April 2023 Culture Catch-Up
A guide to everything I watched and read (and you should too) during April 2023
This newsletter begins a new tradition: an end-of-the-month culture catch-up. Half culture diary and half opinion piece, these posts will encompass reflections on what I watched, read, listened to, rewatched, and enjoyed that month. My goal with this end-of-the-month edition is to take stock of all that’s out there in the cultural landscape and recommend pieces of art that I think deserve more attention or have a potentially thoughtful opinion about. If something I like resonates with you, feel free to leave a comment and let me know!
April 2023 was a month of mid-tier stuff. Not the slops usually dropped in January and February, or the summer blockbusters, and certainly not end-of-the-year awards fare, the films and TV of April are a work in progress. In television, nothing started or finished. We are in the middle! That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it, though. After all, life’s about the journey. So without further ado, here’s everything I enjoyed and think you might too.
Movie of the Month
Last month I wrote about the 3.5-star movie. A film that is perfectly okay and perfect because of its okay-ness. I even pleaded with the movie gods to make more of these movies and release them in theaters, allowing adults who aren’t obsessed with action figures and superheroes to spend a Saturday afternoon at the theater. I must have done something right because one such film was released in April.
Air is a star-driven feature about a couple of executives at Nike in 1984 who wanted to sign Michael Jordan and change the basketball shoe business forever. The plot sounds modest. Bland to some. But the direction by Oscar winner Ben Affleck and a star-studded cast including Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, and Chris Tucker transforms a bunch of white dudes talking on phones in a Portland office park into a propulsive, hilarious, and stakesy feature film. And just when you begin to question whether or not you should be sitting through a movie about basketball shoes, Viola Davis walks on screen and adds a gravitas that imbues real drama into an otherwise corporate plot.
To reduce the power of Air to one word, it’s all about the vibes. The film begins with a montage of 1984. When we started watching, my friend Brett leaned over and commented that 1984 seemed like the greatest year ever. Was it? Obviously not. But that’s what makes Air so special. Its montages, music, and banal office parks infuse the film with a specificity of time and place. The film makes you wish you were working a tedious office job at Nike in 1984, being micromanaged by the ultimate billionaire buffoon, Phil Knight, in between weekend hikes on Mount Hood. To put it simply, Air is transporting. It transports you to a time when players had less power and shoes were just leather and mesh between your feet and the ground. And then it asks, what if it’s not about the shoe but the person who steps into them?
Rewatch of the Month
What would happen if a globule and clawed alien latched onto your face, impregnated you through the throat, and then its child burst through your chest? You can find out by watching Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien. Inspired by The Ringer’s The Rewatchables podcast, I revisited Alien a few weeks ago. My first time watching the film was with my dad as a young teen. He advertised it to me as the scariest movie he’d ever seen. I don’t remember much from that first experience except that I enjoyed it. My second experience with Alien came a decade later, in the summer of 2022, when, for some godforsaken reason, I decided to start watching the movie in my almost empty basement, alone, at 12:30 am. That was when I truly appreciated the power of Ridley Scott’s creation. The film slowly inseminates a sense of pervasive dread in the viewer. Long shots of the ailing aircraft turn unfamiliar territory into the enemy alien’s greatest strength. Broken pipes, dangling chains, flashing lights. They all create an environment where the phallic xenomorph can hide, drip, snarl, attack. The film is slow but never sluggish. Eerily quiet but blaringly loud. It’s the product of H.R. Giger’s masterful creature design, dorky sci-fi writing, and a young director with an uncompromising vision.
I have since been obsessed with Alien and its place in American film culture. It’s a low-budget horror classic turned franchise blockbuster entertainment. James Cameron aided its transformation into reliable Hollywood intellectual property with his 1986 sequel Aliens. Imagine Scott’s contained horror classic with an action thriller spin. Sigourney Weaver is back, but she’s now fighting more overt corporate forces with a squadron of marines. It’s a treatise on capitalism, and the Vietnam War enveloped in Cameron’s masterfully directed action set pieces. Some people like Aliens more than Alien. Regardless of which one you like better, they exist as one of the great one-two punches in cinema history, each achieving greatness in their own right.
But if there’s one thing you can bet on throughout the history of Hollywood, it’s that executives will not let a piece of IP die without squeezing every last dollar out of it. 20th Century Fox executives latched on to this property like an infant alien onto a human face and commissioned countless screenwriters to craft their treatments for another Alien sequel. David Fincher created the much-maligned Alien 3, the strangest installment in the franchise that traps Ripley on a planet with rapists-turned-monks. And Alien Resurrection, the fourth in the quadrilogy, asks, “What if Ripley’s corpse was cloned and spawned an alien-human hybrid.” Yep, the franchise went off the rails.
After a 15-year hiatus from new Alien movies, Ridley Scott returned to create Prometheus and Alien Covenant, two worthy prequels that mythologize the xenomorph species and the company that keeps returning to find it.
As we enter the sixth decade of the franchise, the power of Alien only grows stronger. Up-and-coming horror director Fede Álverez is in production on his standalone installment, and celebrated TV show-runner Noah Hawley is beginning to write scripts for his FX series inspired by the original film.
Like much franchise entertainment, Alien is chock-full of creative genius and soulless cash grabs. The film and its sequels are an instructive lens to view and understand the past 60 years of Hollywood. Was it all worth it? I think so. Ridley Scott’s original creation informed horror, science fiction, and thriller genre films for years. Its original set, creature design, and innovative use of practical effects stand the test of time. Even though the film is almost 45 years old, it’s still the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.
Book of the Month
Few authors get to claim their title as “the voice of a generation” or “the voice of a genre.” At the same time, few authors have as distinct of a voice as Nora Ephron. You may not think you know her, but you do. That’s her power. Her perspective has permeated American culture through her insights on falling in and out of love. She was an essayist, author of books, and screenwriter. Her work helped popularize romantic comedies and, with them, the idea that romance isn’t just sexy but also can be profoundly funny.
Ephron is most famous for her films. When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail began Hollywood’s obsession with romantic comedies. The qualities that make the loveable and honest When Harry Met Sally one of my favorite films are the same that Ephron deploys in her anti-rom-com novel Heartburn. Told from the first-person perspective of Rachel Samstat, Heartburn follows this seven months pregnant mother as she discovers her husband is cheating on her.
In a brisk 180 pages, Ephron breathes so much life into the world of Rachel. Yes, she’s pregnant and was cheated on, but she also is a food writer, a New York native, a DC resident, a friend, and a mother. Rachel is a human and feels all the emotions of someone who tries to piece together when their marriage went wrong, why they didn’t see it all coming, and how they could possibly move forward. Don’t get me wrong. Heartburn isn’t at all sappy. It is very Jewish. And by that, I mean it is told from the perspective of a person who simultaneously feels constantly aggrieved and guilty for it. Who uses humor to hide her emotions until they boil so high they bubble over like a matzah ball soup on a burner turned high.
Ephron’s writing has lasted this long and will continue to resonate among future generations because of the specificity she brings to our most universal emotions. In one sequence, she uses the different potato preparations a person is willing to cook for their partner to signal the stage of the couple's relationship. Crispy potatoes are for the beginning because they take time, and that’s “what true romance is about” and “if you don’t make them in the beginning, you never will.” Potatoes and relationships- an unlikely analogy. But to Ephron, nothing is everything, and every nook and cranny of an interior life is a part of one big picture. So, of course, preparing mashed potatoes instead of crispy ones means the end of a relationship. But that’s precisely what makes her voice so unique. Her total specificity matched with universal emotions. We couldn’t possibly relate, but of course, we do! Because at one point or another, we’ve all tolerated a sad meal of mashed potatoes.
Trailer of the Month
On July 21st, 2023, a great battle will commence. Lovers of spectacle cinema will go to war with those who cherish films about young people just trying to figure it all out.
The Nolan Nerds vs. The Gerwig Gang.
Oppenheimer vs. Barbie.
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would tell you I will be seeing Barbie first and then chasing what will surely be a film experience like no other with a little movie called Oppenheimer. If you asked me today, I would tell you the exact same thing. But, seeing the latest Oppenheimer trailer got me more excited for a movie than I have been in months (except for Barbie) and set my expectations very high for a film directed by a guy who has never made a movie I think of as perfect. Until we see Oppenheimer in theaters, all we have to judge it on is its trailer. And let me say it’s one of the best trailers I have ever seen. I’ll let it speak for itself…
Now you can decide:
Where will you be on July 21st, 2023?
Excellent as always, and a book recommendation to boot. I'm looking forward to reading Heartburn.