Volume 4, Issue 98: Soprano Home Movies

"Well, I'd say I owe you one, but I'm sure it's more than one."

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This is the time of year in which I am constantly watching movies. As a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle, my preliminary top 10 movies of 2023 list was due two weeks ago, and since then I’ve been scrambling to see everything I’ve missed from the year before Tuesday’s taping of the annual Grierson & Leitch Dorkfest spectacular, our biggest show of the year, one that listeners consistently tell us has become a legitimate part of their own holiday traditions. (This is of course our own tradition: Tim and I have sat down to go over our top 10 films every year since we both picked JFK in 1991.) As I scramble in these final days—and my personal top 10 list will be published, as is also yearly tradition, in next week’s newsletter (here’s last year’s, and here’s 2021’s)—I’m seeing everything I can, sometimes watching things I’ve already seen one more time as I try to figure out which movie goes in which slot. We take this very seriously in these parts.

The boys who live in this house have noticed this, and they’re always curious what movie Dad is seeing next. They always want to know two things about each movie: What it’s rated (so they know if they can go see it with me) and, to use their terminology, whether it is a “talking movie.” What do they mean by a “talking movie?” To my kids, there are two types of movies: Movies where there’s a ton of action and explosions and fights, and “talking movies.” Suffice it to say, they always want to see more the former than the latter, though ideally a movie is able to do both; William is still marveling how Oppenheimer “had a lot of talking but was also, like, really exciting,” which, as far as I’m concerned, is as succinct and accurate a review of that movie as I’ve seen. This is an ongoing joke in the house: Oh, blech, Dad’s going to see another talking movie.

But the funny thing is, I have my own definition of “talking movie,” and these movies are some of my favorite kind of movies. These are movies that are, more than anything else, about talking, movies that tell their stories and reveal the interior lives of their characters through long, looping, deceptively casual scenes that simply involve the characters talking to one another. The canonical example of this is 1981’s My Dinner With Andre, which is 111 minutes of fictionalized versions of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory having dinner together. There’s a modern counterpart in the Trip films, in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, lifelong best friends, sightsee and eat their way through Europe, talking and talking all the way, pausing only to do some truly incredible Michael Caine impressions.

The pinnacle of these movies, of course, are the Before Sunrise films, the Richard Linklater-Julie Delpy-Ethan Hawke collaborations, each one of which ranks among my favorite films of all time and, someday, will be shown on perpetual loops in the Generation-X museum I’ll eventually curate. Those movies, famously filmed nine years apart (they started in 1995, though they skipped 2022), feature two people with such a profound connection, and the inherent, sometimes lacerating honesty that comes with that connection, that to watch them talk to each other is to witness love, friendship, sex, fear, hope, beauty, all of it, all intertwining into something transcendent, even mystical. When Jesse and Celine start on one of their walks, it’s feels like the beginning of a musical number, or an elaborate action sequence, or a closing aria: It sounds like the music of the world.

Those movies, those “talking movies,” feel to me like being alive. (This year, the great Past Lives is another terrific example.) Because that to me, is what being alive is: It’s a conversation. It’s connection. It’s finding someone who is walking around the world like you are, trying to muddle their way around, to figure it all out the best they can, taking a moment away from the day-to-day struggle and madness of it all to sit down, collect their thoughts and … talk through it.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that this is one of the things I value most, and what I want most out of the world: I want to have conversations. When I think about being young, I don’t think of wild parties, or random hookups, or staying up all night at clubs. I think about sidling up at the back of a bar, in a booth across from someone I find interesting and who finds me interesting, and just talking for hours. It doesn’t have to be about anything specific—it’s actually better if it’s not. It’s just talking: An exploration, of yourself, of another person, and of the world. Who knows where it’s gonna go? That’s the fun of it. That’s why it’s worth doing.

This last fortnight, I’ve been traveling a lot, and during these travels I’ve been able to have a series of conversations that have been invigorating, enlightening and even thrilling. Some of these conversations have been with old friends; some have been with work colleagues; some have been with potential future collaborators. Some were serious, some were goofy, some were focused, some were rambling. But they were all smart, and engaging—actual human beings connecting with one another. They all felt like music.

Day-to-day life, particularly around the holidays, is exhausting, but more than anything, it is packed. There is always something to deal with, the obligations and banalities that can stack up, blocking out the sun. These obligations are important, what keeps our lives afloat and sturdy, but they can’t help reduce many of our conversations to perfunctory exchanges of information rather than conduits for connection. As the world gets more complex and wearying, and our energy level wanes, we can’t help but become more clipped, more isolated. It reminds me a little of how email has evolved over the course of my lifetime. When I first got an email address, my friends and I would compose long, detailed missives to each other, because we didn’t even have a computer at home and thus could only write during brief visits to a web cafe; it was like we were sending letters from a distant land, I do not know when I will have the opportunity to write you again. I found an email I wrote to a friend a while back from 1997 that, I swear to you, is more than 2,000 words long; his response was even longer. Three years later, our emails were a paragraph long; five years after that we were chatting over AOL Instant Messenger; five years after that we were clicking pre-written efficient responses of five words. Now we don’t even email at all. I occasionally get a text from him with an emoji in it.

A great conversation is always free-flowing, but it still has a certain shape. The sometimes-awkward feeling-out process, whether it’s two people who are still learning about each other or it’s two old friends working their way back into their old rhythms. The click, when it becomes clear that this is going to expand beyond empty small talk. The broader expansion, which can even steer into the philosophical. The elevation, when you find yourself talking just to talk, listening to just to listen—two people essentially becoming two halves of the same entity, when the conversation becomes a living, breathing thing. And the close—always the worst part, when the real world creeps back in around the edges and reminds you have to return to it, that you cannot, alas, do this forever. Someday, though, you can get back here, you can do it again. Finding these people isn’t always easy. But there are more in them in your life than it might seem. You know who they are.

The world, as it rolls along, takes things away—time, connection, energy, sometimes even hope. Taken together, all compiling on top of each other, it takes a toll; we can forget what we’re even doing all of this for. It doesn’t mean your life is unhappy; it just means you’re as busy and overwhelmed as everybody else is. If you are not careful, though, the little things that take up attention and hours in your life, the tasks, the errands, the TV binges, the scrolling, the naw-I’m-just-gonna-stay-home-tonight nights, they’re going keep coming at you so quickly that before you know it, 20 years are gonna pass, like it was nothing, like they didn’t happen at all. It’s the moments when you can step out of that, to step out of space and time and sit across from someone to connect and share and just be with, that remind us of why we’re here, what we’re doing, why all of this matters. It’s those connections that keep us human—that remind us we’re not alone. I’m grateful for all of them. It’s my favorite place. It always will be.

So belly up. I’ve got a booth in the back. First round’s on me: Whaddya havin’?

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

1. The Shohei Ohtani Contract Is Insane, New York. Even with the deferrals, I think it’s nuts.

2. Cody Bellinger Landing Spots, Ranked, MLB.com. It’s fun to just randomly guess as my job.

3. Josh Hader Landing Spots, Ranked, MLB.com. Twice, even!

4. Batman Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Merry Little Batman.

5. Five Teams on the Spot, Post-Ohtani, MLB.com. After waiting for Ohtani to sign for a week, he ended up making his announcement right as I was starting the four-hour drive back from Knoxville to Athens. Thanks, Shohei.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we’re in the closing stretch, we discussed Poor Things, The Zone of Interest and Leave the World Behind. Two of those movies are good.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Virus Inside Your TV,” Isaac Butler, Slate. Did you know that radical art collectives were sneaking in subversive messages into the background of “Melrose Place?” They were! This story is wild and made me very nostalgic for this sort of ‘90s activism.

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!

(I will be responding to my growing queue of these over the holidays, so if you’ve written, you should hear back from me in the next couple of weeks.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Housefly,” Cory Hanson. As always, I dug through Steven Hyden’s best albums of the year list to see all the things I missed, and, as always, I was able to find some gems. Here’s one of them. But I still wish this guy wouldn’t have named his album what he named his album.

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

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

The William Bryan Leitches and I enjoyed our trip to Knoxville last weekend, even if that color of orange is weird.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will