perfect. It’s an upgrade from the quiet if admittedly stodgy animation of his excellent Monster, but I feel that it doesn’t deviate from the manga, which is already so good. Nevertheless, Pluto is powerful and thematically fascinating; a meditation of war and AI that drives many of the conflicts in this series. Between this and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, it shows that, while we are still stuck in a rut with many adaptations, they can be quite worth it when artists take more than an effort to make it work.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off
More than a riff on the characters, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off creates many possibilities for their emotional growth. Ramona Flowers finding closure with each of her evil ex-boyfriends, while they move forward from their mission of defeating Scott? Is Wallace Wells hooking up with one of the exes? Is Knives Chau a better bass player than Scott? Yes, yes, yes… and yes. If you’ve never experienced Scott Pilgrim before, this anime is a great entry point.
The series finale of Succession
The final season of Succession has its ups and downs. Sometimes it reaches monumental heights of the Roys failing upwards, but it also has its lows when dealing with events with the least possible stakes. That would be my assessment, except for its series finale, which wraps things up with a tight bow. One of the Roy members thoroughly deserved it.
I wrote more about the high-information appeal of the show here.
The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki’s semi-autobiographical return to film is about as restrained and fascinating as his previous effort. I’ll have more on that later in this newsletter or elsewhere.
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
From the creator of Alice in Borderland comes Bucket List of the Dead, a delightful middle finger to corporate conformity and embracing newfound freedom during a time when everyone’s a zombie or they die. Zombie comedies satirize society’s inability to shake out of the shackles of the consumerist status quo. But what’s different about Zom 100, and its hero Akira Kendo’s embracing his happiness is nothing if not infectious and perhaps its crowning glory.
Vinland Saga: Season 2
Following up your first season by having your main character do farmwork for two years might be an act of genius from Makoto Yukimura. It allows patience and seeing our hero Thorfinn’s graceful journey into pacificism pays off monumentally. What is enriching about Season 2 of Vinland Saga is the character’s exploration of masculinity, much of it comes from the pains of escaping war and violence, without having to shoehorn it in a pompous manner. No wonder so many viewers felt so inspired after hearing “I have no enemies” for the first time.
Attack on Titan’s Final (for real this time!) Series Finale
After three parts of the Final Season, one of the biggest anime series have come to an end. I’ve written about the popularity and meaning of Attack on Titan, but I believe the anime series did a decent job in wrapping up Eren Jeager’s gradual trajectory into evil and how he attempts to reconcile this with his friendship to the Scout Regiment. Not everything matches, and it’s unsurprising considering the reception of the original manga. But if not the ending, it’s action sequences are fluid and are about as exciting as ever. And I hope the ending means that Attack on Titan’s legacy is cemented into the medium.