New Logo, Notes on Identity, and 2023 Favorites
Some favorites from the best movie year in recent memory
Larry David, in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, says that we shouldn’t be allowed to say “Happy New Year” after January 7th and I tend to agree. So rather than saying that, I’d like to say I hope everyone’s 2024 resolutions are still in place and on track. As I continue making the mistake of still dating everything to 2023, I recently had the thought that the celebration of the New Year might be the only universal holiday. In many ways, it’s the one holiday that makes the most intuitive sense to celebrate. The earth has made a full orbit around the sun! And yet some people, like this resentful New Yorker writer, have made calls to cancel New Years Eve as a holiday forever. The argument is nihilistic and unveils a person who hates seeing other people have fun. For many of us, the holiday is meant to celebrate new beginnings. It’s a mental reset, a reminder for us to shed our old skin and enter the new year with fresh aspirations. I hope everyone reading this gets one step closer to becoming who they want to be by the end of 2024.
I have some exciting news. Since the inception of this blog, Epilogue’s logo has always been the stock photo of a film reel that I probably wasn’t allowed to use. In the spirit of the new year, Epilogue now has a new logo! The below graphic was designed by Teddy Rounds, who was introduced to me through Eric Brunts (writer of The Conversation Pit), and he totally knocked it out of the park.
Everything from the scene design to the hand-drawn aesthetic perfectly captures the spirit of the blog and feels human. What does it mean in this day and age to have art that was created by actual people? To me, 2023 seemed like a year in which many questioned what it meant to be their own self. When I was a kid, I thought AI would take the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger as T-800 from the Terminator movies. It was a robot that you could see and interact with and had undertones of something society should fear. Today, AI is fully engrained into our society but takes the form of the Spotify DJ, among other use cases. It is a computer model that takes inputs and transforms them into a specific output based on its training. While its current form feels much less scary, the nefarious undertones remain with the creative workforce going on strike to protect its own human-ness.
While the Hollywood strikes are now resolved, the current agreements only agree to shield writers and actors from further AI involvement through mid-2026, when new agreements would presumably need to be negotiated. AI is coming for many of our jobs, but do people actually want to engage with art that wasn’t created by a human? AI is fantastic at mimicking us. It can learn, draw, write, and create an acceptable output way faster than we can. But it is devoid of human and life experiences that underlie what makes art actually meaningful. No amount of “training” is going to replace having a genuine view of the world informed by our own memories.
What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost, create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then? - Ghost in the Shell (1995)
2023 was a huge step forward for Hollywood
Last year was undoubtedly my favorite year for movies since the 2017/2018 pre-COVID era. Movies such as Three Billboards, Phantom Thread, Moonlight, and Roma were all released during that time and have aged to become some of my favorite movies. The first iteration of MoviePass was still alive. I was still living in the West Village and would frequently walk to the Union Square Regal or the IFC Center eager to watch whatever was playing on a Sunday afternoon. Life was good.
Then the pandemic happened. 2021 and 2022 were mostly filled with backlogged movies delayed by the pandemic and safe bet IP (Top Gun, Avatar, Spiderman, James Bond). I’m a fan of those movies, and truthfully, they continue to keep the industry afloat. However, 2023 was the first year that I truly felt we were creatively back on track. It was the year we had the cultural phenomenon known as Barbenheimer (not a Marvel movie!), a double feature of two movies that had nothing in common other than the irony of comparing them together. We had a normal mixture of original storytelling along with the bigger IP. This became most apparent in July, when I felt like Christmas was coming early with most of my favorite directors releasing their movies in the back half of the year.
Most of these movies didn’t disappoint. Some of them I haven’t seen yet, but many of my favorites in 2023 include unsurprising choices such as Killers of the Flower Moon, Past Lives, and Oppenheimer. Those were to be expected, garnering endless amounts of praise from critics and press alike. The following movies are ones that didn’t get as much initial reach, but hold a candle to some of the best movies in 2023.
The Holdovers (Directed by Alexander Payne)
Every once in awhile you’ll see a movie so good that you get sad halfway knowing it eventually has to end. I felt this way watching The Holdovers. Alexander Payne has a knack for making portrayals of middle class America. His characters aren’t superheroes, serial killers, or elitists. They are high school teachers, actuaries, police officers, and disgruntled parents. Many of his movies take place in Nebraska (Payne’s birthplace), illustrating a cross-section of the Midwest. I don’t blame anyone reading this who have already lost the plot. Most people want to watch movies as an escape from reality, not be transported into someone’s else’s daily life. However, Payne’s films are often deep character studies of people you or I may know and sympathize with. Similar to a friend who always tells jokes at the worst possible time, his sense of humor makes light of unfortunate situations but never at the expense of his characters. This adds to the overall entertainment value and is also why many of his characters, flawed as they are, are so beloved.
The Holdovers is based in the New England area and takes place over the holidays when most of the students at a private boarding school get to go home to their families. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a temperamental history teacher tasked with babysitting the “holdovers”, a term for the students who have to spend the holidays on campus because they have nowhere else to go. One of the students is troublemaker Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), who has to stay because of his mother’s spontaneous honeymoon with his new stepfather. Over the next 2 hours we see their relationship develop, alongside Mary, a grieving cafeteria cook (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). Having a movie be too true to life can be uncomfortable. Payne excels at commenting on complicated family relationships, down on their luck characters, and loneliness. However, Payne is also an optimist. He believes in his characters’ ability to keep pushing beyond the negative emotions we all experience. Despite the slightly depressing premise, this is the most feel-good movie of 2023.
May December (Directed by Todd Haynes)
Part dark comedy, part satire of a melodramatic Lifetime movie, one can imagine in an alternate universe this screenplay could’ve been the original plot of Black Swan as Natalie Portman comes into conflict with another adversary. Loosely based on the true story of the Mary Kay Fualaau scandal, Julianne Moore plays Gracie Atherton-Yoo, an ex-teacher who in the early nineties was caught having sex with her 7th grade student when she was 36 and the student, Joe, was 13. The scandal resulted in tabloid headlines at the time, especially after Gracie gave birth to Joe’s daughter during her prison sentence. The movie takes place in present day as adult Joe (Charles Melton) is now in his mid-30s and the situation has normalized. It’s revealed that they ended up getting married and having two more children who are about to leave for college. Natalie Portman plays actress Elizabeth Berry, who arrives at the Atherton-Yoos’ home in Georgia to research Gracie as she was recently cast to play her in an upcoming film.
This movie works so well because it takes place in present day. The smoke from the initial disaster has blown over and we see what life is like in the Atherton-Yoo household. The movie isn’t about the scandal itself, but the after-effects of grooming decades later. To most of their neighbors, they may even seem like a normal family, but the scars remain hidden. The campy humor, the tension-building script, and the powerhouse acting from the three phenomenal leads are all what holds this movie together. I can definitely see the wheels falling off of this one with less talented execution.
On the surface level one can say this movie is a seething social commentary on pop culture’s obsession with sensational media and consuming scandal-based content. The Netflix algorithm certainly favors shows like The Tinder Swindler and Making a Murderer because the data shows that’s what we want to watch. Perhaps it’s because tabloid content offers an escape from the mundane version of our lives. Something tangible and based on kernels of truth but not something we actually have to live through. The reality is that all of these stories are based on events that actually had an effect on people’s lives. The damage remains even after the subjects cash in the check from the show created after them. They still need to run groceries, do laundry, and everything else we all do in our daily lives.
Anatomy of a Fall (Directed by Justine Triet)
Is the point of a criminal trial actually to search for the truth? “I didn’t kill him,” Sandra (played by Sandra Hüller) maintains as she’s explaining her case to her lawyer. “That’s not really the point,” he replies back. I didn’t truly understand what he meant until a few days after I finished the movie. Most criminal court proceedings revolve around gathering and displaying evidence to fit two narratives, one for the prosecution and one for the defense. While the evidence remains constant for both sides, it’s up to the prosecution and defense to craft their own distinct stories. It’s then up to the jury to decide which version seems mostly true.
Anatomy of a Fall was 2023’s Palme d’Or winner, marking the third time a female director has won the award. The movie is a procedural drama around the death of Sandra’s husband after he was found on the ground outside their home. The French legal system, for better or worse, is displayed in such an animated manner it’s hard to tell if this is what the French judicial system is like in real life. Speculation seems to be fair play and the definition of evidence is very broad. While the film is veiled as a procedural court drama, the deeper subtext is an analysis of a thorny marriage. How much of your partner’s life remains unseen or hidden after tying the knot? Sandra Hüller gives an Oscar-worthy performance here but it’s really Milo Machado Graner playing her sight-impaired son Daniel, who steals the show. Other memorable parts of of this film include a hypnotic rendition of 50 cent’s “P.I.M.P” as well as the performance of Daniel’s guide dog, Snoop.
Godzilla Minus One (Directed by Takashi Yamazaki)
Almost every monster movie asks the question, how does humanity come together when disaster strikes? I suppose the point is to illustrate the extremes of human nature. How willing are people to make sacrifices for others or trust strangers they’ve never met? I saw on a Letterboxd review that this would still be a good movie even without Godzilla in it and I fully agree after watching the film. What they meant is that at the heart of this movie is a powerful family drama, so well crafted that it makes the audiences emotionally vested in their day-to-day lives. I can’t think of many other films in the monster genre where this element is so pronounced.
Godzilla Minus One takes place at the end of World War II. Most films around this time period have anti-war rhetoric and this one is no different. In the opening scene Kōichi Shikishima is a kamikaze pilot who feigns engine trouble to land on an isolated army base island. The lead mechanic deduces what happened as he can’t seem to find anything wrong with the plane and shamelessly lets him know. Later, when Shikishima returns home to Tokyo he finds his neighborhood destroyed by American bombings and is instantly plagued by survivors guilt. Part of what makes this movie intriguing is the concept of a failed kamikaze pilot. From a western perspective, the use of kamikaze pilots was immediately seen as an inhumane Japanese war tactic. Yamazake is interested in portraying how this tactic effected the mentality of thousands of young Japanese men, training to make the ultimate sacrifice. How much of yourself is too much to give for one’s country?
In many ways monster movies mold their titular characters to represent broader personal or cultural fears at a specific point in time. The original 1954 portrayal of Godzilla showcases the destruction caused by nuclear warfare, and in particular, the atomic bombings of WWII. Minus One brings the infamous kaiju back to post-WWII setting with an atomic breath that’s legitimately scary as it wreaks havoc on Tokyo. I saw this movie in 4DX and by the end I remembered why I don’t see movies in 4DX. In between the water spraying into my glasses and the seat threatening to bounce me into the next row, by the end of the movie I was pretty irritated. That didn’t deter me from appreciating the real human drama element of the movie, and at least I had an excuse as I was leaving for why my eyes were watery.