What I'm Reading, What I'm Watching - Fall 2025

What I’m watching:

When Parasite came out in 2019, though Covid had not yet happened, Marvel had taken over movie theatres for years already, streaming and smartphones and gaming and prestige television had taken over our leisure lives, and the same cheap amusement park aesthetic and feel of “Canada’s” Cineplex movie chain (Canada’s because we still, outrageously, had/have not come up with an alternative) , an aesthetic and feel that wouldn’t impress an eleven-year-old boy never mind a grownup all this was already firmly enough in place to have all but killed anyone anywhere ever wanting to go to the movies again. Then a Korean movie by a director only a film nerd might then have known was released in November of that last year of what had to then been considered normal.

I saw Parasite once alone. As I tend to see movies. On my own. When they knock my socks off, or, rather, when I think they have and I want to go back to confirm, to understand, to get why, I hurry back to see the thing again, ideally with my wife, if she’ll go. A good friend otherwise. Parasite I saw in theatres three times. The second with my wife. The third with a set of friends because I get that excited about movies I love and feel a definite compulsion to spread the word like a religious zealot proselytizing the gospel. I’m not convinced that Jesus, God, faith, good movies or quitting smoking are things you can browbeat people into believing or doing, but some of our addiction remain with us despite our advancing age.

Becasue Parasite was that good, The first thing I”d seen in adult memory that hit me like that. I have seen countless films shot by actual filmmakers (which is to say people of that craft of vision that know how to use the medium, the full big screen, the sound) so beautiful, in look and score or soundtrack that I urge others to come see them with big sound and big screen. With Parasite it was that(!) and more. A film that begged to be seen communally, because early on, you may recall, it is that funny. Early on it is a comedy and as Bill Hader, I think it was, on a Rewatchables (podcast) episode on the movie Airplane, pointed out: great comedies aren’t made for the big screen anymore and he was speaking longingly for that experience, of busting a gut with others, as guts are generally meant to be .. bust. With Parasite, it is of course that remarkable feat of a tonal shift from comedy to something very, intensely different - that jolt, where one minute you’re laughing, hard, with the folks surrounding you, and the next you’re tense as hell, and so is everyone else. Which ups the fun. And the tension. And the reason the whole endeavour was designed for, no? The very definition of a ride of a movie. But not a kiddie ride, for once this godamned century. A movie that happened also to be about something. A something I’d argue that matters now more than anything. Is at the root of so much.

Speaking of rides of movies about something, that are still in theatres (barely): Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie One Battle After Another is the first post-Covid movie I’ve seen in a theatre that I all but raced back to see a second time. I hate ruining movies, so just the barest specs in case they entice: it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and he is amazing because he’s cast so against type, and also it has Benicio del Toro, also playing someone different than we’ve seen him play before. In a sense the movie is like if Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino split the difference and made an action movie but was a little less precious and cute than either of those directors can be. In other words, this is a movie with car chases, hardly a trace of CGI, and the tonal shifts of a Parasite, but not as horribly violent.

The humour hits harder the second time I will admit, but it’s damned funny as well as harrowing as well as managing to use the backdrop of something very current and very real and very political without once feeling didactic, or lecture-like, which is to say it’s never once boring or soap box annoying. Instead, it is amazing. If you can see it on a big screen (it will likely get a wide re-release when Oscar noms come in — it will get many), for a great director’s vision, for Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead’s) score and for a Sean Penn comeback that no one saw coming.

Also, the three white men mentioned are all of them upstaged by an African-American woman who gives one of the most stunning performances of the year. Her name is Teyana Taylor. She plays Perfidia Beverly Hills. That’s right. Perfidia Beverly Hills.

Also, Train Dreams. The director of Sing, Sing’s followup. A prose poem of a movie, as the critics aptly put it. If elegy and beauty and loss and nature (America’s Pacific Northwest) are your bag .. this is a movie so filled with the hard stuff of being human. The hardest stuff. A reminder of how inextricably linked loss and beauty can be. The kind of tonic those of us who want to get off a screen, by going to see stuff on the big screen (or your Netfix small screen, sigh) is made for.

What I’m reading:

In a New Yorker Festival talk I heard Zadie Smith reference this Karl Ove Knausgaard essay as a writer-artist contends with living and “finding mystery” in a digital age. For the topic and the content but lord have mercy for the writing too. The depth and original thought that academic writing at the graduate level aspires to, what journalism of the highest orders tries and what fiction at its best captures — depth, philosophy, meaning and the rich texture that fiction brings and does so well in its imitation of life itself.

I’m also (re-)reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. It’s a 1940s Modern Library edition I may have bought second hand somewhere or inherited from my mother’s library - I can’t honestly remember. But thought it’s 700+ pages, the book (that I took a large image of) is small as a bedside bible, which is I think what most people on the subway probably think I’m reading if they don’t happen to catch the title.

I have to admit the opening chapters seemed rather meandering and, honestly, if I hadn’t read it and a couple other Maugham novels I loved in my 20s (The Razor’s Edge; The Moon and Sixpence) I’m not sure I’d have given the novel enough of a chance. Glad I have. What a read! Maugham was no stylist, but he espoused some great philosophy and mostly was just a good old fashioned storyteller. A guy who lived and worked in Paris when everyone went to Paris to paint and try and become the next Pissaro and Monet. He writes about ambition and love and the oft failure on both fronts like nobody’s business. Get to the Mildred story and you will not stop reading and asking yourself wtf our protagonist Philip Carey