The only legendary actor brave enough to let his final role involve serious bowel trauma.

Phantom Thread: didn’t love it. I’m sorry! Lots of people did, and that’s cool. It was certainly pretty.

Generally I’d rather not try to review a movie that didn’t do it for me. But okay, just a little.

Maybe because in a love story where the love feels unmotivated, it undercuts my investment in the whole story –like The Shape of Water, but from a darker perspective.

Maybe because the movie seemed to both celebrate and have contempt for its main character, portraying him as a foolish blowhard but also lovingly praising his brilliance, which left me confused and even a bit angry — much like Wolf of Wall Street. (Man, I do not like that movie.)

In fact, that made me think that in particular, I’m pretty well over movies about terrible men that we are supposed to be entertained by, and that the films seem to glamorize for the majority of their stories, but that, *wink*, all us smart viewers know in our hearts are awful, so it’s ok to spend hours laughing at their misdeeds. I’m not really buying that argument.

So instead of talking about the deep themes of a movie I didn’t like, a simpler question:

Who’s more over-rated, Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson?

You can answer this even if you love both! I personally like several of the movies by both of them. But… definitely not all, nor would I call either “The Best Living…” anything, based on my tastes.

Controversial!

Also, they could have made the fish guy way hotter.

Here’s the thing about this beautiful, fanciful, fairy tale about seeing beyond the surface of a person, misfits banding together against conformity and fascism, and accepting your weirdness as something that can be loved.

I totally wasn’t into it.

I realize on paper that it has those messages, all of which I’m for. Aesthetically, it did all sorts of things I tend to love. But The Shape of Water left me totally tepid.* And now it’s getting all this award season buzz up against movies that I absolutely understand why everyone loves.

*my best guess for why: the creature never intentionally does anything to make Elisa fall in love with him; it just happens because of what he is. so there’s no wooing, no courtship, no earning it, no “falling” in love, just a woman in love with an idea, which makes for an unsatisfying romance.

Some of my favorite critics loved this movie. I just don’t feel it. I almost feel guilty about not feeling it. It’s the kind of thing that makes me question how my own brain works.

What’s something lots of people love, that you just don’t get? What is it about that thing that keeps you from loving it?

What does not loving that thing say about you — or about why everyone else is wrong and you’re not?

Definitely unfair: judging images based on beauty per square inch.

Over the weekend, I played through a video game called Inside, which I am comfortable calling a masterpiece. Its moody visuals drew me in. Its haunting environments kept me constantly on edge. Its unsettling themes left a mark I won’t soon forget. Games of this high caliber give me hope for the artistic potential of the medium. It’s that good.

It’s especially easy to recommend because I played through the game in two sittings of a few hours each, making it convenient to absorb in its entirety.

This in contrast to another recent game I also loved, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, a giant role-playing adventure that I spent roughly 80 hours to complete. As I joked on Twitter: “In the time it’s taking me to finish #Witcher3, I could have listened to the entire audiobooks of both Infinite Jest and A Game of Thrones. This is not an exaggeration. I checked.”

Which is not to say that a game becomes immediately less worthy by being longer, deeper, or more epic in scope. Merely that very very long works in any medium, whether a three-and-a-half hour film or a thousand page novel, come with certain baggage. And in the case of Inside, or the original The Office, or the short story collections of George Saunders, there is a sense that every minute, moment, or page were agonized over to distill a work down to their very essence.

The obvious counterargument is that different works have different aims, and a George RR Martin book or Godfather film would not be what they are or achieve what they set out to by slimming down. But if you were to invent a metric that measures Quality Per Minute of artistic works, those shorter works would rate extremely highly, where the longer ones by their very nature would rate lower.

With Inside, that rating would be off the charts. Every minute brings some new surprise, some newly disturbing tableau, some beautiful choice of artistic direction or thought-provoking inversion of expectations. By this measure, this may be one of the best games I’ve ever played.

The question is:

Should quality-per-minute factor in to judging any work of art?

Is that metric an unfair way to consider more ambitious works that aim for a bigger, deeper explorations of ideas?

Or, are those works being unfair to their audiences when a shorter work could achieve a similar resonance without requiring so much time?

**Do not be a coward and dismiss the question. Care enough about the limited time you have on this earth to value every minute and demand more of art.

There is no fire-fighting in this game. Only fire-watching. Respect the restraint.

As an adult male that begrudgingly accepts the label “gamer” — I play them regularly, I follow the latest releases — my favorite movement in games right now is toward shorter, more focused narrative games. Games that steer away from grand adventure and intense action and tell intimate interactive stories. Games that feel like they’re made by adults, and for an adult sensibility; games that don’t require lightning reflexes or hours of dedication to enjoy or excel in. Gone Home, Her Story, SOMA, and The Beginner’s Guide are some of my favorite recent examples, and now currently, Firewatch.

The setup: main character Henry flees a difficult relationship situation to work in a fire lookout tower for the park service in Wyoming. It’s beautiful, isolated, and lonely, but for his boss and eventual friend Delilah on the other end of the handheld radio.

Playing the game consists of exploring your patch of forest, dealing with minor problems (some which later become major ones), and getting to know the woman on the other end of the radio as you do your jobs. There’s some excitement, definitely some mystery and tension, but no fighting, racing, collecting, or puzzle-solving like other games you might play. You can’t die or lose. You can’t even jump.

But it’s moving, it’s human, it’s beautiful both visually (the scenery, lighting and color palettes are spectacular) and emotionally. It feels grown-up, which so few video games manage to do. And at least for me, it made me think about my life and my relationships, which almost no games do. So, based on the big-boy ideas dealt with in Firewatch, two topics for discussion*:

(*saving the others that might spoil surprises in the game)

Henry takes the job as a fire lookout to get away from a tough relationship, needing time to think and sort out his life.

Why do we associate going out into nature with figuring out our lives?
Aside from quiet and lack of distraction, what are we looking for when we “get away from it all”?
Aside from nice landscapes that make good photos, what is the emotional benefit of “natural beauty”?

Henry “meets” Delilah over the radio, and for the rest of the game she’s really your only other point of human contact.

Have you ever become friends with someone you’d never met in person?
How did they become your friend?
How was your friendship with them different than with people you have met?

Hotel hallways: the loneliest places in the universe.

We’re not supposed to like Michael Stone in Anomalisa. This beautiful stop-motion film, from the byzantine mind of Charlie Kaufman, might impress us with its craft, might make us laugh at its absurdity, but it doesn’t want us to root for its main character Michael. Michael may be at the center of the film, but he is also its villain. It’s a cautionary tale.

The film deals with loneliness, that feeling that sometimes creeps in that we’re somehow apart from and different than everyone else, that we’re tortured and misunderstood and experiencing some special sort of malaise that’s specific to us while everyone else goes on happily living.

Anomalisa confronts us with this phenomenon of both self-absorbtion and self-doubt at once, captures the emptiness it leaves in our hearts by creating a beautiful visual metaphor of Michael’s worldview in which everyone looks and sounds like the same bland person. His perspective shows us at our worst. And yet he gives a lovely speech (as a renowned expert in customer service) about striving to see each person’s individuality, their complexity, their personal pains and failings, that maybe Michael can’t quite live up to himself but must in his heart believe to be true. His speech, even if he can’t practice what he preaches, represents us at our best. Kaufman knows this, and shows us his anxiety of falling on the wrong side of the divide.

When do you feel loneliest or most disconnected from the world and the people around you, not so much physically, but emotionally?

Has anything ever made you feel at a distance from the rest of the world, as if removed from or different than everyone else?

How do you combat that feeling and try to see others as people, not a sea of “everyone else”? Does it work? Does it make life better?