The 2023 Movie List

Finally! A really good year for movies. Box office was up and people showed they’d turn out for movies they really liked. Of course this is in large part because of two movies that, in lucky happenstance, premiered the same week. Apparently, this wasn’t the plan but the anticipation, critical approval, and popularity of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” resulted in the two films reinforcing each other. I know I wasn’t the only one who saw them back to back. And not only were they popular, they were GOOD.

The films that were not so good and not so popular were the big franchise movies, especially of the superhero variety. Good riddance to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And while I did enjoy the latest Mission Impossible movie, I’m not sure I will bother to see its sequel and find out how it ends.

So here’s hoping that Barbenheimer will convince Hollywood to take more chances on original stories, reward creativity and not take the audience for granted. With that as a preface, I saw 25 movies last year and here they are rated from best to worst.

1. Barbie

Yes, I think Barbie was a better movie than Oppenheimer, and not because I’m a sap for message movies. By reversing the gender power dynamic, it showed how clueless a privileged class can be (the women in Barbieland are no more sensitive to the feelings of the opposite sex than your your standard Lax Bro). More important “Barbie” teaches what it means to be human; Barbieland is a feminist Eden, but like Eve before her, Stereotypical Barbie wants knowledge, even if means accepting pain, and ultimately death.

2. Oppenheimer

I was lucky enough to see this movie in an IMAX theater and it was a remarkable, enthralling experience. I saw it again online and it was almost as good (being able to watch a second time with subtitles was a big help). Christopher Nolan is one of the last Great Event filmmakers and he really delivered. It’s a sprawling story about the making of the atomic bomb and the subsequent implications for Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the bomb’s development. (By the way, for those of you who listen to podcasts, check out the episode of my American presidents podcast, “The Celluloid President,” in which we discuss “Oppenheimer.” You can access it here.)

3. Past Lives

What claim does someone you loved as a child, a teen, or a young adult have on you when you become a mature adult? That’s the question at the center of this very moving and thought-provoking movie about childhood sweethearts in Korea who separate and then reconnect 12 years later and 12 years after that. They still have a hold on each other even though their lives are completely different. Now what?

4. Living

Technically this lovely film is from 2022 but I couldn’t see it until it appeared on Prime in mid-2023. Set in a 1953 British Public Works office, this is NOTHING like the TV show “Parks and Rec.” Bill Nighy plays a formidable, stiff-upper-lip department chief who is as far removed from Ron Swanson as you can get. Almost everyone in the department is scared of him, and since he can’t really relate to his family, he has no emotional resources to fall back upon when he gets a fatal cancer diagnosis. Having rarely if every experienced joy, he finds a way to leave a real legacy.

5. American Fiction

The funniest movie of the year. A Black author with literary aspirations is so put off by the public’s preference for racially stereotyped writers and the efforts of white would-be allies to absolve themselves of their guilty feelings that he pens an over-the-top fake memoir (“My Pofology”) that unexpectedly becomes a massive best-seller. He’s also got a messy personal life that requires some attention, too.

6. Anatomy of a Fall

Did she or didn’t she? A French movie about a successful novelist who is arrested and charged with murder when her husband is found dead from a fall from the third floor of their ski chalet. Their young son is a key witness who wants to save Mom from jail, but even he’s not sure if she’s innocent. Very absorbing courtroom drama and a fascinating look into the French justice system, which is very different from ours.

7. Air

It’s been quite a year for Matt Damon. He was the funniest character in “Oppenheimer,” and then he starred in “Air” as the real-life guy who saved Nike by signing Michael Jordan as the face of the company. This is a very enjoyable, supposedly true story, with Ben Affleck as Nike founder Phil Knight, and Viola Davis as MJ’s mother. In addition to providing insight into how the sports marketing business works (or used to work), it’s also a great vessel for early 80’s nostalgia.

8. The Holdovers

Speaking of nostalgia, the main kid in this movie seems to be the same age I was in the year during which this is set (early 1970’s). He’s attending a fancy prep school outside of Boston and is held-over at school during Christmas break in the care of a cantankerous unpopular teacher played by Paul Giamatti. They really bond during a trip to Boston, which looks very much like the grimy Boston I remember from those years. Terrifically written and acted.

9. Poor Things

Wow this is a weird movie. It’s like someone merged The Bride of Frankenstein with Alice in Wonderland and sprinkled in some soft-core porn. Set in a fantasy Victorian world where it’s possible to combine and reanimate parts of dead bodies, a mad scientist plants a baby’s brain into the body of a recent suicide and we watch her consciousness rapidly progress from that of a toddler’s to a mature woman who has a very health appetite for sexual pleasure. This is wildly imaginative and an impressive intellectual exercise, but a little difficult to warm up to.

10. Killers of the Flower Moon

The scariest moment of the year was when I looked at my watch two-and-a-half hours into this movie and realized there was still another hour left. This Martin Scorsese epic is movie-making at its ponderous best, dealing with complex moral issues through beautiful cinematography and great writing. I’d have ranked it higher except that both Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro are way too old for their parts. This is especially true for Leo, who’s character is supposedly about 25 years old.

11. May December

Julianne Moore portrays a woman who, having been sent to prison for statutory rape after having sex with a young teen her son’s age, marries the kid when she gets out of jail. Twenty years later, Natalie Portman is an actress who shows up to shadow Juianne Moore because she’s playing her in a movie. Not surprisingly, she finds a strange family dynamic where the young husband is emotionally stunted and their kids are very confused, but maybe not as confused as the actress, who tries to figure out what’s going on behind the surface and ends up exploiting everyone. There is a lot to think abut here.

12. Maestro

This is a movie about the beginning and end (but not the middle) of Leonard Bernstein’s career as the most famous figure in American classical music, a genius who wants to do everything. He wants a glamorous wife and numerous male lovers on the side; he wants to write classical music and Broadway musicals; he wants to be on TV and also be taken seriously. Bradley Cooper does a tremendous job in embodying Bernstein’s many contradictions and probably should have been nominated for best director as well as best actor.

13. The Boys in the Boat

Practically a remake of Chariots of Fire, except that it’s about an American crew team in the 1936 Olympics instead of British runners during the 1924 games. There are no surprises but director George Clooney does such a good job depicting the desperation of these Depression-era athletes that it really works.

14. Golda

Helen Mirren is almost unrecognizable as Golda Meier, who was prime minister of Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It’s a very fascinating look at how the Israeli government works in a crisis, but the movie does presume a high degree of knowledge about the war’s timeline and its major players.

15. No Hard Feelings

Jennifer Lawrence is hired by the parents of a shy 19-year-old to “bring him out of his shell” (if you know what I mean) before he goes to Princeton and hi-jinx ensue. It’s very funny and very sweet if you can get over the ickiness of the parents paying a down-on-her-luck Long Island local to deflower their son.

16. Dumb Money

The protagonist of this movie if from my hometown of Brockton, Mass (where “no one here can kick our ass.” That’s actually a football chant.) Disappointingly, the movie was filmed in New Jersey and looks it. Based on a true story about the financial analyst, played by Paul Dano, who helped spur the GameStop stock mania of 2021 by touting it on Reddit. I remember it as a crazy story when it happened in real life because a whole lot of small day traders were able to bring a few short-sellers to their knees by buying an over-priced stock. Not mentioned in the movie, but after the protagonist made $20 million, he immediately moved out of Brockton!

17. Blackberry

Another true life business story, this time about the rise and fall of the Blackberry, which I still miss because my fat fingers make so many mistakes when I’m typing on an iPhone. This is one of those classic stories about a nerds/business shark marriage that works for a while and then goes astray because of hubris and incompatibility issues (and of course a superior competing product from Apple).

18. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1

Very good action movie that, like “Top Gun 2” last year, was supposed to bring people back to the movie theater. Alas, Barbenheimer did that instead. I enjoyed it but as is often the case in movies that depend on thrilling chases to keep the audience’s attention, right now I can’t remember what the whole thing was about.

19. The Book of Clarence

This movie is as offbeat as they come and I don’t know who it is aimed at. It’s a little bit funny, but not funny enough to be a comedy like “The Life of Brian,” which it most closely resembles. It’s pretty religious but not enough to be taken seriously like “The Chosen,” which it resembles a little bit. The gist of the plot is that Clarence, the brother of the Apostle Thomas, is the bad seed of the family. As bad seeds do, he decides to pose as the Messiah for the perks of being the Christ, but after getting crucified himself realizes that Jesus is the real deal. There’s also a racial angle since all the Jews are played by Black actors and all the Romans are white.

20. Guardians of The Galaxy

Guardians of the Gallery has been the only Superhero movie franchise I have been able to stomach for the past ten years, and the saga ends with a satisfying denouement. Having said that, I think one, possibly two, episodes in this franchise would have been enough.

21. You Hurt My Feelings

This has to be one of the lowest-stakes movies ever. The conflict is right there in the title. A Manhattan husband doesn’t like his wife’s new novel but tells her he does, because as every husband knows, the wrong answer to the question “Do you like my novel?” can be ten times more devastating than “Do you like my dress?” But her feelings are hurt when she eavesdrops on him and finds out the truth. That’s the proximate justification for the movie, but the film is REALLY about the disgruntlement of middle-class New Yorkers who just aren’t very good at their jobs.

22. The Lost King

To like this movie it helps a lot if you care whether Richard III really killed his nephews in the Tower in 1484. This is the mostly true story about how Phillipa Langley, a depressed Englishwoman who really believes in Richard’s innocence (which I do NOT), was able to find his body buried under a parking lot in the town of Leicester.

23. American Symphony

The year 2021 seemed to be a very good one for Jon Batiste, perhaps best known as Stephen Colbert’s bandleader. He won all kinds of awards, including an Oscar and a couple of Grammys, and had a hit record. Regrettably, his wife, the NYT columnist Suleika Jaouad, learned that her Leukemia had returned and she needed bone marrow treatment. Also, Batiste was trying to write a major classical piece called American Symphony. This documentary film captures all of this in intimate detail and you can only marvel at the highs and lows that people can experience simultaneously.

24. Elemental

Can fire and water coexist? Can they form a romantic couple? Pixar wants to know. The ancient elements of earth, wind, fire and water (and no, this is not a based on the 1960s rock band) are cartoon ethnicities trying to live in harmony in this very imaginative movie. The movie is not shy about addressing issues like racial assimilation, the immigrant experience, etc. but still manages to be fun.

25. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Was anyone asking for a fifth Indiana Jones movie? Not me. Harrison Ford looks pretty good for a guy his age. The movie begins in 1969 Greenwich Village, where Indy is being chased by Nazis (again!!!) who are trying to go back in time and change the end of World War II. There’s one excellent chase scene on a horse in the subway, but Indy is so crotchety now that the movies lacks its original zest.

26. Taylor Swift Eras Tour

I thought I’d check out what the Taylor Swift thing is all about and I mostly get in now that I’ve seen this concert film. I will say this — the single most thrilling moment of the year, cinematically, is when she dives into a previously unidentified hole in the stage. Whoa! As in many concert movies, your enjoyment depends to a large extent on how well you know the music. So I enjoyed it when I recognized the songs and was a bit bored when I didn’t. (Very impressive costume changes, though.)

27. Champions

Woody Harrelson is a talented but hotheaded basketball coach who is sentenced to community service coaching a basketball team with people with learning disabilities. This movie is very sweet but you can predict what’s going to happen. This movie is possibly listed lower than it should be, but the problem is that when I saw the title on my list of movies seen during the year I had to Google it to refresh my memory.

28. Good Grief

Dan Levy from “Schitt’s Creek” wrote, stars in and directed this story about an American in London who seems to have it all until his husband is killed in a car crash at Christmas. A year of unassuaged grieving occurs and things aren’t improved when he learns that the husband had a secret apartment in Paris where he entertained his secret boyfriend. Everyone in the movie has a lot of unresolved issues, which are eventually resolved through a series of confrontations and hard discussions.

29. Theater Camp

This an arch, semi-satirical look at the self-important counselors at a theatre camp who seem to think they are Broadway producers. It’s charming and funny for a while and then you wish everyone would just get a life.

30. You Are So Not Coming to My Bat Mitzvah

Adam Sandler has a producing deal with Netflix for which he knocks off one-to-two movies a year. This Bat Mitzvah movie is a family affair, though. Not only is he in it but his wife and daughters are too. The story revolves around the tween angst of wealthy, Jewish California girls who believe that their Bat Mitzvahs will be the crowning achievement of their lives — that and kissing a boy for the first time. The movie is a little bit funny, a little interesting but I am definitely not the target audience.

31. Are You there God? It’s Me Margaret

I am not the target audience for this movie either. It’s a dramatization of Judy Blume’s best-known novel, which takes a hard look at how difficult the tween years can be. I was surprised to see how significantly religion figures into the equation even though God is mentioned right there in the title. I respect the effort, and empathized with poor overly hormoned Margaret, but the movie gives off too much of made-for-TV vibe for me to care a lot.

32. 80 For Brady

Now this is a movie that was targeted for an audience of one: me. Four senior ladies in Boston find meaning in worshipping Tom Brady, travel to the Super Bowl and watch the greatest comeback in football history (the 34-28 win over the Atlanta Falcons in SB LI). But if you’ve ever watched Frankie and Gracie, you know the kind of antics that Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin will pull (i.e. far-fetched). These antics are fine but not really my thing.

33. Eric Clapton: Across 24 Nights

In 1991 and 1992, Eric Clapton played 24 concerts at the Albert Hall and this documentary is a stitched together presentation of the highlights, with some of his greatest hits and some lesser known songs. With no narration or subtitles explaining who he’s playing with, this movie is really for super-fans (see Taylor Swift, above). Still, experiencing “Layla” played on the big screen is worth the price of admission.

34. Murder Mystery 2

Another Adam Sandler production for Netflix. I like him, I certainly like Jennifer Aniston, and I like the European backdrops, but this is the kind of thing you only stream when there are four people in the room who can’t agree on anything else to watch.

35. Beautiful Disaster

This is the only legitimately bad movie on the list, but that’s OK because we watched in advance of attending a live podcast called How Did This Get Made?, where they dissect really sub-par movies to hilarious effect. I’d summarize the plot for you but it’s just too ridiculous.

The Best TV of 2023

I’m not sure what this says about my state of mind (or society in general) but my four favorite TV series this year featured people creating unconventional families or communities in a heartless world. There’s a lot about surviving grief on these shows, but not a lot of victimization. These are about people who soldier on without a lot of whining.

Once again, I am amazed at how little traditional network TV I watched this year. I still DVR a few shows but except for Saturday Night Live (not ranked here) I usually end of watching them on Hulu anyway. And speaking of which, Hooray for Hulu, which has the best content. I subscribe to the ad-supported service so it’s a bargain despite all the ads for depression, hair loss, and ED. Maybe one of these years I really will cut the cord. But’s hard for us Boomers to let go.

One final observation. Many of the lower-ranked shows were series that once ranked much higher. It’s surprising how quickly we tire of TV shows today. Not too long ago, a series could go on for seven or eight years with no drop-off in quality. Part of the problem is that many popular contemporary series are based on a unique premise that delights us at first and then becomes tiresome with repetition. Plus each season has a story arc with a lot of plot and character development. The long-lasting shows (like Cheers
or Seinfeld) had no story arcs — just stand-along episodes that you could watch out of order and not miss much. Those were the days.

1. Reservation Dogs (Hulu)

This was the third and final season of the most affecting TV show in years. Four teens on an Indian reservation have mourned and matured after the suicide of a fifth friend. Now we see them launched into early adulthood, with the support of their extended community. A clear-eyed comedy that refuses to make these kids victims, although they seem to have about three parents among them. The genius of the season is that it digs deeply into intergenerational story-telling and shows how one generation flows into another.

2. The Bear (Hulu)

A super-intense show about a talented chef from a dysfunctional Chicago family trying to open his own fine dining restaurant, even as he deals with his own grief and longing for connection. There’s a lot of yelling and making up after fights, although some wounds cannot be healed. This show also has the most amazing cameo appearances of the season, with multiple Oscar winners showing up for short bits. And for what it’s worth, I think this is the most conservative show of the year because it celebrates the dignity of work, doing the job right, and serving others.

3. Somebody Somewhere (Max)

Sam is an overly self-aware but emotionally blocked daughter of Kansas, who returned to her small farming town to care for her dying daughter and didn’t leave after the funeral. She’s slowly making connections and making herself vulnerable again. The show is sweet and slow-moving but it packs a punch.

4. Welcome to Wrexham (Hulu)

Who would have thought that a documentary about two actors (Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney) buying a Welsh soccer team could be so emotional and inspiring? This show is for anyone who has ever loved anything enough to keep loving it when it disappoints you.

5. Succession (Max)

I hated myself for watching Succession. On the one hand, it was the funniest show of the year. On the other hand, all the characters were either very loathsome or just a little bit loathsome. And then there was all that voyeurism. Do the fantastically rich really live like that? Not all the plotlines made sense this year, especially where presidential politics was involved, but still — it was beautifully acted, hilariously written, and gorgeously shot.

6. White Lotus (Max)

Another show with a huge budget and beautiful locations about rich white people acting badly. It introduced the much needed phrase “high-end gays.”

7. Letterkenny (Hulu)

For twelve seasons Letterkenny was the most hilarious and politically incorrect show on TV. Who knew Canadians could be so funny? 

8. The Diplomat (Netflix)

Keri Russell plays the American ambassador to the UK, in a political thriller that that combines a lot of fast-paced, jargon-rich dialogue with some of the most ridiculous plot twists you could think of. But it’s very addicting.

9. The Crown (Netflix)

The final season of The Crown is by necessity kind of a downer, considering how badly those people messed up their lives, but it’s still an emotional rumination on influence, mortality, and duty. I’m glad it’s over, though, especially since Her Majesty has subsequently died.

10. Daisy and the Six (Amazon Prime)

Very loosely based on Fleetwood Mac, Daisy and the Six is a nostalgic recreation of the music scene in the 1970s, when sex, drugs and rock and roll ruled the world. The story is a weensy bit melodramatic but the really great music, all of which I downloaded, really saved the day.

11. Jury Duty (Amazon Prime)

Ronald Gladden, a regular schmo who doesn’t realize that everyone except him is an actor in a fake jury trial, is a true hero for our times. His deep decency and commitment to do the right thing, even as the circumstances become more and more outlandish, is legitimately heart-warming.

12. Abbott Elementary (ABC)

This is the only series from old-fashioned traditional TV (ABC) that I watched this year. Abbott Elementary is a real throw-back to the days when sitcoms were reliably funny and warm. Set in a low-income elementary school in Philadelphia, it features the usual combination of characters who would never be friends in real life but who somehow manage to bond in workplace comedies. It’s mildly funny but very sweet.

13. Fargo (Hulu)

I’m taking a risk here in listing the series so high since I haven’t seen the conclusion yet, but based on the track record of the show I am hoping it sticks the landing again. Each season of Fargo is set in Minnesota, with a very decent cop investigating deep depravity, and this is creepily no different.

14. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

A cute show that spoofs New York City, show business, and podcasts, although you have to wonder if the writers have any idea how podcasts actually work. After only three seasons, the series is beginning to show its seams, and I feel my interest waning. The murder mystery did work, though, and as usual I never did guess the killer.

15. Poker Face (Peacock)

Very good premise for a show. Natasha Lyonne has the power to tell when people are lying but the misfortune to make friends with people who are always being murdered. She’s also on the run from a gambling casino mob boss. Often compared to Columbo, in that we know who committed the murder and enjoy the pleasure of seeing her solve the case.

16. What We Do In the Shadows (Hulu)

Season five was a bit of comeback after a mildly depressing season four, but I don’t think it will ever feel as fresh and hilarious as it did in the first couple of seasons. The premise is still funny — four clueless vampires trying to adapt to life on Staten Island — but the show is on cruise control.

17. Justified City Primeval (Hulu)

The original Justified was one of the great TV shows of the 2010s. Timothy Olyphant played a US Marshall in his native Kentucky. But in City Primeval he’s a stranger in Chicago and the combination doesn’t quite click.

18. CB Strike (Amazon Prime)

The Cormoran Strike novels are the product of JK Rowlings’ capacious imagination, featuring a gritty London detective and his aspiring partner and would-be love interest teaming up to solve brutal murders. The BBC made five of the novels into short series and we watched three of them this year. All excellent. That JK Rowlings! She really does know how to spin a tale.

19. Beckham (Netflix)

A fascinating documentary about David Beckham, soccer star, media celebrity and obsessive-compulsive patient. Unless you followed soccer, he’s one of those guys that you heard about constantly but can’t remember why, so I was glad to get the lowdown. And it was amazing. His entire life is documented on video and the producers were able to follow him from a 14-year-old teen phenomenon to his crusty self today. (By the way, between this and The Crown, I can’t understand how any famous person ever survives the British media.)

20. Winning Time (Max)

Highly entertaining but historically questionable recounting of the early LA Lakers dynasty, with a heavy focus on Magic Johnson, who has to be happy that this was cancelled after two seasons. 

21. The White House Plumbers (Max)

I haven’t wallowed in Watergate for a long time, so I appreciated the opportunity to review some of the highlights (or, rather, lowlights) of that woeful saga. This version was told from the bottom up — from the perspective of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the guys who planned the break-in and went to jail for their troubles. How well I remember the 70’s, may they rest in peace, and yet my mouth was agape at seeing some of the crazy things I had long forgotten about.

22. Trailer Park Boys (Netflix)

Again, who ever guessed that Canadians could be this funny? We’re just catching up with this 20-year-old series about the residents of a Canadian trailer park. I would rank this higher except I feel a little uncomfortable laughing at the pathos of poor white trash.

23. Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime)

I never thought that Jim Halpert could be an action figure but turns out he’s an Boston College-trained economist who can outfight terrorists and communists. The show has a lot of shooting, explosions, and emotions and is a perfectly fine way to spend several hours in front of the TV.

24. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Another series that lasted a little longer than it should have. Anything this quirky eventually begins to become annoying. So much talking, so many outfits, so much interpersonal drama! I will say this, though: the show ended with a lot of truth. Characters this self-absorbed are unlikely to have fairytale lives.

25. Yellowstone

I thought the first season was great TV. I started to get disenchanted in the second season and by the third season I’d given up completely. There’s only so much plot that any series can bear (and so many murders, in a series that is supposed to reflect real life). Like Succession, almost all the characters are reprehensible, but Yellowstone lacks the sharp dialogue that makes Succession watchable.

Best Movies of 2022

It’s hard to get excited about the Oscars this year. At best, this was another so-so year for going to the movies. My wife and I made a concerted effort to support the cinematic experience by getting off the couch, driving to the theatre, and seeing as many films as possible on the big screen, even movies that we could have watched for “free” on our streaming service just a week later (i.e., “The Glass Onion”). And since seeing movies in the theatre is the best way to do it, my big regret of the year is letting the critics talk me out of viewing “Nope” upon release; when I decided to check in on it on Peacock, it turned out to be my favorite film of the year. I can only imagine how much more exciting it would have been in a theatre.

In furtherance of the in-person experience, I also attended my first film festival this year — the Sonoma International Film Festival (or SIFF) — which in additional being a lot of fun gave me a chance to see a lot of unknown small movies in person that I would have otherwise missed, which explains why there are so many movies on this list that you’ve probably never heard of (we saw seven movies in three days, and the only one that made a commercial splash was “The Lost City”).

I noticed two major themes in 2022. The first was an outright hostility to the rich, who were portrayed as clueless, out of touch, entitled and malevolent in a way we haven’t seen since the “Occupy Wall Street” days. I don’t know what was driving that theme but it was clearly manifested in “The Glass Onion,” “The Menu” and “Triangle of Sadness.” But an even more common subject this year was the pursuit of artistic excellence and how it causes people to go a little — or a lot — insane. And the “art” in question was wide-ranging, from music (“Tar,” “The Banshees of Inishirin,” “Elvis”) to film (“The Fablemans,” “Babylon”) to food (“The Menu”). You could even make the argument that Tom Cruise’s character was also driven by the pursuit of art in “Top Gun: Maverick,” if you can classify flying jets as an art form.

Some major omissions from the list this year. I made plans to see the new “Avatar,” but in the end I just couldn’t be bothered. I also thought I might watch “All Quiet On the Western Front,” but the war in Ukraine is real enough and I thought the movie would just be emotionally punishing. I understand there’s a movie called “Women Talking” that’s been nominated for best film but I don’t know anyone who has seen it, so — no thanks. Also not on the list — Superhero movies (except for the one Spiderman that I saw out of curiosity), horror films, or kiddie movies.

With that said, here’s the list:

1. Nope

Five years ago Jordan Peele was justly celebrated for his debut film “No Way Out,” but “Nope,” possibly the most original movie of the year and a major hit as well, gets no love. Not a single Oscar nomination and mediocre reviews. Maybe the subject matter — an apparent spaceship lurking over the California countryside — wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but this was not only thought-provoking but thrillingly directed. I have a feeling the critics didn’t like it was that it didn’t fit neatly into any particular genre — horror, drama, social commentary.

2. Top Gun: Maverick

OK, this is not a great movie, by any stretch. But the single best experience I had at the movies this year was watching the Top Gun sequel. I haven’t felt this enchanted in a movie theatre in a long time.

3. Apollo 10 /12: A Space Age Childhood

If you want to see what live was really like in the 1960s, watch this Richard Linklater nostalgia-fest. The hippies, the riots, and the assassinations get all the attention, but here’s what it was like to grow up in a normal middle-class house. The conceit of the movie is that this fourth-grade boy daydreams Walter Mitty-like that he is secretly recruited to fly the first mission to the moon. I have been begging people to watch this movie but no takers.

4. Everything Everywhere All At Once

I’ve seen my share of Metaverse movies but was still unprepared for the cornucopia of ideas that came flowing out of this story about a Korean immigrant family caught in the disjunction of the limitless universes that usually only exist in superhero movies. But then, it turns out to be a superhero movie after all, showing that we have hidden abilities we barely dream of and multiple destinies even if we can only live out one of them.

5. Babylon

This epic three-hour depiction of Hollywood as it transitioned from silent to sound movies is not for everybody, that’s for sure. According to Damien Chazelle (of “La La Land” fame), the late 1920s were a feverish, orgiastic dreamscape, where life was cheap, ambitions unbounded and raw talent rewarded and exploited. The whole thing was way over the top but I wasn’t bored for a second.

6. The Banshees of Inisherin

I read that this was being marketed as a comedy, but if so, the Irish have very dark senses of humor. Two old friends on a remote Irish island break up when the smarter one can no longer tolerate the boring, repetitive musings of the other one and demands to be left in peace to work on his music. I should put “smart one” in quotes because he chops off a finger each time the dumb one talks to him. Haha.

7. Tar

The life of an imperious symphony orchestra director spirals out of control when her “Me Too” sins catch up with her. This is Art with a capital A. You need to work hard to follow the thrust of what’s happening, which is fine because it’s mostly rewarding when you figure it out. The acting, directing, set design and writing were all great but I’d have rated it higher if the last half hour hadn’t been so confusing. I am told now that it might have been a dream sequence, which, if true, is a massive cheat.

8. The Fabelmans

A thinly veiled autobiographical depiction of Steven Spielberg’s childhood, “The Fabelmans” is a lesser Spielberg and two movies in one. The first movie is about his preternatural talent as a youthful film-maker. The other is about the collapse of his parents’ marriage. And both are suffused with a gauzy dream-like nostalgia. Every scene, as is usual in a Spielberg movie, is beautiful and stylish, but the movie as a whole doesn’t quite come together.

9. Down With The King

The best film we saw at the Sonoma International Film Festival (SIFF) was this story about a rapper who had a nervous breakdown and is recuperating in an isolated but beautiful region of the Berkshires. Nor surprisingly this very urban guy has some trouble adjusting to life in rural Massachusetts, but he eventually makes friends and attempts a comeback.

10. Spirited

Ryan Reynolds and Will Farrell — a great pairing that should have occurred to someone sooner than this — update A Christmas Carol to amusing and clever effect.

11. Good Luck To You Leo Grande

As much as I admire Emma Thompson, I never really felt the need to see her in a nude scene, but here it us. She plays an extremely uptight widow, who, having never experienced sexual pleasure, hires a sex worker to do the deed the right way. There are some surprisingly interesting themes afoot here, particularly the power dynamics among genders, classes, ages, and incomes.

12. Where the Crawdads Sing

I am surprised that this movie didn’t get more love from the awards circuit given that it was popular hit in a year where they were hard to come by. I didn’t read the best-seller this is based on but can see the appeal. It’s a murder mystery wrapped within a swamp-gothic love story and a female empowerment fantasy.

13. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

I don’t know if anyone saw “Phantom Thread” a few years ago, but this is a happy-happy version of that. Both movies are about the snobbiness of European high fashion houses in the 1950s and star Leslie Manville, but in “Mrs. Harris,” there’s no weird psycho-drama and everything works out well for the people who have good hearts.

14. Ticket To Paradise

Julia Roberts and George Clooney, divorced and rich, have a daughter who wants to marry a Polynesian sea farmer she met while on vacation. Somewhat amusingly, they squabble and insult each other while trying to prevent the poor girl from throwing her life away on kelp. The movie has a gorgeous setting but would have been better with sharper and less cliched writing.

15. Vengeance

There’s a lot happening in this BJ Novack-written murder mystery about a shallow New York D-bag who learns down-home values in Texas when he launches a podcast about a murder victim he once casually hooked up with. When it’s sharp and witty, this is terrific, but when the murder is solved, all those hard-won values go out the window.

16. The Lost City

This is inspired by those “Romancing the Stone” movies and it’s great to see Sandra Bullock traipsing through the jungle. I can’t quite figure out why it’s not more fun, though. The movie only really comes to life when Brad Pitt shows up.

17. The Glass Onion

What a surprise — this “Knives Out” sequel is not as good as the low-budget original. Set on a Greek island, it’s more beautiful than the first one, while the murder was conceived, committed and solved in a large rambling house. Expanding and opening up the setting gives the director, Rian Johnson, more opportunity to be self-indulgent, and exposes Daniel Craig’s acting idiosyncrasies as vaguely absurd.

18. Weird

Everything about this mockumentary on Weird Al Yankovic’s life, starting with the casting of Daniel Radcliff as Weird Al, is hilarious in 15-minute bursts but it’s a lot to absorb over a full-length movie.

19. Bros

This was positioned as a ground-breaking “gay rom-com,” but what’s really innovative about this isn’t that the protagonist is gay but that he’s so neurotic, self-absorbed and unlikable. Bold choice! It’s undeniably funny and does have a conventional cisgendered pairing off, but the route to this happy ending was more than a little tortured.

20. Spiderman: No Way Home

This is another multiverse story with a clever premise: the Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland Spidermen all live in different universes and and need to join forces to fight and evil nemesis. The movie is fine but I immediately forgot the plot the second I left the theatre.

21. The Menu

A celebrity chef with an insanely devoted staff goes a teensy bit off the rails as he seeks to avenge himself on his rich customers who don’t appreciate his artistry. The movie is beautiful and fascinating until it spins out of control. One thing it has going for it is that one of the protagonists — Anya Taylor-Joy — plays a character who hails from my hometown of Brockton Mass.

22. Triangle of Sadness

Another movie about the wretchedness of the top one percent (see “The Menu” above.) In this version, the obnoxious rich get their due when their luxury cruise ship sinks during a hurricane and various guests and crew are washed up on a deserted island. Status and power now reverts to those who can enhance survival and having been a male model doesn’t really cut it any more.

23. Sr.

Before there was Robert Downey Jr., there was Robert Downey Sr., a 1960s avant garde filmmaker (“Putney Swope” being his most famous film). Jr. commissions a documentary about dad so they can have a nice bonding experience. This is not a “warts and all” treatment but the film does make it clear that Jr.’s well-document drug problems almost certainly stem from Mom and Dad’s casual approach to drugs when he was growing up.

24. The Rose Maker

A French rose farmer on the verge of bankruptcy takes on three work release employees who know nothing about agriculture or roses but somehow manage to save the farm. Light and charming in that French way.

25. Come Back Anytime

If you’ve seen “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” this is the ramen version — a documentary about a small restaurant owner in Tokyo who wants to retire. WE come to understand the impact that will have on his regular customers, who consider the place their home away from home (like the “Cheers” bar or a Black barbershop). Given that being in community with other humans is a universal need (ranging from bowling leagues to QAnon message boards), it’s interesting to see how other cultures achieve that.

26. Elvis

This is not a good movie but somehow got a Best Picture Oscar nomination anyway. Go figure. “Elvis” is a PowerPoint version of Presley’s life; it hits the highlights, which seem accurate enough, but misses the complexity in between. Maybe the better analogy is “Elvis for Dummies.” It doesn’t help that the movie is narrated by Tom Hanks, in his worst role ever, as Col. Tom Parker. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the music isn’t very good, making it hard to understand what made Elvis so wildly popular.

27. To Olivia

Hugh Bonneville (aka “Lord Grantham”) portrays the children’s author Roald Dahl, who was a complicated figure. He’s married to the actress Patricia Neal and the movie covers the period in their life when they have to grapple with the sudden death of their daughter Olivia. Not all movies have to have happy, life-affirming endings, but this one essentially peters out.

28. The Pact

Karen Blixen, who was better known as the author Isak Dinesen, lives a life of lonely luxury back in post-war Denmark. She takes on an aspiring writer as a protege, and then, creepily, tries to take over his life.

29. Martin Eden

Based on Jack London’s semi-autobiographical novel about an ambitious working class schmoo who works his way into the high society that he despises. This is an extremely low-budget movie theoretically set in early 20th century Oakland but filmed on Nantucket (!!!!).

30. We Feed The World

A Ron Howard documentary about the super-chef Jose Andres and his non-profit World Central Kitchen, which rushes to disaster areas to feed people devastated by hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. The story itself is inspiring but the film itself inexplicably falls a little flat. Ultimately there’s no narrative — it’s like a long Sixty Minutes piece.

I’m a Podcaster Now Too

I remember the first time I heard a podcast. It was in the late 1990s, when you could only get good Internet at work, and I was killing time in the office when I should have been billing clients. I had previously discovered Bill Simmons, then known as the Boston Sports Guy, who was a sports blogger on Boston’s AOL Digital Cities site. I clicked on the site on afternoon and instead of reading his blog I discovered him talking about the Red Sox with Seth Meyers, then the Saturday Night Live head writer. As hard as it is to believe now, the idea that people were talking on the Internet, was disorienting. I don’t think they even called it podcasting yet.

Since then, Bill Simmons has built two podcasting giants — first Grantland for ESPN, and then The Ringer, which is now owned by Spotify — and there are reportedly more than three million podcasts available for our listening pleasure. During that time, I’ve sampled several hundred podcasts and am currently subscribed to about twenty podcasts myself, picking and choosing what to listen to depending on the episode’s subject.

Clearly the world doesn’t need another podcast but my college friend Jim Robinson and I have taken the plunge anyway. I’m not sure why — we’re definitely not going to make much, if any, money on it. I suppose we just want to keep our minds sharp at our advancing ages.

Since there are thousands of podcasts about movies and thousands more about politics, I thought it might be interesting for us to do something about the intersection of movies AND politics, so we came up with “The Celluloid President,” in which we discuss how American presidents are depicted in film. Jim and I were American Studies majors together in college and we can finally deploy what we’d learned about analyzing history through a cultural context to explore what the filmmaker was REALLY trying to say.

Our first two podcasts are by two talented directors whose visions of America are completely at odds and who, unsurprisingly, created films that couldn’t be more different.

Our first podcast out of the gate was on Oliver Stone’s “Nixon,” a three hour and 20 minute biopic that is a perfect match of a dark, brooding conspiratorial filmmaker with a dark, brooding conspiratorial President. Jim and I had been pro-Nixon allies in college but we don’t really see eye-to-eye on him any more, although we are still fascinated by Nixon and even a bit nostalgic about Watergate, which seemed so important at the time. To learn more about that journey and to listen to the podcast, click here: [Nixon Podcast]. You might also want to check out the movie trailer first to get a flavor of Oliver Stone’s approach.

In contrast to Stone, Steve Spielberg is in love with what America can be, even though it doesn’t always live up to its ideals. The movie “Lincoln” is ostensibly about the 16th President but it’s really about how America struggles to become a more just place. Rather than a traditional biopic about Honest Abe, Spielberg decided to depict how Lincoln rammed the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, through the House of Representatives even before the end of the Civil War.

To Spielberg, this achievement — the legal end of slavery — shows that democracy can work, especially if a visionary, talented politician steps forward embodies the better angles of our being, which is what Lincoln did. “Lincoln” is fundamentally a civics lesson in how democracy works — how the people’s will can be fulfilled through a messy combination of self-interest and idealism. To my mind, “Lincoln” displays more mature understanding than “Nixon” of how the American government works. Oliver Stone opts for a simplistic explanation of why things happen the way they do — because a secret cabal of corporations and security agencies drives events behind the scenes. But “Lincoln” shows that our country is too big, with too many interests, for any conspiracy to succeed for long. If anything, the danger is inertia — with nothing happening because the bickering groups can’t reach a compromise. For more elaboration on this, check out the podcast here: [Lincoln podcast]

And to get a flavor of what “Lincoln” is about, check out the trailer below.

As they say at the end of all podcasts, be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, etc. You can find both of The Celluloid President podcasts so far below at https://thecelluloidpresident.buzzsprout.com.

Let us know what you think.

The Best TV of 2022

Well, it’s been another great year for television — unless you’re a corporate executive trying to make money on the hundreds, maybe thousands, of TV shows that were served to us this year. There are, after all, only so many eyeballs to go around so the profit margins are not what they used to be. I never thought I’d complain that there were too many good TV shows, but the overabundance is frustrating because not only are they spread out among a dozen streaming services, but even if I had the money to subscribe to them all, I’d never have the time to watch it all. Which is why there are highly praised shows missing on the list below.

This might have been the year that streaming fully conquered old-fashioned live TV. Out of the hundreds of episodes we watched last year, my wife and I only watched two “live,” in real time — the series finale of “Better Call Saul” and the season finale of “White Lotus.” And we only watched two shows that were broadcast on traditional network TV — “Abbott Elementary” (ABC) and “Saturday Night Live” (NBC).

The best trend of the year were intelligent shows that dove deep and unsparingly into the niche cultures of their creators — “Reservation Dogs,” “Letterkenny,” “South Side,” “Atlanta,” and “Derry Girls.” When you are making a show about your family, your friends, and yourself, it’s easy to poke fun while making broader social points.

The worst trend of the year was the staleness of once-fresh shows that hung on too long. Most of these were once-edgy series like “Killing Eve,” “Stranger Things” and “What We Do in the Shadows” that had nothing new to say after a while, relying instead on one improbable plot twist after another to extend the life of the series beyond its “sell-by” date. (I’m afraid this will eventually be the fate of “Succession,” which wasn’t on this year but which was verging on exhaustion at the end of its third season in 2021.) The great exception to this rule was “Better Call Saul,” which, from the beginning, had an end in sight and was able to plan the whole six-season arc in linear story-telling rather than relying on the back and forth dithering of a series that doesn’t know when the bosses will pull the plug.

Looking ahead to next year, the most exciting thing is that I have no idea what unheralded piece of content will fall out of the sky and amaze us, like “The Bear,” “The Old Man” and “Somebody Somewhere” did this year. And if that doesn’t happen, maybe I’ll finally start “Yellowstone.”

1. Reservation Dogs

This heartbreaking but subtly hilarious depiction of teenagers dealing with grief and the magical realism of growing up on an Indian reservation was actually better this year than last. There’s no self-pity on this show, just honesty about the universal hardship of being a teen anywhere and the specific problems of living in a subjugated culture that has nether fully embraced nor rejected mainstream American values.

2. Better Call Saul

A profoundly moral show, and a masterclass on how easy it is for a someone with a nominally good heart to “break bad” through years of irreversible small choices. Visually stunning in episode after episode, with sharp writing and the best TV performance in decade (from Rhea Seehorn), it was sometimes hard to watch knowing that we were eventually going to be offered up the death and destruction of characters we had come to care for. And, to be honest, it’s been hard to follow the plot over the years. Nevertheless, “Saul” turned out to be one of the great shows in TV history.

3. Letterkenny

The funniest and verbally filthiest show on television. This year we caught up on all ten seasons and absorbed many Canadian colloquialisms into our family language (“Pitter patter,” “That’s what I appreciates aboot you,” “degens” “figure it out!”) Letterkenny is a small town in the Canadian boonies where archetypes feud and literally fight with each other, but where the real damage is done through an onslaught of insulting, frequently sex-filled verbal puns. Weirdly, for all the drinking, fighting, carousing and swearing Letterkenny is also profoundly moral, with a strict sense of right and wrong.

4. The Chosen

I’ve watched a lot of dramatic productions of the Jesus story over the years but nothing as enthralling as this. It helps to know a little bit about the Bible because this series fills in the backstories of the major and minor figures we hear about in the Gospels, especially Simon Peter, Mary Magdalene, Matthew, Thomas, and Nicodemus. Importantly, the whole thing seems believable, especially the way Jesus is so human, displaying humor, self-awareness, kindness and wisdom. If you don’t know about this show you’re living in a bubble because it’s a national phenomenon.

5. White Lotus

A national phenomenon of an entirely different sort. (I have a feeling that the Venn Diagram of viewers who watched both “The Chosen” and “The White Lotus” is very narrow.) The second season of “The White Lotus” delivers all the satisfactions of the first, with an even juicier murder plot. It’s satisfying to know that the filthy rich, who can afford to spend a week at a place like this, are even more miserable than we are. The theme this year was sex — what people will do for it, what they’ll trade for it, and the costs of anything besides monogamous relations between married couples. One of the few shows we watched “live” this year.

6. Mythic Quest

Can I just point out that F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar in 1984 and then kind of disappeared for almost 40 years, has resurfaced to play surprisingly humorous parts in two hit TV series — “White Lotus” and “Mythic Quest”? The latter is an hilarious satire on a video game company run by the usual assortment of egomaniacs, incompetents, strivers, hangers-on and dreamers that populate corporate America on TV. And beneath the surface of those really funny jokes, the show is remarkably humane and insightful about human nature.

7. The Bear

I don’t know what an Italian Beef Sandwich was before, but after watching this show I’m dying to visit Chicago and have one. “The Bear” is an INTENSE inside look at the workings of a small family-owned restaurant. It’s so realistic that everyone I know who works in a restaurant can’t bear to watch it because of traumatic flashbacks. The latest in a long line of culinary dramas with food and chefs serving as metaphors for Art and Artist respectively. It’s a family drama, too, where the characters repress their feelings and dreams until they explode. I ate it up.

8. Welcome to Wrexham

There’s a lot of entrepreneurial genius in this show, which arrived in the aftermath of Ted Lasso but before the start of the World Cup. Rob McElhenney (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Mythic Quest”) and Ryan Reynolds (“Green Lantern” and “The Proposal”) buy a down-on-their-luck soccer club in Wrexham, Wales and fund its improvements by selling this reality show/documentary to FX. There’s a lot here about what it means to be a sports fan, how a team can embody the heart of a community, and what it’s like to be a professional athlete, an owner, a long-suffering fan, or a general manager. After watching this series there’s nothing I want more in the world now than to attend a Wrexham match

9. Atlanta

“Atlanta” was the most ambitious and innovative series of the last six or seven years, mixing humor, pathos, surrealism and social commentary, sometimes with disconnected episodes that had nothing to do with the main characters, but everything to do with the Black experience in America. When it was good it was very very good but when it was bad it was horrid. Occasionally the experimentation with form and content seemed self-indulgent, but it was never less than thought-provoking. Donald Glover, the creator, is obviously some kind of genius, but he throws so many contradictory ideas on the screen that it’s hard to know what he really thinks beyond: “It’s complicated.”

10. Somebody Somewhere

A sweet and gentle look at a women who returns to her somewhat dysfunctional family in Small Town Nowhere following the death of her sister. Life is complicated, and not always what we wanted or expected, but we can get by with basic decency.

11. The Andy Warhol Diaries

This is a really great documentary about Andy Warhol. Excerpts from his diary are interspersed with interviews with people who knew him. In the end, this is not only a documentary about Warhol but also a fascinating look at the New York art and cultural scene during the sixties, seventies and eighties.

12. The Old Man

Like “The Bear,” “The Old Man” came out of nowhere on FX and gripped a certain class of TV watchers with its complex plot and open-wound drama. This is a show about a mythical CIA, a former agent, a deputy director, a daughter, an Afghan freedom fighter and a lot of killing. Initially gripping, it does go a bit off the rails at the end of the season with the convoluted twists and counter-twists, but it still ended up being seven episodes of gripping TV.

13. The Crown

I was initially put off by Imelda Staunton but quickly came to think she’s the best QEII yet. “The Crown” always has a juicy premise — purportedly exposing the inner workings of the British royal family. But I’d like it better if it didn’t depend quite so much on invented suppositional events, like, say, Charles’s fictitious scheme to depose his mummy. Although beautifully filmed as usual, this season was not as much fun because the Charles/Diana story is so sordid and tragic. (The major surprise is that boring old John Major is acknowledged as a very good PM?)

14. Winning Time

A very entertaining account of the rise of the Lakers and the NBA itself in the 1980s. This suffers more from made-it-up-itis than even “The Crown,” but it’s fun nevertheless, probably because it takes itself less seriously.

15. Derry Girls

“Derry Girls” is a teen comedy about adolescence in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles” in the 1980s. I didn’t think I wanted or needed to see another season, given that — way before COVID — Season 2 had ended so satisfactorily. And while all the characters have now aged out as believable teens, this season was genuinely funny and affecting.

16. Only Murders in the Building

An extremely light and fluffy show that’s mildly interesting and not very challenging but still a pleasant way to pass the time. I’ve already forgotten who committed the murder in the most recent season, but does that really matter? The real pleasure is watching Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez and the Upper West Side interact with each other.

17. Hacks

“Hacks” is another of those unheralded gems on HBO Max. with great performances by Jean Smart (“Designing Women”) as a hacky Las Vegas comedian in the Joan Rivers mode and Hannah Einbinder (aka Lorraine Newman’s daughter) as a down-and-out younger writer who thinks she’s too good to be churning out one-liners. You will not be surprised to learn that they each learn something from the other.

18. Stranger Things

The best moment of the TV season was the sequence featuring a Kate Bush song (“Running Up that Hill”) playing in the background as one of the characters literally hovered between this world and the next. The worst moment of the year occurred five minutes before the end of the final episode when it became clear that this season wasn’t going to be the final one after all. (I also enjoyed the Russians being portrayed as the bad guys, which those commies definitely were.) Going for another season is just a money grab by everyone concerned, given that the series has run out of ideas. Still, the action is exciting, although it does occasionally strain credibility, and being back in the 80’s is definitely fun.

19. Wednesday

As mash-up of “Stranger Things,” “Harry Potter,” “Twilight: and “Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” and based on the Adams Family’s sulky teen daughter. Wednesday is sent to an American Hogwarts knock-off, where she has to deal of the angsty teen emotions of her classmates, none of which she seems to experience herself. Normally, someone who can’t experience emotions is considered a psychopath, and sure enough Wednesday’s inability to trust is inadvertently responsible for the season’s high body count. But she does “grow” throughout the season so I guess it makes sense that she’s not the one sent to an institution in the final episode. The show is definitely fun, although I gather I am way too old to be in its target demographic.

20. South Side

“South Side,” about the antics of the South Side of Chicago, is flat out hilarious, with everyone on the make or the take. Aggressively anti-woke, “South Side” nevertheless treats its characters with respect. They have agency and real human emotions and motivations. I would rate this higher except there’s really no one to root for, making it hard to feel invested.

21. Abbott Elementary

“Abbott Elementary” is a throwback. Its a show on a real televisions network — ABC — that’s actually decent. The setting is a public elementary school in Philadelphia, with the young idealistic teachers pitted against the grizzled veterans. Warm and sweet and occasionally funny.

22. The Last Movie Stars

Ethan Hawke was hired to do a documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward based on unpublished interviews that the great Star had made when planning to write a memoir. Although Newman subsequently destroyed the tapes, transcripts somehow emerged and Hawke hired actors to impersonate the voiceovers of the stars and their family and friends. The documentary is maybe a little long but nevertheless fascinating. It’s a warts-and-all portrayal of a famous couple who seemed to have a perfect marriage but definitely didn’t.

23. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Like “Stranger Things,” there’s no reason to expand this season for another year, but that’s where we ended up. It’s pleasant to watch, but the tics of these fast-talking wisecracking caricatures are starting to wear thin. Love the Sixties milieu, though.

24. Bridgerton

Beautiful mind candy. Just turn it on and look at all all the pretty characters and don’t think too hard about the plot. It’s not really that interesting, clever, or hard to figure out, but just good enough that you want to see how it resolves itself. And of course there’s all that sex.

25. Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy

Talk about food and travel porn! It’s almost painful to watch this show because the food looks so delicious and the locations so spectacular, that I feel sad knowing I’ll never experience either.

26. Killing Eve

Another series that lasted about a season too long. This was one of the most interesting and original series for a while, with great acting and a gripping premise, but the extremely convoluted plot eventually got tiresome and all the gruesomely graphic murders started to make me queasy.

27. Star Struck

I watched this series in January and had to look up what it was all about, which is this: a movie star unexpectedly falls in love when a very ordinary woman and no one can quite believe it. HER!!!??? The show is British, and consequently understated and reasonably witty. I remember liking it when I watched it but obviously it didn’t make a big impression.

28. We Are Lady Parts

Four young London-based Muslim women find solidarity by performing in a punk band while trying to fit into their own culture. The characters rang from devout to rebellious and as in most sitcoms, they are so different that they’d never be friends in real life. Despite the seemingly inventive premise, “Lady Parts” is really a traditional comedy with fairly obvious jokes and plot lines. A nice amusing show, but not deep.

29. What We Do In the Shadows

“What We Do In The Shadows,” has been one of the most hilarious and inventive shows over the past few years, featuring four clueless vampires living in a creepy house on Staten Island. But the schtick, which involves casual heartlessness about the way so many victims die, now seems tired and even sour. They should have quit after three seasons.

30. Saturday Night Live

Regrettably, a flat year. The cast lacks star power and do we still need so many skits about Donald Trump? You’d never know someone else was president. I’m sure Lorne Michaels is desperately holding onto the show so he can make it to the 50th anniversary in two years, but everything needs to be sharper and funnier if that’s going to happen.

Fortunate One — Chapter 6 — Ellis Brett Part 1

The following is an excerpt from my memoir Fortunate One, with some content from the chapters on my elementary school Ellis Brett. The book is on sale at Amazon here, or contact me directly for an autographed copy.

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Chapter 6 — Ellis Brett, Part 1

I’m sure the wooden, two-story Ellis Brett elementary school had been a state-of-the-art educational facility back in 1895, but when I started first grade in 1960 it was an anachronism, consisting of twelve airy classrooms. In the middle of each floor was a wide-open, all-purpose area that functioned as performance space, temporary nursing station, or visiting library as needed. Each classroom had a high ceiling, lots of windows, and an exterior door leading out to an iron fire escape. Although we never sheltered under our desks to prepare for a nuclear attack, we did regularly scamper outside for fire drills — and a good thing too because the building, dry as a pile of Arizona mesquite, might have burst into flames at the drop of a match.

I lived half a mile away, so I walked myself to school. Every morning I stopped at the Perdikis house to pick up Jimmy, after which we continued on together. No one thought it strange to see two six-year-olds strolling down Pleasant Street (aka Route 27), which, with its whizzing cars and lumbering trucks, was one of Brockton’s major thoroughfares. There were no flashing lights to warn drivers about school crossing either. Why bother?  When we got to Belair Street, we met our school custodian and crossing guard Mr. Kundis, who made sure we got to the other side of the street without being flattened. No problem!

The second day of school turned out to be one of the most crucial days of my life. Recognizing an unbalance between the two new first-grade classes (mine had 42 students and the other had 38), our principal entered the classroom to announce that since Freddie Tedesco and I were the last two students to register we were being moved to the other first grade class. That was the domain of Miss Marsha Lindsay, a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties. This is where I met my two best friends, who would shape and influence me and remain the center of my social life through high school and beyond. 

Miss Lindsay’s room was set up with about twenty little two-person desks, one of which I was assigned to share with Philip Tasho, a black-haired Albanian-American who served as the best man at my wedding three decades later. We didn’t get off to the greatest start, though. One day he scribbled on my side of the desk and tried to blame me. Not made for a life of crime, he cracked under close questioning by Miss Lindsay, confessed to the whole thing, and ended up weeping during lunch break as he erased all traces of his transgression.

He had his revenge mid-year, though, when we changed desk partners and he was assigned to sit with the class’s six-year-old heart-throb Jaye Jantamaso, who in a room of Debbies, Susans, Marys, and Kathys, was adorable in the way that baby chipmunks are adorable. On the walk home that bitter day, it was my turn to weep at the essential unfairness of the universe, which would allow the undeserving Philip Tasho to sit next to Jaye Jantamaso. 

The Jantamaso fiasco aside, I generally liked first grade, and not just because I could freebase the white paste that Miss Lindsay handed out for craft projects. I liked almost everything about my six years at Ellis Brett, as decrepit as the physical structure was. I was reasonably bright and eager to please and teachers took to me. The school provided old-fashioned 3-Rs education, with kids arranged in neat rows and teachers standing in front of blackboards. This kind of instruction suited me, but there were a few kids, mostly over-energized boys, who couldn’t really adapt. They ran around when they should have been sitting still. We considered them naughty. In second grade our teacher’s frustration with one kid named Douglas boiled over and she tied him to his chair. Somehow she wasn’t fired or sued, but this was a never-to-be-repeated punishment. Deemed to have behavioral problems stemming from his parents’ divorce, he emerged in a rage from a vexing one-on-one session with a visiting school psychologist one day, sputtering that the “asshole” asked too many questions about his mother, and vowing to “kick him in the nuts” if he ever did that again. I didn’t exactly know what that meant but by this time I’d learned not to repeat expressions said in that tone of voice.

The days and years at Ellis Brett were full of rhythms and rituals. In the mornings we arrived at the school a few minutes early and ran around in the expansive playground. When the bell rang, we formed lines by class and gender before being escorted to our classrooms — the boys through the boys’ bathroom in the basement and the girls through their own bathrooms. Once ensconced in our classroom, the first thing on the agenda was the Pledge of Allegiance, guided by one honored child who would lead the class as we stood to face the flag with our hands over our hearts. We then sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” This was followed by an opening prayer. In deference to the many Jewish students in our school, we recited a passage from the Old Testament, which is how I came to memorize both the 23rd and 100th Psalms. This practice lasted until 1963, when school prayer was outlawed by the Supreme Court. All the adults seemed to agree that it was a damn shame that some atheist crank could deny the rest of us this moment of grace. 

My third grade teacher, Miss Hazel Bond, was particularly incensed. She’d been teaching elementary school since Calvin Coolidge was president and could have given my grandmother lessons in how to dress like an old lady. I am now half a decade older than she was then but with that prune face she seemed so ancient I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that she’d had a pterodactyl as a pet. Politically, she might as well have been a member of the John Birch Society, based on the running commentary she provided about contemporary society. She railed against the Court and asserted that we would continue to pray in defiance of the entire federal government. That didn’t last long. 

At lunchtime, those of us who walked to school returned home, once again braving the dangers of the Pleasant Street traffic. Fully nourished, we returned an hour later for ANOTHER death-defying walk to school. The unfortunate kids who took the bus to school ate their lunch at their desks. When it snowed and was deemed too dangerous to walk to and from school twice in one day, the entire class brought lunch and ate at their desks. Those were always fun days, despite the classroom’s lingering sour-milk and damp-wool smell. Crucially, I got to use my barn-themed lunchbox, which carried a thermos of chocolate milk where the hayloft would have been. 

The sorting among the “smart” and “slow” kids started immediately. For reading, math and music, we were divided into four different groups according to ability. Not having been to kindergarten and lacking instruction in any academic subject, I was assigned to the second reading group. Within a month, I had learned so quickly that I was moved in with the smarter kids in the first group. Reading came easily and I quickly learned its value. One day at home, I picked up a TV Guide and a lightbulb went off: I knew so many of the words that I could figure out what would be on TV!

Our report cards covered over a dozen areas, ranging from social development to academic performance. There were three grades: G, for “good,” AV for “average,” and U for “unsatisfactory.”  Each subject had three to six sub-categories of achievement, where the teacher could mark an N for “needs improvement.”  My grades were decent but when I found my old report cards stashed away in my mother’s desk a few years ago, I discovered they weren’t as good as I remembered. I didn’t get any U’s, to be sure, but I never swept the board with G’s as my memory had led me to believe.

I always got G’s in deportment and was reprimanded only once, in the third grade, by Miss Bond, who terrorized all the boys in our class. She had a habit of calling malefactors to the front of the room, grabbing their chins in her bony fingers and berating them for their many sins. If she was really annoyed she’d use her knuckles to hit up, up, up from beneath the chin, slamming her victim’s teeth together. Usually she directed her ire at the usual group of overactive misbehavers who have been making trouble since first grade, but one day I entered her line of fire. She was a demon about school property and I had dropped one of my books on the ground and scuffed the cover. There was also a slightly torn page. She seized my chin in her pincers and accused me of being careless and negligent.

As someone whose life-long ambition is never to be reprimanded for anything, I arrived home for lunch agitated and distraught, nearly weeping when I recounted the injustice to my mother. To be manhandled in front of the entire class and for what? Some very minor wear and tear to a book that had resulted from an honest accident?  

Back at school after lunch, I was summoned to the principal’s office and told to bring my book. To my astonishment there sat my mother, who had apparently marched down to the school to find out what the heck was happening in that classroom. The principal, Mrs. Evelyn McCarthy, a very professional fifty-something educator with eyeglasses that hung from her neck in a beaded string, asked to see the damaged item in question and then used about an inch of scotch tape to repair the slightly torn page. She gently explained to me, although not in these exact words: look, you have to understand, Miss Bond is, well, OLD and you can’t take everything she says seriously. OK? Oh, OK. I was glad to know that even adults realized Miss Bond was an old bat, but my most important takeaway from this incident was that my mother had my back. She would never take my side if I was in the wrong but knowing that you have that kind of unspoken support from a parent when you are in the right is crucial for any child.

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For more on my adventures at Ellis Brett buy the book here.

Wordle at 200

Is Wordle still a thing? For a few months last winter it was all anyone could talk about or post on Facebook. Or rather, it was about the only thing in this politically polarized moment that everyone could discuss without pulling each other’s hair out. (And even that was dicey. One morning the answer was initially ABORT, which was itself aborted at about 2:00 a.m. for a less sensitive five-letter word.)

Wordle was so popular that TheRinger.com had a whole interview with Kamala Harris to discuss her game strategy. Apparently the Vice President’s go-to starter word is NOTES. She also claimed that she’d never missed solving the problem, although conveniently she can’t share her squares to confirm this because she uses a super-secure, triple-encrypted, anti-spy phone. I would certainly not imply that a politician is stretching the truth but I find the whole story a bit fishy, especially since NOTES is such a mediocre-to-bad starter word (having that S at the end is not very strategic because Wordle doesn’t use plural words as answers. STONE would be a much better word if you wanted to use those same letters.)

I know some people continue to play Wordle because I still see the Facebook posts, but I don’t know whether this is a fad that has largely burned out or if it’s turned into a habit so regular that it’s no longer worth mentioning.

I, for one, am still at it. It gives me something to do at 3:00 am, when I have insomnia, and it provides my wife and me something to talk about every morning. More important, by helping me break my addiction to the NYT Crossword puzzle, which was occupying hours of my time by the end of the week, Wordle — and its big brother Quordle — turned out to be the puzzle version of Methadone. Apparently all I need is ten to twenty minutes of word scrambling a day to get my fix

I reflect on all this now because I just played my 200th game. I wish I could be prouder of my record, though. I have a 97 win percentage, which means I’ve lost six times — much worse than Kamala Harris (supposedly!) Some of these failed attempts were bad luck, like the time I identified four in-place letters but they were _IGHT, leaving my potential solutions as SIGHT, MIGHT, LIGHT FIGHT, RIGHT, NIGHT, and TIGHT. Then there was the time I had _0_ER after two guesses but still guessed wrong on my next four tries. When the word LOSER then popped up, I thought WORDLE was insulting me rather than providing the correct answer. (I guess this was my penance for using URINE as my starter word.)

I thought Wordle was trolling me but it turned out that LOSER was the answer.

In my defense, I deliberately create an extra degree of difficulty for myself with starter words. Actually, I don’t understand why people always use the same starter word. Once you’ve figured out that ADIEU has four vowels, what’s the fun of that? Rather than stagnate with the same starter, I deploy a different one every day. To discipline myself I go through the alphabet in order, starting with AVOID and working my way through to ZEBRA. I specifically seek out the words that amuse me, like MOIST, LOUSY, JUICY, SAUCY, WEIRD, ROACH, ODIUM, NASTY, or HAIRY.

This leads to a few surprises. I’ve learned for example, how few five-letter, non-plural words begin with E. And of course it’s particularly hard to find starter words that begin in X or Z. Although occasionally this strategy will pay off (see below)

Who knew that XRAYS was such a good starter word?

How long will I stick with Wordle? I did the New York Times crossword puzzle every Sunday through Friday for ten years before I fell down, broke my dominant arm last January and then couldn’t hold a pen to write out the answers for months. Maybe I’ll stick with Wordle and Quordle until I break my thumbs.

Fortunate One Chapter 16 — Returning to Nantucket

[This is an excerpt from my memoir “FORTUNATE ONE: From Nantucket to The White House.” which is available for sale at the local Nantucket bookstores. This excerpt addresses my return to Nantucket in the mid-1970’s to run Channel 3, the local cable channel that my parents had bought from Nantucket Cablevision.]

The Nantucket I remembered from visiting my grandparents in the mid-1960s was not the place I found in the winter of 1977, when I took command at Channel 3. Like Brockton, it was caught up in economic and social forces beyond its control, but the island’s increasingly bright trajectory was almost the opposite of the ongoing immiseration of my hometown.

For decades, Nantucket had been a sedate, cash-poor, seaside outpost, living on the memory of its whaling era riches and supported by WASPy summer people who were happy to keep a low profile, quietly sip their gin and tonics at the yacht club, wear shabby clothes around town, and navigate the local waters in unpretentious wooden sailboats. In the summers of the 1960s, you could still drive to the end of Straight Wharf, then little more than a paved parking lot jutting out into the harbor. Once there, you’d buy an ice cream cone at the snack bar and sit in your car to gaze out at the boats hypnotically bobbing at their moorings. The big event of the week was the band concert on Sunday night, when we crowded around a temporary wooden platform erected on Main Street’s cobblestones to listen to an ebullient woman in a man’s white suit and narrow black necktie conduct a program borrowing heavily from the middlebrow Boston Pops repertoire. Those quaint, innocent, small-town pleasures had all vanished when I moved back.

The country’s post-war economic boom created a much larger millionaire class with significantly more time and money to spend on recreation. This was the insight of a rich summer resident, Walter Beinecke, an heir to the S&H Green Stamp fortune and the controlling investor in the “Christmas Club” business. In the late 1960s, he started buying up the town’s waterfront, biggest hotels, and fanciest restaurants. The ancient wharves, home first to whaling ships and later to commercial fishing boats, suddenly sprouted high-end retail stores, art galleries, and a world-class boat basin. It was a Disneyland version of a maritime village but it prevented the island from becoming a ticky-tacky tourist trap like Hyannis or Provincetown.

This strategy worked spectacularly well. Beinecke’s savvy understanding of the new upper crust’s aspirations, combined with the legitimate charm of Nantucket’s historic pre-Civil War mansions and its remote, windswept natural beauty, quickly remade Nantucket into a major East Coast resort and playground for the rich, on par with the Hamptons, Hilton Head, and Palm Beach.

As the money poured into the island, so did a brigade of retirees, lawyers, doctors, artists, real estate agents, general contractors, bartenders, and hair stylists—people who had once enjoyed the island for its summer charms but had decided to make Nantucket their year-round home. From 1970 to 1980, the island’s winter population grew by 50 percent, to more than 5,000 people.

Chief among the new blood that flooded into Nantucket during the 1970s was my Uncle Wayne, my father’s younger brother. He had worked his way through Mercer University in Georgia after graduating as the “most likely to succeed” from Nantucket High School with my parents in the class of 1950. He had subsequently married my Aunt Lee, the daughter of Roy Sanguinetti, Nantucket’s most prominent attorney. Wayne became a lawyer himself, initially slaving away on soulless corporate legal staffs in Pennsylvania and Ohio. After growing tired of the mainland rat race, he moved the family back to the island and took over his retiring father-in-law’s legal practice at a time when there were only three lawyers on the island. Smart and sharp-elbowed, he became the attorney for many of the island’s leading businesses and quickly established himself as one of the town’s most dominant politicians, ultimately serving on almost every important town board.

Until I arrived on Nantucket, I didn’t realize what an important and sometimes polarizing figure Wayne had become. Nor did I understand immediately why people would be wary that he had effectively gained operating control of one of the island’s few news outlets. I quickly intuited that if I ran into people who didn’t like him, which was frequently the case, I should emphasize that I was myself a native and that my parents were the more down-to-earth Quentin Holmes and Jean Harris—remember them? Or maybe I’d mention that I had Nantucket relatives on both sides of the family, including my grandfather Arthur Harris and my other uncle, Arthur “Brother” Harris. In a place like Nantucket where genealogies mattered, I was happy to play the “native” card when I needed to. 

The business we had bought, known as Channel 3 because of its location on the cable line-up, was just a penny-ante operation. Nevertheless, we incorporated the business as the Nantucket Broadcasting Company and created an NBC logo because Wayne thought it would be great publicity if the real NBC sued us for copyright infringement, which alas, they never bothered to do. Located in the narrow basement of a former house on Federal Street, underneath an electronics store called “The Electric Mainsail,” Channel 3’s assets consisted of two video cameras, several monitors, and some aging transmission equipment. The “studio” was located at the far end of the cellar, with a curtain to cover up the stone foundation and a video set that accommodated a two-person plywood desk for newscasts. To be honest, we got ripped off. Cablevision should have paid us to take the operation off their hands, not the other way around. 

Channel 3 had one full-time employee, Jason, a sullen tech guy a couple years older than me who was rightfully wary about my qualifications to run a TV station. Before I arrived, Wayne recruited two local women to be the TV news anchors—Lillian Waine, the 60-something wife of a local electrician and a homespun, amateur winter thespian, and Nancy Burns, a late-20s, big blonde personality from the Boston suburbs, who was socially connected to the arty and moneyed summer crowd.

The idea was that I would report and write the news for a 15-minute Monday through Friday news broadcast at 5:30pm. I’d type the stories on my typewriter and hand them to Nancy and Lilian at 5:00pm for a quick read-through before going live. We’d try to break up the verbal narration with video segments recorded earlier in the day on three quarter inch tape—it was usually an interview I’d conducted but it could also be music from a kids’ concert, a scene from a school play, or a birthday party from the nursing home. There was frequent tension on the set because Nancy aspired to be a polished, Leslie-Stahl-like newscaster and she chafed at Lilian’s folksy, grandmotherly delivery, with its touches of Minnie Pearl. 

After the news, we offered a series of 15-minute shows that Jason would produce: a man-in-the-street interview segment (On the Street Where You Live with Al Fee, whose day job was an assistant manager at the local First National supermarket), a program on local architecture, or a public affairs interview show that Wayne hosted. Jason would also be responsible for live broadcasting local high school football and basketball games (boys only, since the sponsoring booster club was only interested in one gender), as well as the annual town meeting and other important civic events.

Most of these shows were marginally supported by advertising, but to cover all the bills, we had to figure out how to squeeze more ad dollars out of the local merchants. Considering how much money was floating around town, this should have been easy, but I was from the “You don’t want to buy an ad, do you?” school of salesmanship. For a while, Lilian tried to sell ads and then we hired other sales people, but since there were no TV ratings, most of the local businesses didn’t see the value. Some of them would throw us a few crumbs from their leftover marketing dollars as a civic goodwill gesture, not unlike their sponsorship of a local Little League team, but we never cracked the big ad budgets. 

Despite having never previously written one line of news copy, I became a decent reporter. In the very early days, I got a lot of tips from Wayne, who knew all the town government gossip. In fact, thanks to him, I broke major news on our very first broadcast—that the disgruntled members of the police department were unionizing and joining the Teamsters. That was a classic small town news story, growing out of years of petty grievances, hurt feelings, and personal conflict. The selectman had recently recruited as their new police chief a well-credentialed but decidedly off-island law enforcement officer who ended a two century-long string of homegrown, good old boy top guns. The new guy was not popular with the dozen or so officers serving under him. They didn’t like it that he and the captain wore professional-looking white shirts instead of the gray uniforms that were good enough for the rest of them. Nor did they like it that he was recruiting new officers from off-island. And there were conflicts over shift assignments and a general feeling of disrespect. There were also nasty rumors, almost certainly unsubstantiated, that his wife was seen alone at the Chicken Box, the town’s ill-reputationed dive bar.

In a small town, the cops are celebrities, and the activities of the police department were a major focus of the island’s attention in those days. With only three national channels to watch on broadcast television, the police scanner was one of the island’s most important sources of entertainment, especially on long winter nights. Everyone had an opinion on what the cops did. In the end, the anti-chief turmoil was like almost everything else I covered as a local reporter: there was the surface news and the more interesting story-behind-the-story. For example, three meter maids (all sisters nicknamed “Charlie’s Angels” because of their father’s given name) were having affairs with three members of the force. Even though these were local women stepping out with local men married to local wives, somehow the outsider chief got blamed for letting his department become a little Peyton Place. But obviously none of this ever made it into print or on the air.

I tried to ingratiate myself with my new sources in the town building, the selectmen, the school committee, the police and fire departments, and the business community. Sometimes, I’d pick up some interesting historical tidbits. This is the kind of ancient anecdote you’d hear: the Chairman of the Planning Board was nicknamed “Hosey,” which I thought was a play on the name José; but no, he got his nickname in the high school locker room because his male member was alleged to be as long as a hose. 

Some sources became friends, particularly Madelyne Perry, the town clerk. Her son, slightly older than I was, had recently died in a car crash and she treated me as a surrogate son. She knew generations of island gossip and I’d hang out in her office to learn not only how the town actually worked, but also what children had been fathered by someone other than the men raising them, or which local officials had been enemies since birth. There’s a game Nantucketers play: “Who are their people?” If I asked about a woman on the planning board, Madelyne would say, “Well, she was a Holdgate,” and tell me who her parents and grandparents were and which of her multiple Holdgate brothers and sisters still lived on Nantucket and who they dated in high school. And I ate it up.

The 2021 Pre-Oscars Movie List

Here we go again. Another strange year in cinema, where the existential question of what it even means to BE a movie is open for discussion. Case in point — the most powerful and absorbing filmic experience of 2021 was Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary “Get Back.” Was that eight-hour, three-part, mind-blowing experience a “movie” or “TV show”? Dunno. But because it was really neither, it’s not on this list nor on my post of top TV shows either (which can be read here).

We can obviously blame some of the year’s weirdness on the pandemic. You couldn’t even GO to the movies for the first third of 2021 and even when they allowed you in the theatre, you practically needed to wear a Hazmat suit. But a bigger problem is that consumers have just gotten out the habit of treating the movies as a social experience to be shared with other human beings. It’s just so much easier and cheaper to stream a movie at home, so why go out?

I respect that Old Hollywood is doing what it can to hang on, and that it held back some of its most highly anticipated would-be blockbusters for the big screen. But most of them — “West Side Story” and that James Bond movie, for example — ended up being well-made and beautifully shot disappointments.

What’s also distorted about this list is that I didn’t even see most of last year’s best movies until calendar year 2022, which is why I waited to publish this until a week before the Oscars. Unless you lived in Manhattan or Hollywood it was hard to see them in 2021, since many producers delayed their releases in the mostly vain hope that they’d generate some late-year Oscar buzz.

Having said that, I’m reasonably happy with the what I did manage to see this year. I really like my Top Five movies, which makes me hopeful that there’s still a little life left in the old art form. Fingers crossed that the pandemic is really over now and that grown-up movie lovers will return to theaters.

1. Licorice Pizza

The protagonist is named Gary. Need I say more? Set in Hollywood during the early 1970s oil embargo, Gary is an aging child star, a cany entrepreneur, and a 15-year-old romantic who has his eyes set on a woman ten years his senior. Everyone understands this is weird and maybe even illegal but it’s still endearing. And to be honest, I too am in love with Alana Haim, the object of his desire, so I get it. The other great thing about Licorice Pizza is that it’s the funniest film of the year, despite technically not being a comedy.

2. CODA

I almost made this my number one pick but decided that Licorice Pizza was more interesting, even though CODA was the movie that produced the tears. CODA stands for Child Of Deaf Adults and the protagonist is a high school senior forced to chose between staying home to support her family’s fishing business or going to college to pursue a vocal career. It’s more than a bit manipulative but who cares? Sometimes it just feels so good to be manipulated.

3. Tick Tick Boom

Before Jonathan Larson created “Rent,” he wrote another (unproduced) musical — Tick Tick Boom — about being a starving artist in New York City during the worst of the AIDS crisis. Now directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the movie is surprisingly innovative, so although the songs are not familiar the musical is still engaging. And to be honest, even if you weren’t a struggling artist at age 30, you probably were a struggling something, which makes this deeply affecting.

4. Belfast

Kenneth Branagh’s coming of age story about a boy in Protestant Ulster during the North Ireland “troubles.” His dad is targeted by the Provos for being insufficiently anti-Catholic and the story revolves around the question of whether the family will move from the home they love. But even as the bombs go off around him, the young, seemingly untraumatized, Branagh stand-in is having a charmed childhood, like something out of James Joyce. So when the movie is not tense it’s very sweet.

5. Summer of Soul

Terrific documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which featured Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, The Fifth Dimension, the Staple Singers, Gladys Night and the Pips, Sly and the Family Stone and the Chambers Brothers. Obviously the music is fantastic and the flashback to 1969 is always welcome.

6. In the Heights

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda created “Hamilton,” there was “In the Heights,” a remarkably conventional Broadway show about life in New York’s Washington Heights. The film, directed by “Crazy Rich Asians” director John M. Chu, is a highly romanticized view of urban life. Why would anyone ever want to leave? The exuberant musical numbers are the highlight, followed by the very likeable stars.

7. Dune

This is “Star Wars” for adults. No jokes and don’t get attached to any character because almost everyone dies. It’s more visually beautiful than “Star Wars,” and the world-building in more believable. On the other hand, while not impossible, it’s pretty hard to follow the plot without having read the book first. Subtitles would have helped a lot.

8. West Side Story

I was more conflicted over this than any other movie this year. Every single musical number was thrillingly beautiful, which made me regret that Steven Spielberg didn’t make more musicals, but while I was watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder why this movie needed to be remade. The original was pretty terrific. What’s next? “The Sound of Music” with Taylor Swift?

9. Free Guy

What happens when a character in a video game starts to develop self-awareness and intelligence? This extremely clever premise powers “Free Guy,” with Ryan Reynolds as “Guy,” an initially clueless bank teller who thinks every day is great until there’s a glitch in the program. Consequence-free action and amusement ensues. This is very professionally produced entertainment.

10. Cry Macho

Clint Eastwood, a retired ranch hand, is hired by his old boss to find his young son in Mexico and return him to Texas. From decades of watching Eastwood movies, we know that Clint is a softy and will develop feelings for the boy. There will also be car chases, some horse-whispering, family drama and even an age-appropriate romance for Clint. It is astonishing that this guy is still directing and starring in movies at 90 years old!

11. The Mitchells vs. the Machines

One of those animated movies that’s kind of for adults and kind of for kids, “M vs M” envisions a world in which a Jeff Bezos-like megalomaniac unleashes all the robots in creation to take over the world. Standing in the way is one slightly dysfunctional family that pulls together to save humanity. This has the same antic energy and emotional power of “Toy Story,” except that in this case the lump in the throat comes from the prospect of the older daughter heading off to college.

12. Power of the Dog

Who let the dog out of the closet? By far the weirdest movie of the year, with Benedict Cumberbatch as a psychologically twisted co-owner of a massive cattle ranch who makes life miserable for everyone when his brother takes a widow as his bride. There’s some serious sexual dysfunction happening here and yet it’s compelling and absorbing. I do not get why this captured so many Academy Award nominations and is the favorite to win.

13. King Richard

A very ordinary sports movie about the rise of Venus and Serena Williams with all the usual cliches. Richard Williams, played by Will Smith, is their hard-charging dad, who is a pain in the ass to the stuffy tennis establishment. Like all sports movies, this is inspirational. There are hardships to overcome, especially the fact that the family comes from Black Compton and not the white, country club-strewn suburbs. Of course the problem with valorizing a monomaniacal sports dad like Richard Williams is that it inspires the millions of other sports dads who think THEIR kids are also sports prodigies.

14. Being the Ricardos

Aaron Sorkin knows how to weave together a handful of actual facts to form a narrative that contains a semblance of truth without all the messy nuances that might complicate the story. So what we have here is a week in the life of Lucy and Desi in which: 1) Lucy is accused of being a communist, and 2) Lucy finds proof of Desi’s infidelities. Both these things happened in real life, but in one week and in such a tidy fable? Probably not. Nicole Kidman is OK with her Lucy impersonation. Javier Bardem lacks Desi’s charm and charisma.

15. Drive My Car

This plot — famous actor/director mourns the death of his wife, produces Uncle Vanya, broods a lot, stares out the window at the frozen landscape as he’s being driven to someone else’s sad memory — would have been perfect for Ingmar Bergman. It’s lovely and meditative but not for the impatient.

16. No Time to Die

Jerry Seinfeld has a funny joke — “If you have a license to kill, and every girl in the world wants to go to bed with you, how about a smile once in a while?” I find myself increasingly bored with Bond; not only can I barely follow the plot but where’s the fun? Obviously this is well produced with excellent car chases, but we can lose everything in between. Also, the ending? That would be a hard no.

17. The Truffle Hunters

I have a special affection for this gentle documentary about the elderly residents of a small Italian town who search for truffles in the forest because it was the first movie I saw at my beloved Avon Theatre when it reopened after phase one of the pandemic. It’s a trifle of a movie, a bagatelle really, but still a pleasure.

18. Limbo

I’m astonished to watch the trailer after having seen the film and discover they were pitching it as a comedy. In reality, I felt sad from the first frame. Omar is a Syrian refugee caught in bureaucratic limbo in Scotland. He desperately needs to gain official legal standing so he can work and begin a new life. He’s a mope and who can blame him, spending his days in lame ESL class and wandering the countryside. Yet he’s one of the lucky ones. There are tens of millions of refugees that never even make it to the West.

19. The Worst Person in the World

Julie, a lovely thirtysomething Dane with unfocused artistic aspirations, can’t decide what to do with her career or love life. To me, as an older adult, the stakes seem small, since you know she’ll figure it out. Yet Julie’s situation also feels real since some people really do feel lost in their twenties (see Tick Tick Boom above).

20. The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground were just a little before my time so until now I never really understood why they were so important to the development of Rock ‘n Roll. So thanks, documentarians, for educating me. I also really enjoyed flashing back to the downtown scene in the early 1960s, when underground culture seemed to be so vibrant and was on the verge of going mainstream.

21. Listening to Kenny G

Quite a thought-provoking documentary on what makes Kenny G one of the most popular musicians in the world. The guy does have an amazing story, but at the risk of being one of the snobs called to task in the documentary, a little bit of Kenny G goes a long way.

22. Good on Paper

One of the few purported romcoms of the year, this is actually an anti-romcom. There’s no emotional pay-off, just frustration. Folks, here’s a hint about romance, investment opportunities, and house-hunting: if something looks too good to be true, it usually is.

23. Don’t Look Up

Wow, what a lot of talent to waste on a garbage movie. Leo, J. Law, Meryl, Timothee, Cate, Ariana, that guy who played Cromwell in Wolf Hall. Ostensibly a hard-hitting satire on government and the media, as well as an allegory on climate change, this would-be comedy forgot to be funny or even plausible.

24. The French Dispatch

I wanted to walk out of this movie after five minutes but since I’d paid for tickets I stayed until the end. This extremely arch and self-satisfied depiction of a New Yorker-like magazine based in France is Wes Anderson at his whimsical worst. I wanted to pluck my eyes out. And yet somehow it made it onto many critics’ Top Ten lists. As Wallace Shawn said in The Princess Bride, “inconceivable!!!!”

Chapter 1 of “Fortunate One”

This is the “hospital” where I was born

Today is my birthday so I thought I’d post the chapter from my memoir “Fortunate One: From Nantucket to the White House” that describes my birth. The book is available on Amazon here:

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On the day of my birth—13 months into the Eisenhower presidency and six months before Elvis released his first hit record—my very pregnant mother woke up feeling so odd that she stayed home instead of driving out to milk the cows. Only 21 years old, she and my 22-year-old father owned a small dairy about five miles out of town on the flat and then-deserted south shore of Nantucket Island. Yes, in those days, Nantucket had a dairy farmer, and that farmer was my father.

Early in her pregnancy, my mother asked her doctor when she should go to the hospital. His answer? “You’ll know.” This was in the benighted days before “What to Expect” books, Lamaze classes, and sonograms, but he was right. As the day of March 5th, 1954 wore on, she did, in fact, know that the time had come.

Returning from his milking duties at noon, my father discovered what he surely must have suspected when he left a few hours earlier—that his young wife was in the early stages of labor. My mother, not knowing when she’d eat again, prepared a robust lunch that they ate together, and then, after one last cigarette to calm her nerves, asked to be driven to the hospital.

Her destination—the original Nantucket Cottage Hospital—was neither a cottage nor a hospital as we’d understand the terms today. Imagine your grandmother’s house, but outfitted with a few hospital beds and some medical equipment. That’s what this was, a rudimentary medical facility created in 1912 out of a pair of weathered two-story 18th century houses. Connecting these former dwellings was a passageway that served as entrance, lobby, business center, and reception area. Turn right from the front door and you’d end up in the nurses’ residence; turn left and you’d enter the medical care part of the facility.

My mother had been born in this very building two decades earlier—delivered in fact by the same physician, Dr. Ernest Menges, who met her there later that afternoon. Not much about birth rituals had changed since my mother’s own birth, especially the role of fathers. In keeping with the iron law of mid-century obstetrics, my father’s participation in the birthing process consisted solely of depositing his wife at the front desk. With that task successfully accomplished, there was nothing else for him to do but drive back to the farm for the afternoon milking and pensively await the phone call announcing whether he’d become the proud father of a girl or a boy.

The hospital staff directed my mother from the front desk to a small room across the hall where she herself had been born. This chamber was used by two types of patients: women in labor and terminal patients who were not expected to live long; functioning, in other words, as Nantucket’s version of the circle of life.

The only people in attendance for my birth were Dr. Menges and two nurses, one of whom was my father’s maiden lady aunt, Edith Holmes, the hospital’s gentle, capable, and cheerful head of nursing. Mothers and best friends did not come rushing over with temple massages and heating pads to provide moral support. And if a midwife had arrived, she would have been treated like a witch doctor and driven into the street.

I’m told that the birth itself—at 7:15pm—was unremarkable, consisting mostly of contractions, cooling compresses, and at the end, a whiff of gas to numb the pain and induce outright unconsciousness. Soon after the deed was done, I was whisked away to the nursery while my mother slowly regained consciousness. She was then walked to a small, three-bed women’s ward on the second floor and wasn’t allowed to see me until the following morning. The umbilical cord was definitely not put in cold storage for future use.

The bill for the delivery—there was no insurance—came to $150.

No one arrived at the hospital the next day with a camera to capture my first gurgles and I escaped the nursery only sporadically for tightly regulated bottle feedings. Even my father was denied a glance of his firstborn until the next day’s visiting hours and not a moment sooner.

My parents named me Gary, although until the last minute, I was going to be Glenn. My mother was looking for a given name that theoretically couldn’t be shortened into a nickname. My uncle had the perfectly respectable birth name of James and she believed a grown man should not have the misfortune of being stuck with a diminutive like “Jimmy” all his life. She switched at the last minute, reasoning there is no cutesy moniker for Gary either. Alas, there is almost no name, no matter how short or monosyllabic, that cannot be made into a nickname, and various friends would later call me “Gare.” My wife takes it a step further, sometimes calling me “Ga” when she’s feeling particularly affectionate. (For what it’s worth, my brother-in-law calls his best friend “Glenny,” so there’s no winning this game.)

Despite being completely healthy, I didn’t leave the hospital for a week—after which I was driven home by my father, cradled in my mother’s arms as she sat in the car’s front seat, completely unprotected by not-yet-invented seat belts or infant car seats. Modern mothers who are familiar with being dumped onto the street after one night in the maternity wing might be interested to know that 1950s best practices required the mother to remain in the hospital for at least seven days to recover from the rigors of labor. In this regard, she was luckier than my grandmother, who, having given birth in the 1930s, was sentenced to two whole weeks of hospital bed rest. She later claimed those were the two most boring weeks of her life.

Naturally, there were no televisions or radios—never mind internet devices—to amuse young mothers as they lay in the women’s ward, but my mother considered herself relatively fortunate because she occupied the bed nearest the window and could look out to West Chester Street to see who was arriving and leaving the hospital.

A few days after I was born, I had company in the nursery. Another young mother had also delivered a baby boy. This small detail never came up until three decades later, when I heard that Nantucket had just recorded its first murder since the Civil War. My mother casually informed me that the perpetrator and I had been born practically at the same time and had even shared space in the nursery. She remembered being in the women’s ward with his mother.

It turned out that my first roommate, a hardened townie, had been in and out of trouble with the law for most of his life. Arrested for receiving stolen property at 17; arrested again for fighting with a police officer at 24. Now, at age 29, he had shot a long-time adversary in the stomach, becoming the protagonist in a case that drew national attention thanks to the mystery novel headlines: “A Murder on Nantucket.” Eventually he was convicted of premeditated murder, had the sentence reduced to manslaughter, and was retried and convicted a second time before being sentenced to 14-20 years in Walpole state prison.

For most people, this story was a curiosity. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about were the vagaries of fate. The two of us slept next to each other right out of the womb and never saw each other again. His family had stayed put on Nantucket with its insular and sometimes grievance-filled culture; mine had moved away, where I’d had all the advantages of an upwardly mobile household. What if the nurses had mixed us up in our bassinets? Would I have turned out to be a murderer? How is it, I wondered, that two babies lying side by side in the same nursery, born to two local working class mothers from similar backgrounds and with similar prospects, could end up in such different places?

Not for the first time, I observed that life is just one roll of the dice after another.