Films and Feelings

      In seminal romantic comedies or dramas, the mark of great writing was in artfully burying the lovebirds' insecurities and hangups in artifice. Pretense. The lovebirds didn't know how to honestly approach their own feelings at first. The distortion revealed the personality of both the situation and the relationship. What's more, it was just fun. The film would slowly thaw this facade until Cary Grant and Irene Dunne finally had, what Materialists calls, the ugliest parts of themselves laid bare for one another. Only then were they ready to embrace.       Yet with Materialists , out this weekend, even in moments when the situation calls for vulnerability, the characters are oddly empirical and clinical with describing the things about them that they are ashamed of. These players might as well be performing a passionate reading of a Walmart receipt. Yes, Materialists is very obviously about the transactionality of the dating scene, but the movie ...

    This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.      But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else.  Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.     On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

            So … yeah, this is obviously an exaggeration. The thing we’d call toxic masculinity is, regrettably, still with us, like a fart that just won’t terminate. It is in the workplace. It is in elected positions of power in the United States and across the world. It is behind closed doors. It is out in the open. In the wake of certain recent events, some voices have expressed some opinion about whether the fight against toxic masculinity has died and whether we’d best just hang up our boots and return to our trash piles. I think such attitudes are certainly understandable, but not at all helpful. The attitudes that feed the parts of masculinity we might call toxic have been reinforced for centuries. Any such campaign to clean out that mess was going to have to persist for far longer than the life cycle of any one hashtag. The good news is that history shows us we are maybe a little further into this fight than we thought. And in our effort to und...