Holiday Screenings

REVIEWS: Wake Up Dead Man

Though I’ve not been as big a fan of the Knives Out franchise as some people, the latest installment, Wake Up Dead Man, blew me away and is perhaps among my favorite films this year.

Surprisingly, writer-director Rian Johnson’s detective character, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), isn’t even the lead character—it’s Father Jud, a priest sent to assist at a small upstate New York Catholic church. Immediately at odds with the parish priest—an intolerant brim-and-firestone preacher, Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin) whose ironclad control of his parish has shrunk the parish to a core group of regulars under his thrall—Father Jud is soon the prime suspect of the murder of Wicks and several other people at the church.

It’s a fun romp with an all-star cast, including Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Thomas Hayden Church. 

But it’s O’Connor who shines as Jud, partly because below the surface is some real depth to the story and character. While Blanc is firmly not a believer and very much seems to reflect Johnson’s point of view, the movie nevertheless examines the power and grace of religious faith. Indeed, faith, belief and the mystery of the church are integral to the story, not just set dressing for the film. Indeed, it is the belief in the sacraments of the church that allows the film’s locked room mystery to be solved, helping to restore Father Jud’s commitment to his mission of serving the ministry, making for a profound and satisfying conclusion.

Remembering Rob Reiner

I was very sorry to hear about the passing of director-actor Rob Reiner and his wife, particularly given the tragic circumstances involving their troubled son.

Like a lot of people in my age group, I first encountered Reiner on All in the Family. Though he was the son of a comedy legend, Carl Reiner, he was universally admired in Hollywood for being grounded and a mensch, which he also used to advance causes that were important to him.

As his filmography shows, Reiner was a versatile director, from This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men. Just this year, we watched his documentary, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, and, in the theater, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (see my review here).

I had the fortune to once see Reiner in person—my now wife and I had snagged tickets to see a test screening of A Few Good Men that he was present at. As one can imagine, it was very well received by the screening audience, and the film remains very watchable and a personal favorite.

REVIEWS: The New Yorker at 100

I recent watched The New Yorker at 100 documentary on Netflix, which turned out to nicely complement the 100 Years of New Yorker Cartoons exhibition we saw at the Society of Illustrators during our visit to NYC in April.

The documentary offered a great glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings and history, including segments devoted to some of the magazine’s established cartoonists (and the cartoon selection process), as well as its iconic covers and distinctive spot illustrations. It was particularly nice to see fFrançoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, in action, who of course is also the co-founder and co-publisher of Raw and Toon Books, as well as the spouse of cartoonist Art Spiegelman—a few weeks before, I had coincidentally re-watched the American Masters episode on Spiegelman, Disaster is My Muse, when I came across it on YouTube—Mouly is prominently featured there as well.

It also included an overview of some of the groundbreaking and celebrated articles and stories in the magazine, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which first appeared as a piece in The New Yorker, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, first serialized in the magazine. One doesn’t always associate hard journalism with The New Yorker, but it definitely has become known for such work. As an example, Ronan Farrow brought his coverage exposing Harvey Weinstein to the magazine after others thought it was too hot to handle. There were other examples from its history of how the magazine stood by its reporters, a courage that seems to be lacking in many of today’s news outlets.

I’ve always been a fan of magazine and print journalism and, over the years, have intermittently maintained subscriptions to magazines like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Esquire, Time, and The Economist. In fact, it was a career path I briefly considered, and worked as a copy editor at my college paper and interned at an ambitious startup magazine called Buzz in the early 1990s. 

During my brief time there, I worked as a fact-checker—my name is in the masthead on a few of the early issues. The New Yorker is considered the gold standard in fact checking and we were given a fact-checking style guide from The New Yorker to train us. So I was delighted to see the documentary cover its fact-checking operation and, must admit, my jaw dropped when I learned that the magazine had 29 fact checkers on staff!