What an exciting time to have been a Classics minor way back when: I finally saw The Odyssey! I feel like we are all possibly discoursed-out about this but I will say I thoroughly enjoyed Emily Wilson’s LRB review (and her Odyssey translation!) and while other authors may claim she’s just a curmudgeon I agreed with much of her assessment. (10/10 for the headline alone.)
This paragraph, while scathing, is… not wrong. The kicker made me laugh out loud:
Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
To that second-to-last-point: Is Christopher Nolan actually Gen Z at heart?? How else to explain his sexless Odyssey when his source material is (conservative estimate) 20-25% sex and lust? Odysseus is supposed to be a man you would never want to introduce to your girlfriend. He’s a wily, smooth-talking schemer: brilliant, diabolical, Athena’s pet for a reason. That is not the energy I got from this Odysseus, sorry!1 I mean, imagine a Ryan Coogler Odyssey…
My other top Odyssey reading rec is this poem, “Telemachus’ Detachment,” by Louise Glück:
When I was a child looking
at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.
This week my Retro Recs for you are some of my favorite lesser-seen films by the mega-stars of this mega movie. But first: come on a little personal odyssey with me!
…when I first met Sam Sanders, working together at (Don Graham’s) Washington Post. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been one of those rare voices in culture: He loves it, he GETS it, but he will also call it out. He is discerning, sharp, curious, down, and always on-point. You know the friend in your life where it’s like, have I really seen this movie/listened to this album/watched this show if I haven’t heard what this person thinks about it? Is my cultural experience complete without their take? That’s Sam! I aspire to be that person in your group chats as well :)
So what an honor and a JOY to be a guest on The Sam Sanders Show, talking about some of my favorite zeitgeist-y topics: digging into my reporting on why so many modern movies look so meh, how cigarettes are making a coolness comeback, and the nihilism-meets-nostalgia energy of this moment that makes the mood so ripe for my debut novel Retro.
Perhaps out of respect for how thrilling this was for me, Substack has (in its great benevolence) decided to allow me to embed videos again! Watch below/on YouTube and/or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Hello to everyone who’s reading this newsletter because we met at the Sundeck Summer Reads at the Yards this week! Had the best time signing Retro and meeting new readers (and your adorable dogs). On my way there, I stopped at East City Bookshop to sign a few copies of Retro. Head over there to get your hands on one while supplies last!
My next tour stop is REHOBOTH BEACH, DE! I’ll be on the boardwalk outside Browseabout Books from 1:30 - 3:30 pm on Monday, August 24 selling and signing Retro and making the most of one of the last weeks of true summer. Come by if you’ll be in town! I’ve never been so if you’re a regular, send me your Rehoboth recs.
You can get your copy of Retro wherever you buy your books (and/or at your public library)! It’s in hardcover, it’s an audiobook, it’s British also so theoretically Christopher Nolan could read it if he’s into this sort of thing, it’s everything and everywhere baby! (ICYMI: It’s been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize!)
And if you’ve read Retro, remember to leave a review! You can do that on Goodreads, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Let everyone know you have excellent taste :)
You can explore the world of Retro at the official Retro agency site! Get your Pastport, plan your trip, apply for a job — and, because the book is speculation fiction, if you apply for a job you will actually get a reply. Sci-fi > reality?!
Is YOUR book club reading Retro? If so, let me know! I’ve had a great time getting into all the details and behind-the-book work with readers and would love to talk with more of you. Schedules permitting, I can make a cameo at your club. Drop me a note!
If I had not, MANY moons ago, written about this movie for ThinkProgress (RIP), I would swear I hallucinated it. The premise is wild—in a cool way, not in a “there’s one night a year where single people can have sex” way: Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, an out-of-work alcoholic whose human actions trigger a Godzilla-type monster in Seoul. Gloria scratches her head; Gloria’s kaiju does the same. Innocent enough, but when Gloria takes one step forward, her monster stomps on a skyscraper, killing everyone inside.
But really it’s a movie about how monstrous men can be, even/especially men who present as prototypical “nice” guys. The men in Gloria’s life are all, to a letter, EXACTLY the types who you will get a bad spidey-sense about but the people in your life who want you to “settle down” or whatever will try to talk you into dating, “give him a chance,” etc. Very easy to imagine them all making a guileless who, me? gesture as they quietly undermine and chip away at a woman’s confidence and stability with their envy, insecurity, and barely-suppressed rage.
Meet this murderer’s row of supposed good guys: The New York boyfriend (Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey fame) who is tired of waiting for Gloria to get her act together; Oscar (Jason Sudeikus, astutely deployed here as the villain who initially presents as an ally), Gloria’s childhood friend who takes her in when she trudges back to their hometown with the shame of having fucked it all up hanging around her neck; and Joel (Austin Stowell), Oscar’s friend who has a crush on Gloria from the moment he meets her. He’s so quiet! He’s so nice, right?!?!
But every man in Gloria’s life is dead set on controlling her, all under the guise of protecting her from herself, saving her from her woes, or doing what’s best for the world (see: monster). Oscar is constantly assuring Gloria that she has greenlit all his actions—unsolicited visits to her new apartment, gifts she didn’t ask for—and that she must not remember having said yes to him, was she that drunk last night?
He does all the classic romantic-comedy gestures that, in real life, would be the stuff of stalkers, which was exactly what writer-director Nacho Vigalondo was going for. As he told the Verge:
“I was aware from the beginning that the movie was dancing around within the tropes of romantic comedies… I love some of those films, but at the same time, some of them are really problematic. Most romantic comedies, the message is like, ‘If you persist enough, you will get her.’ They encourage behavior that’s terrifying these days. ‘If you stop her wedding, you won’t go to jail. You will just show your charms to her, and she will prefer to go to you.’ So something like that was inside the kindling of this movie. I wanted to play with those rules in a different way.”
As strange as this may sound, this is a quiet, sharp, unsettling movie that also feature Godzilla-scale monsters. It’s a weird one with a lot to say and the execution only sometimes lives up to the ideas behind it. Still worth watching for the big-swing of it all and for how this movie, which came out ~six months before the #MeToo movement exploded, anticipated so much of what we’d all be talking about.
Also: Very funny to read this Vulture interview with Sudeikus and Hathaway, where Sudeikus answers a question about “toxic, nice guys”—who’d recently been parodied in an SNL sketch about self-professed feminists hitting on, and ultimately being vile creeps to, women at a bar—with a not-exactly-relevant answer about how, actually, women can be annoying to men, too (“I don’t think that’s a male or female thing”), which goes on for four paragraphs, to which Hathaway ultimately replies, “And there is the reality, which is women are harassed by men more than men are harassed by women.” (To this, Sudeikus can only say: “100 percent.”) Meta!!!!!!
I watched this for the first time when I was profiling J. Smith Cameron (aka Gerri, Roman’s “mommy girlfriend” on Succession) for Marie Claire in 2021. I’d heard about it because it is sort of infamous for being a movie that no one could figure out: Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (Mr. J. Smith Cameron, among other noteworthy accolades), this film—about a teenage girl (Anna Paquin) whose mild flirtations distract a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) who, in turn, fatally hits a pedestrian—was shot in 2005 and stuck in post-production for six years.
In 2011, a 150-minute cut was released in theaters and was deemed “an inchoate masterpiece, perhaps, but a masterpiece nevertheless.” The extended cut—which received an edit from none other than Martin Scorsese, doing his friend a solid2—came out on DVD a year later, and that’s the one I saw.
So you can see why it’s a hard sell: maybe overlong, definitely super-sad. My pitch to you is that I have not stopped thinking about it since I saw it and I don’t think I ever will!!
It has some of the most intense and captivating performances I’ve ever seen. Paquin’s Lisa, the seventeen-year-old whose bored flirtation incites a tragedy, feels like a totally real, infuriating, complex girl3: She cannot stop making this about her, but also, it is the single most upsetting and horrifying thing she has ever witnessed or experienced; she is desperate for attention, but her relationship with her mother (Cameron) is tense and fraught, so she finds herself alternately flinging her virginity at a willing classmate (Kieran Culkin) and—possibly acting out, again, the actions that caused the bus accident, or just acting out because she is seventeen and lost and confused and lonely and horny—flirts with her teacher, Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon!).4
There is this unbelievable fight between Lisa and Emily (Jeannie Berlin, ELAINE MAY’S DAUGHTER), the best friend of Monica, the woman who was killed in the accident (who in played in this extraordinary single scene by Allison Janney!). Lisa, who sees every boundary as a light suggestion, insinuates herself into Emily’s life, as if they should be friends in the aftermath of this tragedy. Eventually, Emily snaps at what she perceives as a brazen attempt by Lisa to use Monica’s death to make her own life seem more dramatic.
I loved this take from the Roger Ebert site review:
Everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong; everybody’s aggressive and defensive; everybody’s sincere and full of shit; everybody’s got reasons and everybody’s making excuses… It’s a good thing the art of “Margaret” is so penetratingly perceptive and exhilarating, because these characters, the intensity of this language and the drama of these confrontations, would otherwise be simply exhausting.
Also: If you’re out here thinking okay but who the hell is Margaret then?? She is the addressee in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” that Lisa’s English class studies.
I know, I know: another super-long movie (153 minutes), another hard sell, but last week I gave you The Parent Trap! The newsletter giveth, etc.
I cannot say this for sure but I FEEL like this movie was mismarketed. My recollection of the trailers, posters, and vibe is that this was a Boy Movie about Battles. It is not even CLOSE to that. I guess the Ridley Scott of it all really threw me? And evidently it threw other moviegoers because it flopped at the box office (but reportedly picked up a fanbase on streaming). Also, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have really stupid haircuts in this. They are stupid in a period-appropriate way and I think, in context, add to the whole mood of “these men are ridiculous, actually.” But yeah, not ideal for the poster:
If I were in charge I would’ve called this movie A Property Crime, because much of the story—set at the end of the Caroline War, so, in the late 1300s—hinges on the fact that the rape of Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer, Killing Eve plus that weird motorcycle movie where everyone had a goofy accent) by Jacque le Gris (Adam Driver, puh-puh-puh-please Mr. Kennedy/thank you Lena for discovering him!!!) is, under the laws of the time, not adjudicated as a crime against her person but as a property crime against her husband, the vain and pathetic Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon).
The movie tells the same events three times, each from the perspective of a different main character, saving Marguerite for last. Presumably (and correctly) realizing that they were not best suited to write the third of the movie that deals with Marquerite’s POV, co-writers Damon and Affleck brought in a ringer, Nicole Holofcener (we will talk about Enough Said in a future newsletter!), to co-write the screenplay with them.
The Last Duel is so great on how men can behave like absolute children, how everyone creates their own realities, and the way a certain kind of man can always find a way to make a woman’s whole life about him. Jean is so obsessed with his petty, internecine squabbles with his fellow French squires—over money and status and land, all the usual stuff—that he experiences this assault on his wife entirely as an offense to him, personally. He is convinced Jacque committed this rape with the express intention of insulting him.
Meanwhile Jacque is insistent, starry-eyed, that this was an act of mutual passion and Marquerite’s demurrals were simply what would be expected of a lady of her stature and position. Her denial proves nothing to him, save that she knows a lady would never admit to a consensual affair—of course she’d say it’s rape, that’s the only way to defend her honor.
Lest you think it is all heavy material, Ben Affleck is here to be very bitchy (in a great way) as Count Pierre d’Alençon, who is the French court equivalent of the person in your family who runs the bank when you’re playing Monopoly and relishes their power in a way that is genuinely alarming.
See what I mean about the hair?
Also a technically-small but irritating-to-me continuity error: That puppy does NOT grow up to be that dog! That’s a totally different breed! Was Circe involved…
Here’s Lonergan on Scorsese’s edit, from The Guardian: “Martin Scorsese stepped in when we were at a standstill in the politics of the editing process. The theatrical release represents the cut I had submitted to Fox Searchlight in 2008 or 2009. I was unhappy with it and continued working on a version of my own that I could live with. I suggested bringing Marty in as a respected third party who could work with me to create a final version of the film that everyone could be happy with.
Searchlight had dug their heels in about the contracted two-and-a-half hour length – mistakenly, I think – and I’d been equally mistaken in trying to find a satisfying version of the film at that length, long after it should was obvious that I couldn’t do it. With Marty’s imprimatur on the film I thought the studio would be less apt to feel affronted if the running time increased a little – as I had learned it obviously had to if the film was to work. Marty’s always been incredibly supportive of me, but he really outdid himself this time. He worked really hard on the cut; he tried and I thought found a way to maintain the integrity of the movie while keeping the running time down. We passed the movie back and forth until we were happy, and in the end we turned in a cut that was about 12 minutes longer than the theatrical release.
I signed off on it, Searchlight signed off on it but unfortunately [producer] Gary Gilbert did not. Without his OK, Searchlight couldn’t release anything over the contracted length, so they released the two-and-a-half-hour version instead. I should also say that the length of the film per se is of zero importance to me. What matters is how long it feels, and doing whatever it takes to realize the film as fully as possible.”
sing to me muse of a complicated teen!
In the theatrical version, the audience doesn’t know for sure if Lisa and her teacher actually have sex: the scene cuts out early. Later, Lisa announces she’s had an abortion, and the audience doesn’t know if she is making that up or telling the truth. I was actually v into the ambiguity of that—Lisa as the ultimate unreliable narrator; besides the panic on Damon’s face really tells us all we need to know—but Fox Searchlight released a pdf of Lonergan’s 2005 shooting script online, and in the script you learn that Mr. Aaron did have sex with Lisa, and there’s a scene at an abortion clinic to confirm the rest of her story.
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