Volume 3, Issue 72: Sunloathe

"I kill my memories with a cheap disease."

Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it.

This week on the Grierson & Leitch podcast—we’re off next week because Grierson is at the Cannes Film Festival right now, Mr. Fancy Pants—Tim and I each discussed our six favorite films of the first half of 2021. We do this show every year, as a way to mark the halfway mark toward Dorkfest, our annual countdown of our top 10 movies of the year. It is amusing that Dorkfest has become, by far, our most popular podcast episode every year, because Grierson and I have been getting together and announcing our top 10 lists to each other for, literally, 30 years. The only difference is that we’re taping it now.

We started in 1991, thanks to a particularly formative movie experience. At the old Cinema 1-2-3 Theater in Mattoon, Tim and I saw Oliver Stone’s JFK, and it melted our face and blew our minds. Every person who loves movies has a movie that made them realize that, oh shit, I want to see every movie ever made now, and for us, that movie was JFK. That movie was more than three hours long, and the old Cinema 1-2-3—as I’d learn when I started working there six months later—had a projector with platters that could only hold about 180 minutes of film reliably without the risk of one of the reels falling off and locking up the machine. With about 15 minutes left, right as Jim Garrison is wrapping up his final case, the projector broke down and stopped the film. It snapped us out of our film dazed, and we emerged as if plunged out of a freezing lake; I remember actively gasping.

Movies have been at the center of my life ever since. I spent almost my entire freshman year in college in the undergraduate library at the University of Illinois watching every old movie I’d never seen on laserdisc, and reading every word Roger Ebert wrote, and eventually even moving to Los Angeles to try to make it as a film critic (which in retrospect is a really weird reason to move to Los Angeles). Going to the movies has always been a place of peace for me, a refuge I can enter where, for two-or-three hours, my own world peels away and I get to go somewhere else entirely. Ebert once wrote, about the first time he saw Star Wars, that “my imagination has forgotten it is actually present in a movie theater and thinks it's up there on the screen. In a curious sense, the events in the movie seem real, and I seem to be a part of them.” This is what the best movies do for me. They transport me to another universe, another life, entirely. I like the life I have; movies are not a place to escape from some torment or pain. But movies expand the limits of my imagination. They allow me, for a while, to be something else.

As far as pandemic woes go, “not being able to go to movies” is relatively low on the list, but now that I’m fully vaccinated and back going again, I’ve been a little overwhelmed by how much I missed it. It’s almost making me a bad critic, because I’m so happy to be in the theater that I’m finding myself forgiving of bad movies, like I’m so grateful to be there that I just want to thank the filmmakers for making the movie in the first place. Black Widow might be one of the worst Marvel movies, but I’ll be damned if I still wasn’t moved and a little awed by the thing. The light’s always a little too bright when you first come out from under the covers.

Anyway, while it’s perhaps a little perverse that the thing I want to do most coming out of a pandemic is watch and talk about movies, it’s undeniably true. I stayed up way too late last night reading an early galley of Keith Phipps’ Age of Cage, pre-order it right here, a thorough, smart, funny and very wise look at the career of Nicolas Cage, and, really, a look at the last 35 years of American movies as filtered through one of our most absurd and absurdly invested actors. Like any piece of great writing, Phipps’ book got me reading other great writing about Cage and about movies, and then this morning I was watching clips of how incredible he is in Leaving Las Vegas and then I was realized how much of my adult life has been spent watching Nicolas Cage movies and then next thing you knew I was watching his legendary SNL skit that’s the reason I’ve been saying “OZ-WEE-PAY” as an inside joke for nearly 30 years now.

And that’s what movies are, really: They’re the history of our lives. I saw JFK at the Cinema 1-2-3 in Mattoon, I saw Hoop Dreams at the Nu-Art in Champaign, I saw Short Cuts at the Savoy 16, I saw Fargo at the Santa Monica 7, I saw The Blair Witch Project at the Tivoli in St. Louis, I saw There Will Be Blood at Lincoln Center in New York, I saw Moonlight at the Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta. You think back about great movie experiences you’ve had, and they’re not just about the movies themselves. They’re about where you were in your life, why that movie in particular spoke to you, what the world looked like when you left the theater and were thrust back into it. I cannot talk about my life without talking about the movies.

I know there is considerable debate right now about the future of movies, how we consume movies, how they’re made and marketed, what a “movie” even really is. But those are pedantic accounting details—like baseball, people are always predicting the death of movies, and great movies keep happening, regardless. (Narrowing my favorite movies of the first half of the year down to six was legitimately difficult; there have been a lot of outstanding movies out already in 2021.) I find myself, again, like with so much else in 2021, just grateful to have the opportunity to see movies at all. And to get to talk about them, with lifelong friends, with strangers, with other people who love them as much as I do, whose lives are as tied up with the movies as mine is. I’d be lost without them. Over the last year, I think I was.

So, to finish up, because talking about movies is so personal and specific, talking about movies is actually debating movies. Grierson and I have been doing Dorkfest for so long that we actually have each of No. 1 movies for every year going back to 1991. So here are those films. If you haven’t seen them, see them. If you have, tell us why we’re wrong and why yours is better. That’s the fun of this. My movies mean so much to me. Yours mean so much to you. If you know my movies, you know me, and if I know yours, I know you. Movies are the rare thing we experience both alone and collectively. Another reason they mean so much.

Anyway: Here’s the list. My movies are right, Grierson’s are wrong:

1991
Leitch: JFK
Grierson: JFK

1992
Leitch: Husbands & Wives
Grierson: Husbands & Wives

1993
Leitch: Short Cuts
Grierson: Short Cuts

1994
Leitch: Hoop Dreams
Grierson: Hoop Dreams

(Don’t worry, Grierson moved to California in 1993, the taste diverged eventually.)

1995
Leitch: Leaving Las Vegas
Grierson: Safe

1996
Leitch: Lone Star
Grierson: Big Night

1997
Leitch: The Ice Storm
Grierson: The Sweet Hereafter

1998
Leitch: The Cruise
Grierson: The Truman Show

1999
Leitch: The Straight Story
Grierson: Election

2000
Leitch: Best in Show
Grierson: Yi Yi

2001
Leitch: Mulholland Drive
Grierson: Memento

2002
Leitch: Punch-Drunk Love
Grierson: Chicago

2003
Leitch: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Grierson: Stone Reader

2004
Leitch: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Grierson: Dogville

2005
Leitch: War of the Worlds
Grierson: Junebug

2006
Leitch: United 93
Grierson: The House of Sand

2007
Leitch: There Will Be Blood
Grierson: Zodiac

2008
Leitch: The Class
Grierson: The Dark Knight

2009
Leitch: A Serious Man
Grierson: Two Lovers

2010
Leitch: Toy Story 3
Grierson: Lourdes

2011
Leitch: Midnight in Paris
Grierson: City of Life and Death

2012
Leitch: Zero Dark Thirty
Grierson: The Turin Horse

2013
Leitch: 12 Years a Slave
Grierson: Inside Llewyn Davis

2014
Leitch: Boyhood
Grierson: Boyhood

2015
Leitch: Timbuktu
Grierson: The Tribe

2016
Leitch: O.J.: Made in America
Grierson: Moonlight

2017
Leitch: Dunkirk
Grierson: Dunkirk

2018
Leitch: Roma
Grierson: Burning

2019
Leitch: Uncut Gems
Grierson: Uncut Gems

2020
Leitch: Hamilton
Grierson: Nomadland

Your top movies are your own. Mine are mine. They are all ours.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Sports Are Already Becoming Less Political, New York. It’s OK to take a breather, maybe? Just for a sec?

2. Steven Soderbergh Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. One of my favorite lists that Grierson and I have done.

3. NBA Finals Ratings Will Be Down, and It’s Fine, GQ Magazine. TV ratings are a lazy person’s media analysis.

4. All-Stars, Ranked, MLB.com. There are a lot of them. And lots of ranked lists this week, for that matter.

5. Internet Nostalgia: The Crying Jordan Meme, Medium. No one ever remembers what Jordan was actually crying about.

6. Home Run Derby Participants, Ranked, MLB.com. Been a while since a Cardinal was here.

7. America Is Back, Kind Of, Medium. Well, the vaccinated people are back and safe, anyway.

8. This Week in Genre History: The Amazing Spider-Man, SYFY Wire. In praise of poor Andrew Garfield.

9. Against the Superteam, NBC News. Sort of a grouchy old-timer column here.

10. What Does It Mean to “Visit” a State? Medium. This is a riff off a long, long ago newsletter here.

11. The Thirty: The Best Player Drafted By Their Current Team, MLB.com. Draft this weekend. Lots of local Kumar Rocker interest around these parts.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we gave our six best movies of the first half of 2021, and we previewed the Cannes Film Festival.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I try to stay alert.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we did one big 2020-21 wrapup show before heading weekly in August.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Murder Scandalizing Brazil,” Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker. This story is a month old, but, like a lot of people, I was about six issues behind on the magazine and finally just read it this week. It’s quite a yarn!

ARBITRARY THINGS RANKED, WITHOUT COMMENT, FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON

Apps On My Mac’s Lower Desktop Menu, Ranked By How Many Hours I Use Them a Day

1. Google Chrome

2. Microsoft Word

3. Spotify

4. Stickies

5. Messages

6. Photos

7. Audio Hijack

8. Audacity

9. Calendar

10. Skype

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

By the time you read this, all bookplates, except for 30 (I ran out, but more are coming), will have been sent out. If you have not received yours within the next 7-10 days, let me know and I will send you another one.

Otherwise:

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Walls,” Tom Petty. Sometimes you just need some Tom Petty. (Even if it’s from a dumb Ed Burns movie.)

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

I am enjoying this summer, I will not lie to you. I hope you are too. You have earned it.

Now, how about Kofi coming back? Can we put the cherry on this summer?

Be safe out there.

Best,
Will