It’s a 2020 Top 20
I’m trying to write more this year. This ended up turning into something of a series of personal essays about life in the ‘demic, which I figure partially justifies a 2020 list coming out in March of 2021. The films are ranked, but it’s all pretty arbitrary and length of section has nothing to do with my comparative enjoyment; Plenty of movies I love leave me speechless. I generally try to stay away from summary, but there are spoilers scattered about. There are many tangents. You can skip around if you want (this is usually what I do with end-of-year lists) but I do think it all fits together nicely.
20. The Invisible Man
The month was March, and something sinister hung in the air. Amherst had just announced students weren’t coming back from spring break, Harvard was soon to follow. There was no news yet from Wesleyan, but frantic rumors had began circulating group chats. Desperate to escape the growing tide of worry on campus, I walked to town to see a movie by myself. Each passerby eyed me with suspicion, no doubt fearing the international petrie dish I was soon to be ejected from. At school, we were searching each other for answers, bracing for the severance of a community we thought was protected by tradition and ResLife contracts. To everyone else, I was a threat, a possible vector who could spread disease to them, and through them their friends and family. And they could do the same to me.
As my life was upended by an unseen force pulling at the strings of every institution I thought invincible, I got to watch a delicious Elisabeth Moss performance of the same. Director Leigh Whannell and his invisible monster create slow cracks in an otherwise sensible world, altering reality by tweaking the tiny elements that make our world make sense. The flames on a stove are turned higher in an empty room, the seat of a chair depresses without anyone to sit in it, and then a steak knife drifts up to a family member’s throat as we are powerless to stop it. Horror creeps in then smashes through. As I sat down in my lovably middling Metro Movies theater seat for what would be the last time, The Invisible Man offered that special comfort that only horror movies can: Recognition of the cosmic terror at the border of our everyday lives.
19. Banana Split
After premiering at the LA Film Festival in 2018, Banana Split wandered in distribution purgatory until it was dropped onto Netflix in March of 2020 which for some reason was not front page news at that time. I turned it on expecting mind numbing Netflix rom-content and was whisked away to a delightful, fully realized vision of a world where the greatest danger is becoming best friends with your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. Written by co-lead Hannah Marks, the characters are funny, authentic teenagers tied up in a tight, contained plot that feels refreshingly quaint and effortlessly touching. There is real thought and care put into the cinematography, and the glow and glimmer of Los Angeles on 35mm puts to shame the digital mush of the usual straight-to-streamer fare. Why not make a movie hilarious, heartfelt, and gorgeous? If streaming is the future of movies like these, the giants could learn a lot by emulating a fraction of the love put into Banana Split.
18. Mank
It’s hard for me to a remember a movie guilty of so many of my pet peeves that I loved this much anyway. If I see another CGI zoo animal I am going to flip, and there is no amount of false grain and reel changing cigarette burns that can hide Fincher’s fastidiously digital filmmaking. But I got over it. David Fincher would never sacrifice his exacting process to the celluloid gods, but Mank is otherwise a fascinating departure from the rest of his filmography. The evils dwelling in Mank’s Hollywood are as stomach turning as any Fincher subject, but there is an unusual nostalgia for the fast-talking screenwriters, the towering sets, the movie palaces. Remember when the monsters built castles and presided over studio empires instead of inventing social media platforms? Directed from a screenplay written by Fincher’s late father, Jack, I can feel both men pouring over the past like they’re Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac; Jack uncovering the intertwined fates of Herman J. Mankiewicz and William Randolph Hearst, and David dusting off his father’s great unproduced screenplay. Mank feels like a championing of two great screenwriters, a stray reverence that escapes Fincher’s careful control.
17. Minari
Lee Isaac Chung makes authenticity look easy. Alan Kim is so adorable, it’s easy to overlook the perfect weirdness he brings to his character. David doesn’t feel like a grown-up’s version of a kid, he feels like a kid. As the author avatar in a story that draws heavily from Chung’s childhood, David’s perspective could be the primary anchor of Minari, but instead the film captures the humanity of everyone, from Youn Yuh-jung’s Grandma to Will Patton’s enigmatic Pentecostal farmhand. The images in this film are sensory, richly thematic, and so distinct it feels like I’m remembering them myself. As I watch the black smoke pour from the chimney of the hatchery, the struggle of Steven Yeun’s Jacob to provide for his family feels inextricably linked to the incinerated remains of the male chicks he has doomed to the furnace. I can feel the Yi family’s history in every scene, and as Han Ye-ri’s Monica fights to keep them together in the face of her husband’s ambition, I can still see the love that brought them around the world and across the country. Chung finds the glory in failure and the grace in falling apart, and makes it all feel so familiar.
16. Family Romance LLC
Werner Herzog and a barebones team of collaborators follow actor and entrepreneur Yuichi Ishii, playing a fictionalized version of himself in the business of selling human connection. In the film and real life, Yuichi’s company contracts actors to play clients’ friends, family members, and, in one case, the sweepstakes representative who told her she’d won a million dollars. Family Romance, LLC could be a stimulating piece of docu-content capitalizing on cultural difference, but Herzog turns Yuichi’s story into an exploration of what it means to be a person in the miasma of late capitalism. Herzog drifts from scene to scene like an apparition, shooting on a tiny video camera that allows him to blend into the crowd and access what would otherwise be off limits (a scene on the platform of the Bullet Train led to Herzog and Yuichi fleeing from police).
Yuichi travels to a hotel whose staff is comprised entirely of robots, down to the fish, and to a telephone on a cliff face meant for communing with the victims of the 2011 tsunami. Though Herzog takes poetic license, both of these places are real. Conflict emerges in the relationship between Yuichi and one of his clients, a woman who has hired him to play her daughter’s missing father. This reveals the true crisis afflicting Yuichi — his creation of humanity is severing him from the human race. Whether this is true for the real Yuichi, Herzog clearly finds camaraderie in the character they create together.
15. Host
What makes The Blair Witch Project so compelling to me is that it feels disconnected from the long history of horror. Instead of dipping from the well of Alfred Hitchcock, Val Lewton, or John Carpenter, the scares feel like a natural extension of the medium. Whether it be America’s Funniest Home Videos or viral YouTube content, the entertainment in “found footage” comes from having no fucking clue what these non-professionals are going to do next. Host does for quarantined millennials what Blair Witch did for Gen X film students, and while the end of the film turns into a jump fest straight out of V/H/S, the movie’s creepiest moments feel less indebted to the stream of Blair Witch follow-ups than they do to the unreality of conducting most social interaction through a webcam. This year saw a stunning transformation in which most business meetings, college classes, public events, and hangouts were hosted through a service no one had heard of in 2019, whose security flaws allow it to be penetrated by literal invisible entities who exist to create havoc.
Zoom bombers are only the most literal horror of the strange technological moment we’re living in, and director Rob Savage capitalizes on everything from the strange digital artifacts that can crop up like poltergeists, to the virtual backgrounds which crackle around whatever space the computer has determined to be non-human. Like Blair Witch before it, Host is grounded by a cast of actors who deliver terrific performances without looking like movie stars. By capping the film at 56 minutes, even the duration helps to sell the terrifying near-reality. I may know that what I’m watching is being streamed off of Shudder, but my eyes are telling me I’m in a Zoom call with the monster.
14. Bacurau
I once spent like a half hour reciting a Mulholland Drive internet explanation to a bunch of friends after a screening , and it has become one of those cringe-y memories that my brain always returns to in times of self-doubt. While Bacurau isn’t a headscratcher, I do think it’s best experienced with as little context as possible. So, uh, watch it!
13. Kajillionaire
In Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, she describes what she calls an American “shadow country” for those “cut loose…slipped beneath the surface of the United States”. Kajillionaire falls in a great tradition of shadow country love stories, from American Honey all the way back to They Live By Night and Street Angel. It is a cosmic fairytale filled with off-kilter weirdness that barely conceals a heart as pink and bubbly as the soap suds oozing from the walls. Evan Rachel Wood as Old Dolio is strange and compelling. Gina Rodriguez plays the film’s most normal person, Melanie, utilizing the superpower she demonstrated so consistently as a leading lady in Jane the Virgin. Melanie is quintessentially good-hearted without ever coming off as holier than thou, while also being convincingly “more bisexual than Jane”. Like Melanie, we are swept up by the performances of Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger as Theresa and Robert, whose family unit with Old Dolio is charming and fun to watch, even as its toxicity becomes increasingly evident. Quirky charm can only hide exploitation for so long, but like all great Hollywood romances, the only escape is love.
12. Shirley
The real Shirley Jackson may have nothing to do with the Elisabeth Moss character, but it still feels like Josephine Decker has pulled something out of time in Shirley. The alluring and exploitative relationship between a younger muse and a more established artist is the through line of both Shirley and Decker’s name-making Madeline’s Madeline, but the two films run in opposite directions. Madeline moves forward with fervor, carrying the viewer through strange theater exercises that put us in the eyes of a turtle, then a cat, and then back to the streets of New York City. While Shirley stews over writer’s block, the actors in Madeleine’s Madeline are trying to create a theater piece unlike anything the world has ever seen. This revolutionary energy carries through to the very end, when the muse topples the artist in a flash mob theatrical experience, rallying her fellow cast members and becoming Madeline’s Madeline.
Shirley, while more conventional in many ways, lives in a slow moving dread not dissimilar to the tune of a Shirley Jackson short story. Odessa Young’s Rose is seduced by the verdant world of the Jackson’s Bennington home, charmed by the parties and by her hostess’ skill as a writer. Rather than accelerate, the film moves like slow rot as Shirley pulls Rose in tighter and tighter, ending with the successful completion of Shirley’s manuscript and the disconsolate departure of Rose and her husband. For a filmmaker who has established herself as one of the medium’s most original and forward-looking creators, Josephine Decker is able to steep Shirley in the past. Whether or not any of it actually happened, the story of the secret intimacies between a great writer and her unwilling muse feels stolen from history.
11. Nasir
As quiet as a whisper with all of the force of a roar, Arun Karthick’s Nasir is a portrait of a person, a place, and a world falling apart. The film follows its title character through an ordinary day, opening up shop at the market, delivering orders to disaffected college students, and thinking of his wife. Karthick patiently moves the viewer through Nasir’s world, allowing us to delight in his small pleasures and dread the growing sense of danger as he traverses the city on his vespa, the threat of anti-Muslim violence lurking at the edge of the frame. If the aim of nationalism is to dehumanize the enemy, Nasir counters it by presenting the life of one unexceptional man, as beautiful as it is fragile. If Bacurau is an anti-fascist folk song, Nasir is an ode.
10. Nomadland
2020 was the year when I learned that drive-ins, while definitively not an ample replacement for movie theaters, are their own wonderful social experiment of a filmgoing experience. Once you pick your seat at a theater, your decision making is essentially done. The drive-in forces you to think about what you value in your viewing experience, from the technical to the ethical. You can treat yourself to your car stereo if you don’t mind overlooking whatever dirt has made itself a permanent fixture on your windshield. You can get a better image and some lovely night air if you pop the hatch or bring a lawn chair, at the risk of radio speakers being forced to compete with crickets, busy highways, and other sounds of the night. If my friends and I are sitting outside, can we talk to each other? What if we’re in the car with the windows down? How long am I allowed to run the engine to warm up? How much carbon monoxide is too much carbon monoxide? How many windows (there’s never just one) do I have to knock on before these motherfuckers learn to turn their headlights off?
I’d like to say Nomadland is a movie made for the drive-in, but no movie is really made for a drive-in. It was a great privilege to see this movie on a big screen at all, especially one nestled away in the beautiful Upstate NY wilderness, but like all great films it is designed to be seen and heard under the finest technical circumstances, which isn’t really possible in a big field with a car radio.
Still, at the drive-in, you are forced to think about the film within the context of yourself and the people watching it with you. In Nomadland, Chloe Zhao depicts people who are hurting but making the best of it, pushed to the margins by an uncaring America but still living lives filled with love and joy and satisfaction. I have spoken to more people about loss in the last 12 months than I have in the previous 22 years of my life. No one would equate losing movie theaters to the millions of jobs, homes, and lives that have been stolen by this pandemic, but watching Nomadland at the drive-in felt affirmative of all the ways we’ve made do in a year that has battered and isolated us. Movie theaters are just one part of the social firmament that has kept people from despair in the worst of times, and that firmament has largely been shredded by a virus that makes congregation dangerous. Standing in the cold to get popcorn, I could feel my mind drifting to the warm seats of the cinema, of sitting in a row with strangers and friends at school or the local arthouse or the multiplex and escaping our troubles together. Leaving the concessions stand, my fellow audience members and I returned to our seats, turned our radios up, and watched Nomadland together. As the film ended, Frances McDormand’s Fern stuck in my mind, a woman alone but united with her fellow travelers by the open sky. We honked our appreciation and went our separate ways, each of us separated by the plastic shells of our cars but all a little closer under the stars.
9. Palm Springs
Man, this is so much fun.
8. No Ordinary Man
I love auditions. Watching actors spin words on a page into a walking, talking version of themselves is a fascinating process that is usually limited to the rare YouTube archive or special feature. No Ordinary Man features a series of auditions for a biopic of Billy Tipton, a mid-20th century jazz trumpeter identified as female at birth who lived his adult life as a man, avoiding detection from his friends, his adopted children, and his wife. Billy’s birth sex was revealed with his death in 1989, exploding into a misgendering media frenzy that subjected him to scandal-driven biographies and his family to numerous talkshow interrogations to the tune of “How could you have missed that your husband/father was a woman?”
How do you classify a trans icon who could never claim that mantel, whose public identity was imposed upon him by an act of sensationalist violence? No Ordinary Man directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt don’t shy away from these questions, interviewing numerous trans academics and historians tackling questions of representation that arise from trying to classify a figure whose survival depended on his lack of classification. Billy Tipton has been claimed by trans men, butch lesbians, and even cis women whose jazz careers were stymied by the glass ceiling Billy was able to pass through. While numerous trans interviewees cast doubt on the idea that Billy’s entire life could have been constructed solely to enter the boy’s club of jazz greats, Chin-Yee and Joynt allow Billy Tipton to retain his ambiguity, and don’t vilify anyone attempting to claim him for their own.
Instead of defining Billy Tipton as one gender, No Ordinary Man explores how public identities shape one another. Chin-Yee and Joynt interview queer and trans musicians whose lives were opened up by Tipton’s existence, as well as the actors portraying him in the audition segments of the film, whose experiences in transitioning shape their performances. The emotional climax of the film comes in an interview with one of Billy’s sons, in which his father is presented not as a freak or as a liar but as a towering inspiration to millions of people. The 80s and 90s tried to get to the bottom of Billy Tipton by classifying him as a woman in disguise. Chin-Yee and Joynt refuse to classify Billy as anything other than who he was — No Ordinary Man.
7. Sound of Metal
A relentlessly empathetic movie that deftly avoids easy narratives. Even as Darius Marder uses all the tools of sound design and cinematography to ground us in the subjectivity of Riz Ahmed’s Ruben, the narrative is generous to everyone he comes into conflict with. When Ruben asks Olivia Cooke’s Lou to stay by his side as the future he imagined falls apart, we want so badly for her to say yes, even as we can see on her face that doing so would destroy her. When Ruben abandons the shelter to buy a cochlear implant, we wish he wouldn’t, but know he would do anything to hear Lou sing again. When Paul Reci’s Joe, refuses to let Ruben return, we wish he would relent, but understand that doing so would invalidate the very tenet that his community represents — Deafness is not a disability. Ruben’s loss of hearing is as terrifying as any of the horror movies on this list, but Sound of Metal ultimately portrays deafness as neither a state of pity or a struggle to overcome. It is just another way to live.
6. Bad Education
Like many, I have spent much of my pandemic watching the lives of Tony Soprano and Don Draper. The twin antihero sex symbols of prestige TV, there is a key difference between the two of them that has continually led me away from the cold of my mid-century capitalist department head and into the warm embrace of my murderous New Jersey godfather. Both men do horrible things. But when Tony kills someone or cheats on his wife or allows his crippling rage to further isolate himself from those who love him, I always wish he wouldn’t. The Sopranos shows me what glimmers of humanity exist in him, and I always hope that side wins out. Even what I want some good old fashioned mafia violence, the show usually complicates it to the point where it just isn’t fun anymore. In season 1, Tony and Junior’s showdown is stopped in its tracks by FBI arrests. The man I so wanted Tony to destroy becomes another character I grow to root for despite his consistently evil behavior. When truly irredeemable characters do face their downfall, it is often as depressing and unsatisfying as possible. The mob is powerful, but never sexy and usually disgusting. You see a lot of people taking a shit in The Sopranos.
No one takes a shit in Mad Men. (I haven’t seen the whole show so I could be wrong about this.) When Don is having his upteenth affair with a beautiful woman, the idea that this is self destructive behavior is muted by the feeling that, deep down, the writers think this guy is dope as hell. The early 60s were messed up, but they looked great, and fighting the aesthetic impulse is difficult in a visual medium. A part of me wants Don to sort out his shit, but another part of me cheers when the pretty people kiss.
The corrupt public school officials of Bad Education are very different from the young women of privilege in director Cory Finley’s debut, Thoroughbreds, but in both films I am rooting for their humanity to win out against their darker tendencies. Hugh Jackman brings the perfect balance of charisma and weakness to Frank Tissone. This is a guy who starts on top of the world, but when Ray Romano’s school board president tells him that people laugh at him, you believe it. Bad Education paints a rich 35mm portrait of the fluorescent world of public school politics, and while I can’t support Tissone and his assistant superintendent, Allison Janney’s Pam Gluckin, in their attempts to embezzle millions of tax dollars, I am desperate for them to sort their shit out, and I hope that nothing bad happen to them. It takes Geraldine Viswanathan’s student reporter Rachel Bhargava to act as the film’s moral core, doggedly bringing down an institution that doesn’t take her seriously and bringing the star power to go toe-to-toe with Janney and Jackman.
Still, I can’t help but feel for Tissone. When he dances with Rafael Casal’s sweet, clueless Kyle in a Vegas night club, I know the cops are on his tail, I know he deserves to go to jail, and yet…Even as Tissone has become a victim of his own narcissism, I want this human moment to last forever.
5. Vast of Night
On a shoestring budget raised by shooting NBA promos, director Andrew Patterson and his team were able to transport me across space and time. Read one way, the faux-Twilight Zone opening of The Vast of Night contextualizes the film as a lost videotape unearthed in a closet, featuring unknown actors and a director forgotten by history. (Patterson leaves out his credit.) Alternatively, the jumpy television transmission signifies that we are an alien viewer, watching omnisciently from above as the action of our characters is transmitted to the mothership. This sort of gimmick could come off as needlessly stylish, but instead prepares me for a film that feels both like a piece of history and an artifact of the sublime.
Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick give whip smart performances, demonstrating lived-in dedication by operating telephone switchboards and radio apparatuses in long unbroken takes while driving the mystery plot with wide eyed wonder and frantic determination. I love a good small town movie, but The Vast of Night captures a feeling of being in a nowhere place, isolated from civilization by empty highway and a sea of stars above you. I’ve felt it driving home late at night, when it seems like everyone is asleep and the world of the waking could fall — at any second — under the veil of dreams.
4. Lover’s Rock
The lingering impact of the pandemic I am most worried about is the way in which it has reprogrammed my brain. I long for the day that I can walk freely in the bookstore without constantly calculating a six feet radius, recalculating my route into increasingly circuitous paths to avoid as much contact with people as possible. I hate the roar of thought loops every time I see a friend, of imagining how I would live with myself if I brought death to their doorstep. And I hate the knee jerk reaction to seeing maskless crowds in movies, calculating the superspreader possibilities of the parade in Ferris Bueller or the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Lover’s Rock is immersion therapy. The realm McQueen creates within the four walls of the party is as rich as Middle Earth or Brigadoon, filled with its own little worlds where lovers are brought together for good and for ill, where secret moments can be seen by no one but signify everything. Lover’s Rock is a love song not just for its two beautiful leads, but for the magic that happens when people gather in groups, when the perfect people hear the perfect song and everything else goes away.
3. Tenet
Imagine yourself in Paris, in 1895, a few days after Christmas. You pull off your coat as you escape the cold into the Grand Cafe, where you see two brothers demonstrating a new invention called the Cinematograph. The room goes dark, and you hear a whirring sound as a machine is cranked and light is projected onto the screen, taking the shape of streets and factories and people in motion given life by a strange and mysterious illusion unlike anything you have ever seen. Cut forward 126ish years. You are reading this on your phone or something, probably in between doing other things. A century of technological and artistic feats have made the miracle of the moving image ubiquitous, and in doing so made it feel a lot less like a miracle.
The real existential threat cinema faces is not the pandemic, but the sober truth that watching images move isn’t as special as it used to be. Movie theaters help to elevate film by making it big and loud and people might get mad if you look at your phone, but if you show up early enough to most multiplexes, you can still find an M&M commercial or two. It is now the burden of the filmmaker to rekindle in the viewer that initial magic that images on a screen first represented.
While a brick wall reassembling itself may not have quite the same effect on audiences in 2020 as it did in 1895, Nolan was able to, for me, recapture that wonder of the projectionist running the film backwards, creating a miracle to best the finest magicians and prophets; Turning back time. This is all to say that I got to watch a building explode, reconstitute, and explode again and it was fucking awesome. This is boyishness made opulent. Doctor Who meets James Bond. It is the kind of visceral experience that I probably would have loved as a kid, rejected as a teenager, and then welcomed back once I learned to appreciate the dance of a cross-temporal fist fight.
With so many action auteurs heading to streaming, this kind of distinctive, insane, weirdly personal filmmaking is exactly what I want out of cinemas. I want more planes crashed into freeports. I want more original, movie star performances from John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki completely divorced from pre-existing IP. I want more people to say “temporal pincer movement” without a hint of self-awareness. I want something that I can engage with by piecing it together over multiple viewings, or by sitting back and enjoying the lights.
2. Da Five Bloods
Spike Lee’s films glow with a reverence for history — Black history, American history, film history, and the intersections of all three — while brimming with an urgency for all that has yet to be achieved. I can’t think of another filmmaker whose creative impulses are so simultaneously popular and political. Coupling great performances with funny, lovable characters, Da Five Bloods builds to moments of high emotion in classic Hollywood fashion, while forcing the audience to contend with the real violence happening all around them, in the past and present. Lee juggles comedy, tragedy, romance, suspense, and action while always choosing to illuminate rather than occlude. Da Five Bloods has the weight and fire of a neutron star, an epic about guilt, greed, and reckoning with the past when those qualities couldn’t be more clearly American.
1. First Cow
Early in the pandemic, I went walking with my dad down a nature trail and told him my vision of the next few years. After a period of sustained growth, we were on the top of a roller coaster bell curve and the only way forward was down, down, down, nothing but the ground left for you to fall to. Since elementary school, we’ve been inculcated with the sobering fact that carbon emissions produced by human beings are warming the planet to an untenable degree, that the natural world will strike back with rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns, and that the geopolitical ramifications of entire countries sinking into the water will throw the world into violent chaos. COVID-19 feels like the first cut of a pendulum that has been hanging inches from our necks from the day we learned about recycling.
In my last couple days at Wesleyan, I spoke to a friend I’d known since orientation. They were the first one to ask semi-seriously what many of has been nervously joking about; Is this it? I told them no, I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that so many moments of the past week had felt like scenes out of a movie. Sitting on a couch in Usdan, laughing off op-eds in The Washington Post begging schools not to reopen; cut to one month later, that couch, empty, sitting completely alone; cut to 50 years later, that couch, covered in vines, uncovered by survivors surveying what was once known as south-central Connecticut. Huddled around a laptop screen with friends, watching the president of the university express his condolences at the unforeseen circumstances; cut to graduation, all of us in our pajamas spread out across the world; cut to after that, the firebombs claiming those of us who had not already succumbed to plague.
The year to follow would be far more Kelly Reichert than Roland Emmerich. As the world shook and millions died, I stayed home. I rode my bike and delivered packages for UPS, exploring the towns that had served as a backdrop for my life up until that point. I saw my friends when it felt safe.
It has been a lonely year. I don’t know if all of my nightmares will come to pass or not. It has brought me hope to transport myself backwards 50 years, how convinced I would’ve been that Nuclear War was imminent and that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would be ash by the year 2021. It has brought me hope to watch old movies, where death is a far more intimate partner to most Americans that it is today, and where they still kiss and dance and sing “Auld Lang Syne.”
First Cow will always carry with it that same hope for me. It is ultimately a very sad movie. The ravages of colonialism create promise for a new world where history hasn’t yet reached, but that too is crushed by the cold grip of capital. It is also a movie that opens with the following: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” In a life that will inevitably be filled with turmoil and end in death, people can create so much beauty together. I miss my friends. And I miss the movies.
