The disaster continues. After making a mindless theme park out of liberal democracy, our daring trio of materialists sets their eyes on slavery, race relations, and American fascism. Did I say “set their eyes”? My mistake — I meant “completely ignore while protecting their Civil War ancestors’ honor and looting Native American treasure”.

A pox on everyone who was in this movie, Helen Miren inclusive.

In a museum exhibit dedicated to the fall of liberal democracy, National Treasure deserves to be played at the entrance, on loop; because the treasure in question isn’t freedom, nor equality, and no it’s not brotherhood either. It’s actual treasure, stolen from civilizations past, to be turned by our daring protagonists at the end of the movie into mansions and fast cars. That The Aristocats have a trigger warning on Disney+ and this consumerist anti-civilization piece of dreck doesn’t tells you all you need to know about the situational awareness of modern institutions.

Directed by Jon Turteltaub, 2004.

There are so many parallels between this movie and Wolfwalkers, which is just as well since they are the two main contenders for the 2021 Academy Awards. Both have masterfully innovative animation, but where Wolfwalkers looked back at the old texts and pre-renaissance perspective for inspiration and side-stepped into something new, Soul pushes La Linea and its own work to 11 with Terry, the best non-villain villain since the wind in Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Note also Trent Reznor’s notes bleeping and blooping away in the background. The soundtrack is another thing on par with Wolfwalkers. As you may have seen in the trailers and guessed from the title, most of the music in Soul is jazz, melded with ethereal electro-something.¹

Both fumble the narrative: Wolfwalkers’ story because it was predictable, Soul’s because incoherence. The presumed big conflict — man v. death — is deemphasized in favor of many small ones: art v. education, passion v. commitment, meaning v. nihilism, hippies v. bureaucrats, moments of inspiration v. the daily grind. It is just too much philosophizing, and this is coming from someone who has, from the age of six, been called a philosopher by exasperated adults.²

Not that the story is bad, it is just not as focused as its closest Pixar ancestor — Inside Out — another villain-less meditation on the internal lives of humans.³ Even so, it takes the top half of the Pixar pantheon, at least a few notches above Docter’s first movie, Up.⁴ Wish other studios put out things that were half as good this year.

Take Groundhog Day, punch up the message to make it more on the nose, add a few scenes of awkward sex, finish with an after-credits sequence that chooses charm over consistency. It’s still a good movie, now oh so very millennial.

I didn’t hate it.

Directed by Max Barbakow, 2020.

Remember that climactic scene in Shaun of the dead where they each take a pool stick and beat the zombie pub owner to his second death to the beat of Queens “Don’t stop me now”? You know, this one?¹ Well, Baby Driver is an entire movie made out of that scene — even Queen makes an appearance — only it’s guns instead of sticks and gangsters instead of zombies. Also, Atlanta, Georgia instead of London, England with a baby-faced youth instead of Simon Pegg, so only a third as charming though it’s an Edgar Wright film so still very charming indeed.

Trigger warning: the movie contains Kevin Spacey who first behaves like the rotten bastard we know he is but then goes and (spoiler alert) redeems himself. The movie does kill him off in a rather gruesome manner, if that’s any consolation. Did the writer/director know something we at the time didn’t?

Written and directed by Edgar Wright, 2017.

The camerawork alone makes it a timeless classic. It doesn’t hurt that the deliberate, slow pace is perfect for my increasingly middle-aged mind. Yes it runs for 3 hours, but I’ll take three hours of this

over two and a half hours of that well-known super hero franchise any time.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1975.

Kelsey Grammer once said that Fraiser — the show, not the character — was so good because the writers and cast never went for the easy laughs, the jokes that came to mind right away. That’s what made it the best sitcom of the 1990s and still eminently watchable¹.

TGBBS goes for the easy jokes all the time but that’s OK because we watch it for the emotions it elicits in its competitors, judges, and us viewers, not for the triple-A-rated comedy. And here it does not go for the easy ones, the emotions that will arise any time competing humans are being judged: ridicule, shame, anger, rivalry, envy… You know, the ol’ staples of American reality TV. There is lots of sadness and frustration when a baker overproofs their sourdough, sure, but there is also friendship, compassion, empathy, and a kind of gentleness even when a steely-eyed judge ribs your rhubarb pie’s soggy bottom.

I am sure this wasn’t easy, particularly in a season in which early on one baker makes another drop their finished goods on the floor right before judging (anger hidden), a good baker leaves after a week of horrible performances in what was supposed to be their specialty (ridicule averted), and an oversized bakerette who tends to spill everything everywhere whilst making visually mediocre — though no doubt tasty — goods serves up a cake-shaped splodge in one of the last showstoppers (no shaming of any kind and there were plenty of kinds to think of in those moments). It was a trying year and the season could not have been easy to make. Yet, I can happily report that the baking tent and the hyper-green lawn it sits on continue being cynicism-free zones, making better people of its participants and viewers alike.

A predictable story, beautifully animated. It has the most straightforward plot of the Celtic triology¹ but also the most complex imagery and a soundtrack that equals the two prior films, making it the perfect Oscar contender. And even the simple A to B to C storyline allows for many different interpretations. Is it about man versus nature, town versus country, old versus young, masculine versus feminine, blue eyes versus green? Probably all of the above.

Side note: Wolfwalkers came out on AppleTV+, pretty much sealing its status as the new HBO. Still, it would be nice to see the animation in a theater next year, if any are left.

At a hundred pages, a fifth of which is the preface, this is a slender book that compares the 1950s state of the art computer and neuroscience, but more importantly gives the answer to the burning question in oncology: how much are a few months of overall survival benefit worth? Well, if you are John von Neumann and you have boney metastasis from a cancer of unknown origin eating away first your energy and then your mental capacities while your are writing a series of lectures on how similar and different brains are from “modern-day”¹ computers, and you are way ahead of your time in thinking about both, well, the answer to that question is quite a lot. It is in fact an unthinkable loss that he died before he could even finish his writing, let alone hold the lectures.

It was also somewhat eerie to read about the comparison between humans and machines shortly after Apple announced its quite literally game-changing M1 processor. There is fierce competition among the big tech companies to build the Skynet of our universe, and as of last week Apple is winning.

Netflix has a knack for producing empty calories, and Enola Holmes is not an exception. Pretty visuals, female empowerment, and decent to above-average acting can’t hide the blandness of its storyline nor the absence of any reasoning, deductive or otherwise.

It is, by the way, hard to think of Enola’s character as particularly empowered when the next three women in screen time order are her mother the polymath rebel, her friend the black martial arts teacher, and an aristocratic evil mastermind. Not to mention the brief appearance of a coitery of female anarchist geniuses. In Victorian London!¹ A bit too on the nose, maybe? To paraphrase the Incredibles, when everyone’s special, no one is.