These obligations are important, what keeps our lives afloat and sturdy, but they can’t help reduce many of our conversations to perfunctory exchanges of information rather than conduits for connection. There is always something to deal with, the obligations and banalities that can stack up, blocking out the sun. They all felt like music.ĭay-to-day life, particularly around the holidays, is exhausting, but more than anything, it is packed. But they were all smart, and engaging-actual human beings connecting with one another. Some were serious, some were goofy, some were focused, some were rambling. Some of these conversations have been with old friends some have been with work colleagues some have been with potential future collaborators. This last fortnight, I’ve been traveling a lot, and during these travels I’ve been able to have a series of conversations that have been invigorating, enlightening and even thrilling. Who knows where it’s gonna go? That’s the fun of it. It’s just talking: An exploration, of yourself, of another person, and of the world. It doesn’t have to be about anything specific-it’s actually better if it’s not. I think about sidling up at the back of a bar, in a booth across from someone I find interesting and who finds me interesting, and just talking for hours. When I think about being young, I don’t think of wild parties, or random hookups, or staying up all night at clubs. It’s finding someone who is walking around the world like you are, trying to muddle their way around, to figure it all out the best they can, taking a moment away from the day-to-day struggle and madness of it all to sit down, collect their thoughts and … talk through it.Īs I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that this is one of the things I value most, and what I want most out of the world: I want to have conversations. (This year, the great Past Lives is another terrific example.) Because that to me, is what being alive is: It’s a conversation. Those movies, those “talking movies,” feel to me like being alive. There’s a modern counterpart in the Trip films, in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, lifelong best friends, sightsee and eat their way through Europe, talking and talking all the way, pausing only to do some truly incredible Michael Caine impressions. The canonical example of this is 1981’s My Dinner With Andre, which is 111 minutes of fictionalized versions of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory having dinner together. These are movies that are, more than anything else, about talking, movies that tell their stories and reveal the interior lives of their characters through long, looping, deceptively casual scenes that simply involve the characters talking to one another. This is an ongoing joke in the house: Oh, blech, Dad’s going to see another talking movie.īut the funny thing is, I have my own definition of “talking movie,” and these movies are some of my favorite kind of movies. They always want to know two things about each movie: What it’s rated (so they know if they can go see it with me) and, to use their terminology, whether it is a “talking movie.” What do they mean by a “talking movie?” To my kids, there are two types of movies: Movies where there’s a ton of action and explosions and fights, and “talking movies.” Suffice it to say, they always want to see more the former than the latter, though ideally a movie is able to do both William is still marveling how Oppenheimer “had a lot of talking but was also, like, really exciting,” which, as far as I’m concerned, is as succinct and accurate a review of that movie as I’ve seen. The boys who live in this house have noticed this, and they’re always curious what movie Dad is seeing next. We take this very seriously in these parts. (This is of course our own tradition : Tim and I have sat down to go over our top 10 films every year since we both picked JFK in 1991.) As I scramble in these final days-and my personal top 10 list will be published, as is also yearly tradition, in next week’s newsletter ( here’s last year’s, and here’s 2021’s )-I’m seeing everything I can, sometimes watching things I’ve already seen one more time as I try to figure out which movie goes in which slot. As a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle, my preliminary top 10 movies of 2023 list was due two weeks ago, and since then I’ve been scrambling to see everything I’ve missed from the year before Tuesday’s taping of the annual Grierson & Leitch Dorkfest spectacular, our biggest show of the year, one that listeners consistently tell us has become a legitimate part of their own holiday traditions. This is the time of year in which I am constantly watching movies.
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