Volume 4, Issue 48: Tim McCarver

"These guys out there, the work they're doing is gonna last forever."

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Hey, Happy Christmas Eve. My family growing up was a open-one-present-on-Christmas-Eve family, usually the third-or-fourth-best present: Good enough to whet your appetite for what’s coming, but not so good that you’re tempted to stay up all night playing with it. The boys is this house are getting big enough that their gifts are starting to become objects that distance them more from their parents than connect them: Laptops rather than footballs, video games rather than stuffed animals, clothes for going out with their friends rather than for watching the game with their dad. I suppose this is the only direction it can go. It will surely continue to accelerate.

Though I think the best gift I could give them was running them through that Lensa AI generator. They love it so much. I cannot recommend it enough. My youngest son said it feels like he’s watching himself star in his own movie.

Every year, I wrap up this newsletter season with two clip shows, to give myself a little bit of a break down the stretch. The final one, next week’s, looks back at the year, month-by-month, with the best pieces and newsletters I wrote all year. The penultimate one, this one, is my Top Ten Movies of the Year list, as released on the Grierson & Leitch podcast earlier this week. You can listen to that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Tim and I have been revealing our top 10 movies of the year to each other every year since 1991. The only difference now is that we record it.

But here you can get the words, straight on tap.

This was as “normal” a movie year that we’ve had since the pandemic hit, but it still had that end-of-days vibe every movie year seems to have anymore: It strikes me as a worrisome sign that so many prestige end-of-year releases had “the power of the movies” as their explicit subject, which is not something anyone would feel obliged to say out loud if the movies themselves weren’t in some sort of existential peril. (It’s like the guys who are constantly screaming, “Rock will never die!” at you. I mean, I wasn’t too worried about rock dying until you started making such a fuss about it, but now, well, now I’m kinda concerned.) Movie theaters are a sacred place for me—they were my first job, where I had my first kiss, the first place I realized how much of the world I knew nothing about and how much I wanted to learn—and going to the theater is not something that can be replicated by folding laundry, flipping through your phone and occasionally glancing at your TV to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Movies are transporting: They take you places you can never go, and introduce you to people—even make you one of those people—that you will never meet. I find them absolutely vital to a healthy, curious life.

I saw, according to the Word file I update after I see every movie, 134 movies this year. (You can track Grierson’s and my grades for each movie, along with a link to each podcast and a bunch of pretty charts and graphs, on this Excel spreadsheet dutifully updated by an awesome listener named Steve.) That’s a lot of movies, but there are trade-offs: I think I only watched four TV shows all year: Better Call Saul (which ended perfectly), Better Things (ditto), Severance (which was great but which I only got to watch because I had Covid and couldn’t leave the room) and The Patient (which I’m only halfway through). You are all watching TV shows. I’m watching movies. I’m pretty sure I’m coming out the winner in that trade. To quote, again, the critic James Rocchi, who died last year, wrote, “I write about the movies, which is to say, I write about everything.” That’s why I love writing about the movies: I get to write about everything.

So! Here are my top 10 movies of the year. I’ve provided links to where you can watch them: You can actually stream most of these right now.

10. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, directed by Rian Johnson. (Available on Netflix)

I liked the first Knives Out but found it a little slight and sometimes a bit too cute by half, particularly Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, who felt more like a clever construction than an actual character. Apparently Tim’s old college buddy Rian Johnson heard all my criticism, because he fixes everything I thought didn’t work in the first one, meticulously constructing a superb mystery that is funny, raucous and feels like a parable for our times without ever being obnoxious or hectoring about it. Craig is a lot better in this one, and it’s carried by a fantastic Janelle Monae performance that’s so full of surprises that I don’t want to say anything more about it. This was the most purely entertaining movie I saw all year. You’ll love it.

9. Descendant, directed by Margaret Brown. (Available on Netflix.)

The best documentary I saw this year, Descendant, which is produced by the Obamas’ Higher Ground productions, tells the story of an Alabama community where a slave ship called the Clotilda, which was sunk after illegally transporting slaves from Africa in 1860, is discovered just off shore. The discovery leads to questions of reparations, of appropriation, of who, exactly, gets to tell the stories we then calcify in our museums. The movie is matter-of-fact, deeply fair and relentlessly honest. We should all strive to look at the world with as clear eyes as this movie does.

8. The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers. (Available on Amazon Prime.)

The filmmaker who gave us The Witch (ehh) and The Lighthouse (great) continues to make historical dramas that are so self-contained and ultra-realistic that they truly do feel like they exist solely in that time: As one smart critic put it, this isn’t just a movie about Vikings, it feels like an actual Viking’s favorite movie of all time. (If Vikings knew what movies were.) The movie takes its premise and its setting so coldly seriously that you start to think you yourself exist in this world, and only this world. It’s also a damn-solid action movie too. Eggers is way too weird of a filmmaker to ever get a budget like this again, so it’s thrilling to watch what he does with it. Watch it in a dark room, and play it loud.

7. Barbarian, directed by Zach Cregger. (Available on HBO Max.)

I’ve already written about the experience of seeing this movie in the theater for this newsletter, and I’ll just encourage you to read that then say nothing further to you about it. The pleasure of this movie is in its surprises, and I don’t want to spoil any of them for you. The platonic ideal of the “watch over holiday break” movie. You’ll thank me.

6. Aftersun, directed by Charlotte Wells. (Available for purchase, available for rent on January 16)

A grown woman, struggling with her inability to understand her father, reflects back on a vacation she took with him in the late ‘90s—what she remembers, what she can’t, what she knows about him, what she never can. Aftersun is in many ways about memory—you should read Grierson’s great interview with Wells and star Paul Mescal, who is so wonderful and heartbreaking in this movie—and how powerful and unreliable those memories can be. Some of the best movies of this year were about the unknowability of our parents, and that, now that I’m firmly one of those unknowable parents, hits particularly hard. This was Grierson’s No. 1 movie of this year, for what it’s worth.

5. The Eternal Daughter, directed by Joanna Hogg. (Available for rental.)

I wasn’t as crazy about Hogg’s first two movies, The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part Two, as everyone else seemed to be, which may have been another reason this one blew me away. Essentially a ghost story about trying to understand your own parents—that theme again—and where you stand in their story, and your own, this features a terrific double performance from Tilda Swinton (as a woman and that woman’s mother). It’s astonishingly assured, particularly as it toggles between what is real and what isn’t, never feeling particularly obliged to make the difference explicit. Also: Features the worst hotel staffer in the history of movies.

4. Decision to Leave, directed by Park chan-Wook (available on Mubi)

The director of Oldboy makes an obsessive, sexy, fiendishly clever film noir that’s so engrossing that you don’t realize how tragic of a love story it is until it’s too late. It’s also so technically proficient—you will feel like you’re standing right to everyone in this movie the entire time—but not in a way that ever stops it from feeling loose-limbed and flexible: It’s a movie that’s intricately structured but also light on its feet and forever alive. I find myself thinking about this movie all the time: I bet if I were to do this list in a couple of years, it’s even higher than this.

3. Playground, directed by Laura Wandel. (Available on MUBI.)

A movie about kids shot on the kids’ level—Wandel’s camera seems to scrape the ground, and the adults are always lurking forever above, ineffectual and distant—Playground is basically the nightmare version of what every parent fears when they drop their kids off at a new school. The movie is meticulous and observant, and it never strays off the path of the vividly realistic. This is a movie that, as a parent, I found myself wanting to reject as fanciful and too despairing, which was a clear sign that this movie was really working on me.

2. Vortex, directed by Gaspar Noe. (Available for rental.)

Noe is the French filmmaker who gave us Irreversible, Enter the Void and Climax, three brutal, terrifying, relentless movies that don’t hold a candle to this one, his most restrained, realistic and devastating movie. A wife is suffering from dementia. Her ailing husband attempts to take care of her. They live alone in a flat in Paris. They can no longer take care of themselves. You are there with them, all the way, down the vortex. This movie is almost overwhelmingly powerful. Viewer beware.

1. Tar, directed by Todd Field. (Available for purchase.)

This movie does so many things, so effortlessly, that it sometimes feels like it was beamed here from outer space, as if wise, empathetic but appropriately caustic aliens made it to try to show us who we are, and why we are like that. Both observant and removed, Tar creates a whole universe that is both acutely ours and also full of countless mysteries. And at the center of it is Cate Blanchett, giving a performance so perfect that you have to keep reminding yourself that Lydia Tar is not, in fact, a real person. This is a wildly ambitious film that’s also firmly in control throughout: My kind of movie. We’re going to be talking about this one forever. See it so you’re not left out.

We actually rank our runners-up, so if you’re curious:

11. Happening, directed by Audrey Diwan

12. Moonage Daydream, directed by Brett Morgen

13. Spirited, directed by Sean Anders

14. The Banshees of Inishirin, directed by Martin McDonaugh

15. Avatar: The Way of Water, directed by James Cameron

16. Athena, directed by Romain Gavras

17. Beavis and Butt-head Do the Universe, directed by Mike Judge

18. After Yang, directed by Kogonada

19. Turning Red, directed by Domee Shi

20. The Fabelmans, directed by Steven Spielberg

21. Kimi, directed by Steven Soderbergh

22. Intregalde, directed by Radu Muntean

23. Saint Omer, directed by Alice Diop

I love writing about movies almost as much as I love watching them. And remember, one of the Grierson & Leitch podcast’s avid listeners has that a massive Excel spreadsheet with the grades and links for every movie we’ve ever talked about. Sometimes, when I need a break, I’ll just flip through that spreadsheet. I find it a perfect document.

Anyway, please see all those movies, they’re all great. You’re home all week, most people aren’t working, or at least not working all that hard, go watch some movies. And happy Christmas Eve.

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

1. Stop Treating Elon Musk Like Trump, Medium. Weird to have to say this out loud, but Twitter is not, in fact, a country.

2. Takeaways From That Truly Wild Carlos Correa Swerve, MLB.com. I love waking up to total sports insanity.

3. Will Smith Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with Emancipation, and of course The Slap.

4. Your Unexpected 2022 Breakout Stars, MLB.com. Starting the end-of-year stuff over in baseball land.

5. Donald Trump Is Never Going to Jail, Medium. Let’s stop pretending.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, if you want to hear the (much more entertaining, but very long) audio version of the top 10 up there, here’s that show. This picture is from when I lived in Los Angeles in 1998.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we previewed the CFP Semifinal against Ohio State.

Seeing Red, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Lives They Lived,” Various Authors, The New York Times Magazine. The Times’ mag did a special issue highlighting children who were killed by guns this year, noting that since 2020, gun violence is the leading cause of children’s deaths, a staggering fact.

Also, Olivia Nuzzi is seriously my favorite political writer.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Pilot Can at the Queer of God,” The Flaming Lips. I’ve been thinking a lot about 1994 a lot lately, and hearing this song will always make me feel like I’m riding the 80 Orchard Downs bus around Champaign, shuttling between the Daily Illini and the Florida Avenue Residence Halls. This is one of favorite silly, but still kind of rocking, Flaming Lips songs. I love this whole album: “Be My Head” always makes me happy.

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

Seriously, from this room to yours, happy Christmas Eve, everyone. You almost made it.

Best,
Will