33: From Next to the Fireplace

I've been traveling, trying to keep ahead of the bomb cyclone and deep freeze that hit the Midwest and Northeast this week. It's time for a break. I'm at my in-laws' for the holiday, coccooned away from the weather and surrounded by Christmas cookies and very good dogs. Next week I'll be wrapping up the year with the art that kept me going. Instead of a top-ten list of movies, I write about everything–movies, books, music, and more–that I loved in the course of the year, new and old. Time is an illusion and a flat circle, and it's impossible to turn a single year into a narrative, but I do try to find the threads of the year in the art I appreciated, if only as a memorial for where I've been and for the art I've loved.

You can find my round-ups from 2021 and 2020 on my website. In the meantime, I hope you are warm, safe, and well.

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What I wrote:

I wrote a slightly gonzo piece about Avatar: The Way of Water and Wesleyan models of grace for Think Christian this week. As always, James Cameron's technical mastery gets clouded by his storytelling, but I did find writing about the movie to be a fun thought exercise, and a way to think through the characters' motivations that made the movie make more sense to me.

I also wrote about science fiction Advent movies in a piece for paid subscribers yesterday.

What I talked about:

For the Seeing & Believing podcast this week, Kevin and I reviewed Damien Chazelle's Babylon and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker, which between the two of them just about covers the spectrum

What I'm Reading:

I've been circling Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation since it came out, and finally borrowed a copy from a friend. The jury's still out on this one–usually I'm on board with characters I don't like, so long as the prose is good. The prose is excellent, but so far this book's protagonist is managing to keep me at arm's length well enough that I'm not sure if I'll ever be sold on the story.