My favorite movie, book and tv series of February aka Five Snouts Up

It’s time for Five Snouts Up: February Edition. My loyal readers may recall that I use a snout-based rating system:

(:)(:)(:)(:)(:) is the best — unlike your standard Google and Yelp ratings, I only give five snouts when I find that which I’m reviewing to be outstanding.

Before we get into the movie of the month, I need to address the Oscar-nominated films for best picture.  I am abashed to say I have seen every nominated film except American Fiction (it’s on the list!).  Of the rest of them, the only one that I would give a full 5 snouts up to is Michael Payne’s The Holdovers. You may read my previous review of that film here: https://snicholsblog.com/2023/11/five-snouts-up-november-a-new-snicholsblog-segment. I absolutely loved Barbie but found it flawed as a piece of filmmaking. Of the others, I’d have to say that my favorite was Maestro (I gather I’m in the minority there). I was thoroughly captivated by Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall as well as James Wilson’s Zone of Interest.  This may be the first year where I have genuinely liked every Oscar-nominated film we saw (hated Forrest Gump and No Country for Old Men –was disappointed by Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, for example.  Note: if we’re using E,E,AAO as a measuring stick then Barbie totally should win. It’s head and shoulders better filmmaking and could define a generation.)

Movie:  All of Us Strangers, starring (Fleabag “hot priest”) Andrew Scott, (Normal People) Paul Mescal, directed by (relatively unknown) Andrew Haigh. “A screenwriter (Scott) drawn back to his childhood home enters into a fledgling relationship with a mysterious neighbor (Mescal) as he then discovers his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) appear to be living just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before” is the official promo that underplays the steamy connection between Scott and Mescal–one of the best male romances I’ve seen on screen.

But it’s the weird scenes of a middle-aged man hanging out with his similar age parents that haunt and touch me most. Almost every adult can relate to missing a long-dead someone or the former version of that someone. This film, considered the biggest snub at this year’s Oscars by many, somehow manages to be deeply touching and affecting without being nostalgic or cloying. It will stay with you, and it must be seen.

Book: Biography of X, a novel by Catherine Lacey. My daughter won this book in our 2023 family Christmas book exchange. Her comment was, “why do we want to read a biography of this (not very nice) person?”

That question and the identity of the giver intrigued me to read it. The fictional biography is written from the perspective of X’s widow, C.M. Lucca, who is writing the bio as a way to piece together her famous (like if Andy Warhol were also a major writer and lived a lot longer) wife’s mysterious life.  The book, set around now, casts back several decades, into a parallel universe. From a New York Times review: “Many of the almost throwaway details in “Biography of X” could spawn novels of their own. The anarchist Emma Goldman became F.D.R.’s chief of staff. The Vietnam War never happened. There has been a Bernie Sanders presidency. Kathy Boudin, of the Weather Underground, was among the dissidents who escaped with X from the South.” And there’s so much more.

To answer my daughter’s question, we want to read this novel because it’s a completely fresh alternate reality with a central character who seems to have burst through every barrier or constraint ever presented.  Yes, she’s also something of an asshole but maybe mostly because a) typically only men behave the way she has and get away with it and b) how many of us might allow our own fear of being an asshole to keep us from doing what our spirit really came here to do?

Series:  Watch (or rewatch) Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom (2012). There’s a good chance that I hang out in some weird sub-demographic for whom this show was made, but I just rewatched all three seasons, and man, I was devastated that it ended. To me, it has everything The West Wing had and more: snappy dialogue, much better romances, more women and people of color. Now, a decade later, it provides all of the above plus serves as a real-time dramatization of the transition from experienced journalists to the wild west of internet (often fake) news.