Shakespeare and Dead Men and Monsters, Oh, My

I am writing this to you from the future.

Or at least, that’s how it feels. I’ve had the same MacBook Pro since 2012, switching out the hard drive at one point after I spilled a full container of laundry detergent on it. I had used it for so long that I had worn several of the letters off the keyboard entirely. It was a cantankerous, angry machine that was so old it couldn’t run a good third of the programs that I needed to use. And last Sunday night, it died. Completely. All at once. Just went belly up while I was in the other room getting dinner. I came back and just saw a blinking envelope icon with a question mark inside. That’s all I could get, no matter what I tried to do. I took it to my computer tech on Monday, and he called me later in the afternoon to just laugh at me because of how totally and completely dead the hard drive was.

Thank god I finally got my shit together and learned my lesson from past data losses and made sure I had a backup of everything. I just told iCloud to reload my entire desktop, which seems like science fiction. My old laptop is completely inaccessible at this point, but I pushed one button and it all reappeared like magic. It feels like one bright spot in a month full of chaos and frustration. I love the concierge team at Ghost, and they’ve been nothing but great about getting me moved over. In the process, I created some technical challenges for them that no one anticipated, and it made for a very long month, as did a chest cold that pretty much knocked me down for two full weeks. I’m done with November, and thank God for that.

What made November tolerable were the movies. I saw some great stuff this month, and the final shape of the film year is coming into focus for me. We’ve got less than a month to go, and I still have a list of things I want to see, but if the year ended right now, I would be ecstatic. I’ve seen around 220 films so far, and I’d say at least 120 of those were well worth my time. That’s a lot of good movies, a lot of well-spent hours in the dark, and I’ve seen some of them a number of times already. I’ve enjoyed showing these new discoveries to people, and there are plenty of them that I still look forward to sharing.

Now that I’m up and running, I want to share thoughts on some of these films with you. I’ve got all the other stuff I’ve been planning, but I need to knock the rust off a bit as I get to stop thinking about the migration and get back to the business of just writing the newsletters. To that end, let’s talk about three things that have found their way into my rough top ten list for the year so far.

We’ll kick it off way up at #2…

Jessie Buckley’s face is the best special effect you can buy.

Chloé Zhao is a powerhouse filmmaker, and she’s still early in her career. She has exquisite taste, and I suspect she’s very early in what will be a long and prolific career. While Eternals was seen as a miss for Marvel, I think the fact that she directed it is part of what makes her filmography so interesting. She is not above making a big Hollywood piece of product, but she clearly uses the commercial clout that earns her to make things that matter more to her. This is the way it’s supposed to work. If you’re going to do the one for them, you definitely need to make the most of it when it’s time for the one for you.