Movies in 2026 4

 

Next of Kin (Atom Egoyan, 1984)

I'm a long-time fan of the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, but somehow I had never seen his first full-length feature. Happily, the Criterion Channel is presenting an Atom Egoyan collection this month, so I was able to see Next of Kin. It has many of the things you'd expect in an Egoyan film: technology and isolation and damaged characters. Nevertheless, it has an unexpected happy ending, which doesn't always play a role in his films, which tend to be left at loose ends with the viewer left to sort out or impose their own understanding. Recommended. 

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Girl with Hyacinths, (Hasse Ekman, 1950)

The Criterion Channel, the gift that never stops giving. Seriously, if it ever went out of business - or was intellectually gutted after some corporate buyout - I'd have to pull a Mr. Zipski and run amuck with a meat cleaver. This month they're featuring four films in a collection entitled Nordic Noir. I don't know if the films are truly film noir, at least in the classic definition (often Criterion will tack the Noir designation on collections because, well, we all love film noir), but they definitely seem to fit in the sense of dark films based around deeply flawed characters with troubling, vague endings. The first one we watched was Hasse Ekman's Girl with Hyacinths, which I absolutely loved. Apparently Ingmar Bergman loved it as well. It's the story of the suicide of Dagmar Brink, beautifully played by Eva Henning (who was also in Elvira Madigan, which I saw a couple years ago - and now definitely need to watch again). The story is driven, in class film noir flashback style, by her two neighbors, Anders Wikner (Ulf Palme) and his wife Britt (Birgit Tengroth), who try to figure out why she killed herself. They interview a number of people, including a tortured painter, Elias Korner (played subtly by Anders Ek). Not to give too much of the plot away, but it has become a classic of Queer cinema, and the ending raises more questions than answering them, and is just about perfect. Highly recommended. I'm looking forward to the rest of the Nordic Noir collection, sadly only three left. If I were not retiring I think I'd teach a class on global film noir, focusing on the subtle cultural differences which make these different national versions. 

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The Joke, (Jaromil Jires, 1969)

I always tell people that having the Criterion Channel is like continually taking a film course. In fact, it should probably come with graduate credit. As I've doubtless discussed, my Japanese film noir class grew out of a Criterion Channel collection. I mean, who knew? Another collection that I discovered, and which has remained consistently popular (many collections come and go, but some are so popular that they always hang around - like the Japanese film noir collection), is Czech New Wave. The films are extraordinary, and I'm probably going to use three or four of them as the core of my upcoming Images of Fascism class. I just finished rewatching Jaromil Jires's The Joke. Years ago I read the Milan Kundera novel that is its inspiration, and loved it, but it was only through the kindness of the Criterion Channel that I had the pleasure of seeing Jires's cinematic vision. It's one of the last films of the Czech New Wave (which, truthfully, I like better than the far more famous French New Wave), and is another brilliant condemnation  of authoritarianism (in this case, communist). Josef Somr (who also starred in the brilliant Closely Watched Trains, which will also be featured in my class this spring) plays Ludvig Jahn, who, when he was young, is vanished from university and the party because of a joke he had shared with his girlfriend in a postcard. Years later he tries to get revenge, albeit a tawdry one, by seducing the wife of one of the students who had voted him out, with unexpected results. It's a wonderful film. Highly recommended.

I Think I Know Where This Is Headed

 Yesterday, I guess to ring out the old year, Janet binge watched a nature series on big cats (lions, leopards, cheetahs) in Africa. This inspired her to dig out my Namibia and Botswana travel guide, which she leafed through while watching. Later she had me show her every picture that I had taken on my Namibia trip. In turn, this led to research on flights from Palermo to Windhoek - and guided tours in Namibia and Botswana - and concluded with her astonishment/pleasure in figuring out that Namibia is in the same time zone as Sicily (no jet lag!). I think WE ALL KNOW where this is headed.

Janet was fixated/charmed/amazed at the number of wild beasties that you saw just out roaming, such as these zebra who were galloping down the road.

It Just Never Ends

 Yesterday one of my late Christmas presents arrived, a sweet Montreal Alouettes jersey. I had my old-fashioned souvenir Alouettes jersey (which features the plucky Alouette, and which you can see featured in any old blog post about a Montreal game outing - and which always received praise at the games). Janet determined that I should go ahead and finish out my acquisition of all the CFL team jerseys, because, well, we're running out of time. The last one should arrive in a few days, and then I'll be prepared to visit any CFL game and not look like a rube. Great gifts from my lovely wife.

This is a great jersey. The more traditional Alouettes jersey sort of looks like an old school New England Patriots jersey, but I like version better.

Sure, Pringle is a CFL Hall of Famer (as recounted in an earlier blog post), but this is also the number of days left that I have to be on campus at Champlain (which means I should wear it on the first day of class).

The rendering of CFL in French is just one of the many reasons why the CFL is better.

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Lost in America, (Albert Brooks, 1985)

OK, so I've finished the Year of Books and have started the Year of Movies. Of course, every year is a year of books and a year of movies, but I liked last year's experiment where I recorded all the books I read. This inspired me to designate 2026 as the Year of Movies, and I'll take the same approach. This morning I watched Albert Brooks's Lost in America, which I hadn't seen in forty years or maybe had never seen in its entirety. Considering where Janet and I are personally, and where America is on the macro level, it just seemed like a really good choice to start off this year of transition. Now, I just need to remember to not pass through Las Vegas so that Janet doesn't pull a Julie Haggerty and gamble away our next egg. The film is very funny, but also works as a not too subtle critique of the Reagan years. It's featured in a great collection on the Criterion Channel this month. Highly recommended.

2025 Readings - Janet's List

 Janet has been unofficially recording her 2025 readings as well, although I suspect she misplaced a sheet because she definitely reads more than I do. Remember, this all started because a little over a year ago we read an alarming article on how little Americans actually read. As of 2023, if I'm remembering correctly, 46% of Americans didn't read even one book in that year - and the far end of the spectrum was the 11% who read twenty or more. Oddly, it was the only 11% who read twenty plus that bothered me more (although that plus can expand to a pretty huge number, obviously). This led to us thinking about recording our books just to see where we would fall on that spectrum, and I'm guessing around a hundred books read in a year falls into the .1% Super Nerd No Social Life category.

1) Hernan Diaz, Trust; 2) Stephen McCauley, True Enough; 3) Ann Patchett, Run; 4) Simon Van Booy, Sipsworth; 5) Donna Leon, Falling in Love; 6) Donna Leon, The Waters of Eternal Youth; 7) Donna Leon, Earthly Remains; 8) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; 9) Mary Gordon, The Liar's Wife: Four Novellas; 10) Mary Gordon, The Love of My Youth; 11) Elena Ferrante, Troubling Love; 12) Mary Gordon, Men and Angels; 13) Mary Gordon, The Stories of Mary Gordon; 14) Chimimanda Ngochi Adichie, The Things Around Your Neck; 15) Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell; 16) Chimimanda Ngochi Adichie, Dream Count; 17) Donna Leon, The Temptation of Forgiveness; 18) Andrea Camilleri, The Shape of Water; 19) Phillip Holland, Hemlock; 20) Andrea Camilleri, The Terracotta Dog; 21) Ollie Richards, Short Stories in Italian; 22) Andrea Camilleri, The Snack Thief; 23) Diane Zinna, The All-Night Sun; 24) Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death; 25) Blake Bailey, Cheever; 26) Tara Westover, Educated; 27) Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Long Island Compromise; 28) Brian Gecko, You Must Go On; 29) Courtney Maum, Before and After the Book Deal; 30) Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie, The Uses of Photography; 31) Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleischman is in Trouble; 32) Will Buxton, Grand Prix; 33) Jimmy Carter, The Virtues of Aging; 34) Jimmy Carter, Palestine; 35) Brian Klaas, Fluke; 36) Noam Chomsky, Anarchy; 37) Robert Kaplan, Wasteland; 38) Dan Siegel, The Neurobiology of We; 39) Mary Ruefle, Selected Poems; 40) Mary Ruefle, The Books; 41) Alison Bechdel, Spent; 42) Mattheson & Allepuz, One Light; 43) Michelle Knudsen, Luigi the Spider; 44) Tom Grimes, Mentor: A Memoir; 45) Robert Dana (ed.), A Community of Writers; 46) Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans; 47) Olga Ravn, The Employees; 48) John McNally, After the Workshop; 49) Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence; 50) Tim Bascom, Climbing Lessons; 51) Francine Prose, 1974; 52) David O. Dowling, A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers Workshop; 53) Olson & Schaeffer (eds.), We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love & Literature at the Iowa Writers Workshop; 54) Lili Anolik, Didion & Babitz; 55) Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory; 56) Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future; 57) O'Brien & Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072; 58) Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me; 59) Francine Prose, Sicilian Odyssey; 60) Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies; 61) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; 62) The Norton Critical Edition of the Great Gatsby; 63) Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's; 64) Leanne Shapton, Guest Book: Ghost Stories; 65) Leanne Shapton, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry; 66) Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?; 67) Leanna Shapton, Was She Pretty?; 68) Amanda Lima, CRAFT: Stories I Wrote for the Devil; 69) Maureen Corrigan, So We Read On; 70) Sheila Liming, The Great Gatsby at 100; 71) Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet; 72) Chogyam Trunpa Rinpoche, Spiritual Warriorship; 73) Lindsey Hunter, Hot Springs Drive; 74) Lily King, Writers & Lovers; 75) Julavitz & Heti, Women in Clothes; 76) Leonard Sciasia, The Day of the Owl; 77) Beppe Severgnini, La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind; 78) Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story; 79) Susan Orlean, Joyride; 80) Susan Orlean, Saturday Night; 81) Emily Prado, Funeral for Flaca; 82) Lindsey Hunter, Don't Kiss Me; 83) Donna Leon, Unto Us a Son is Given; 84) Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief; 85) Donna Leon, Trace Elements; 86) Donna Leon, Transient Desires; 87) Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a Machine; 88) Tracy Kidder, A Truckful of Money; 89) Donna Leon, Give Until Others; 90) Donna Leon, So Shall You Reap; 91) Donna Leon, A Refiner's Fire; 92) Susan Orlean, My Kind of Place; 93) Tracy Kidder, Old Friends.