First Man: The Human Toll of Ambition

You may be wondering why you need to watch a movie about Neil Armstrong, when you already know he successfully landed on the moon in 1969 and uttered those iconic lines. However, in First Man, director Damian Chazelle tells a poignant story about men in the 1960s, the women who took care of their families, and the perils, rewards, and foolhardy ambition that fueled the US-Soviet space race.

Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong, a casting coup because you need an actor in this role who can convey a great deal with his face instead of dialogue. This is a man who doesn't talk much, and instead is intently focused on his love of flying and eventually space travel. He is level-headed and calm in the most alarming situations, which is why he is a stellar astronaut, but also why he is a difficult husband and father. At the beginning of the film, we see how the Armstrongs' young daughter, Karen, dies at the age of two from cancer. Neil never discusses this with his wife or his colleagues, instead throwing himself back into work and shoving aside his grief. However, in moments of peril, visions of his daughter always come flooding back, and we see the culmination of that grief in a particularly profound moment during the moon landing.

Claire Foy is magnificent as Armstrong's wife, Janet, and is probably in the running for a Best Supporting Actress statuette this year. She grounds the whole movie, providing the female perspective in a story that is otherwise dominated by men and their ambitions to one-up each other. One of my favorite moments is when she storms into NASA demanding they turn her communication box back on so she can listen to what is happening to Neil in space (they cut off her comms when they realized he was getting into some trouble.) She rebukes them, declaring that they are all "boys building models out of balsa wood," which is not an inaccurate description of the entire Space program.

Indeed, the moments you spend inside a rocket are the most claustrophobic and bewildering of the movie. Expertly shot so that you can almost feel your stomach lurch and your chest compress as the G-force piles up during a launch, Chazelle has perfectly captured the absurd wonder of those early space missions. There are shots of streaky windows and rusty rivets, and as you watch the spaceship rattle and every dashboard light up and every alarm go off, you wonder how anyone ever made it into space, let alone landing on the Moon and safely returning. It's a magnificent space movie and the utter silence during key moments help to fuel your awestruck wonder at the visuals. Then the theremin-laced score swells and tugs at your soul some more. Ultimately this is a magnificent human story about how grief can fuel ambition and men can continue to strive for greatness despite personal tragedy. But again, they can only do this because of the women they leave behind. When Janet insists that Neil talk to their sons and prepare them for the fact that their father may never return from space, you are reminded of how much is being sacrificed.

There are many fine character actors throughout this film and you can start taking bets on which of them will die first to represent the rising death toll of the Gemini and Apollo missions that preceded the successful moon landing. There is so much tragedy that has been overshadowed by this unparalleled human achievement, and First Man gives those men their due.  Nowadays, we only hear that man set foot on the moon, but this movie highlights all the political protests against NASA and the huge cost of sending men into space instead of taking care of the people on the ground. It's a fight that continues today, which is why NASA has yet to send any men to the moon in the 21st century. Ultimately, First Man looks at whether all of this was worth the cost, and frankly, I still don't the answer.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: The Absurdity of Mankind

Last night I was reading up on The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay that posits Albert Camus' philosophy of the absurd and man's futile search for meaning. Then this morning, I watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the latest Coen Brothers film that is essentially a visual depiction of absurdism. I did not plan this, but my it was a revelation.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a series of short films that all take place in the old American West. The conceit is that you are reading a book called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier and an unseen hand turns the pages to introduce each new story and then show you the closing pages as you move on to the next vignette. That flourish made me glad I was watching on Netflix as I could pause the movie and read the last few words of every story to glean some more wisdom from the mysterious minds of Joel and Ethan Coen.

I won't delve into too much detail about each of the vignettes as they pack a wallop and should be experienced firsthand. But if you've ever watched a Coen Brothers movie before, you know what you will find. A bewildering mix of comedy and pathos, with dialogue that falls trippingly off the tongue and makes you want to write it all down so you can read those sentences over and over again. I simply do not understand how they can craft such poetry but every word is a delight. Most importantly, every actor they've hired delivers those lines with the appropriate panache. However, that is only the case in some of the stories. In others, dialogue takes a backseat to Bruno Delbonnel's epic cinematography where Nature provides the necessary poetry. The pristine landscapes and wilds of the frontier are jawdroppingly splendid and highlight the absurdity of it all. These men will play their foolish games to their foolish ends but the land will carry on long after they are gone.

Be warned: this movie is a Western and extremely violent and graphic in spots, oftentimes becoming Tarantino-esque. If bloodshed and bullet wounds turn your stomach, you might want to skip some stories entirely. But each one has one central thesis: men are constantly searching for something, and ultimately, it doesn't matter whether or not they get it. The journey is the destination. As Camus said, "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." And you will really have to stretch your imagination because happy endings are not plentiful in this film.

Of the six vignettes, I naturally gravitated to the only one featuring a meaty role for a woman, The Gal Who Got Rattled. (One could argue that in the Wild West women didn't do much, but we all know that's a paltry argument and is my main quibble with this film - if you have six stories, can't some of them feature more interesting roles for women?) Zoe Kazan's performance is captivating, and the camera lingers on her face even when others are talking because getting her reaction to their words is more important than watching the words be delivered. This vignette felt the most sweet and hopeful...for a while at least. I also enjoyed Near Algodones, starring James Franco, as that featured some of the most outright absurdist comedy (Franco is not allowed to mumble more than a few words during the entire piece as that man is impossible to imagine as a cowboy). And for utter bleak despair, Liam Neeson and Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley's all grown up and magnificent in this role!) deliver quite the gut punch in Meal Ticket.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a cinematic feast, offering an amuse bouche to tickle every palate, but with a central theme of utter Sisyphean futility. It is beautifully shot, impeccably written, and well acted. I can't say it is a warm and fuzzy holiday movie, but it certainly shows you what cinema can do to transform the written word into a moving spectacle. 

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Bloody Good Fun

I started watching Chilling Adventures of Sabrina with a bunch of girlfriends who came over to my house to make bread pudding. Which really is the best way to start bingewatching any new series about an empowered young woman, no matter how gory and weird it may be. Subsequently I have finished watching the show at the gym, where I'm sure people passing me on the treadmill recoiled as they saw blood continually splatter on the screen during all manner of diabolical events.

I was a huge fan of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, which aired in the 90s and early 2000s and was a highlight of my childhood. I also read a lot of Archie Comics as a kid, so was well aware of Sabrina in the comics realm as well. However, apart from having the same characters, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is way darker than its predecessors lead you to expect. As evidenced by the fact that Netflix and Warner Brothers are currently being sued by Satanists who are objecting to how the show makes them look bad. Seriously. This show is bonkers and brilliant.

Kiernan Shipka plays Sabrina, a teenage half-mortal, half-witch (her mother was mortal, while her father was a progressive High Priest of the Church of Night), who has been living a mostly mortal existence in the outside world, with mortal friends and a boyfriend in her high school, but plenty of magic spells and incantations at home with her aunts Hilda (Lucy Davis) and Zelda (Miranda Otto) and cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo). However, upon the eve of her sixteenth birthday, things come to a head, and the Church of Night insist that she must fully embrace the witchy half of her nature after her dark baptism. At this point, Sabrina is too fond of her mortal friends, and what follows is the quest to find all the loopholes so she can have her cake and eat it too. And also combat the Dark Lord who is hell-bent on bringing Sabrina into the Church of Night, which gets up to all manner of bloody shenanigans.

This show is packed to the gills with jump scares, and a number of my friends have complained they got way too scared to wander around their houses at night after watching this show. I wouldn't go that far, because as freaky as it is, there's still a kitschy and fun element to it that helps release the tension. I was particularly delighted to discover that Richard Coyle (who I adore from Coupling) and Michelle Gomez (who I adore from Green Wing) are series regulars, playing terrifically devilish characters in vast contrast to the bumbling British comedy roles I've always seen them in. The entire cast of this show is fantastic; Lucy Davis and Miranda Otto are an excellent double-act as the indulgent and kind Hilda and strict and overzealous Zelda; Michelle Gomez is mysterious and bewitching (pun intended) while Richard Coyle as Father Blackwood is a deliciously unholy and horrifying villain. And Kiernan Shipka binds the whole thing together with the dazzling confidence and backbone we all knew she possessed as we watched Sally Draper grow up on Mad Men.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina may be about a Greendale coven and a teenager struggling with her mortal and witch identities, but it cleverly manages to incorporate real-world issues like bullying, homophobia, and the need to overturn stereotypical gender roles. The production design is impeccable with eerie sets that creep you out even if the actors are doing nothing out of the ordinary. And the costumes are gorgeous, with Sabrina often kitted out in a blood red coat that seems to lend her both the innocence of Little Red Riding Hood but also the worldliness of a witchy woman. Everything is heightened and crazy in this show, but the underlying storylines are magnificent and watching how everything culminates in an explosive conclusion will certainly whet your appetite for the second season. 

The Prisoner in the Castle: Maggie Hope Meets Agatha Christie

Over the years I have become an ardent fan of Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope series. Starting with Mr. Churchill's Secretary, which was released in 2012, the series tells the story of Margaret Hope, an American who moves to London at the start of World War II and becomes a part of the war effort. Over the course of the books, she has moved up from secretarial work to becoming a spy who has worked undercover in the US, Germany, and France. The stakes couldn't be higher and the emotional toll can be quite wrecking as you get through each installment, but MacNeal deftly weaves in historical facts with scintillating fiction to tell a story that reminds us what exactly this war cost the world decades ago.

The latest installment, The Prisoner in the Castle, is a bit of a departure for the series. Rather than putting Maggie in the center of the action in war-torn lands or Churchill's Cabinet Rooms, our heroine is on an island in the remote Scottish Hebrides. She knows too much and has been deemed a risk to the war effort, so has been exiled to a remote location with other British spies who can no longer contribute but know too much to be returned to civilian life. While that sounds rather dull, never fear, MacNeal is about to take inspiration from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game to give you a chilling murder mystery where the inhabitants of the island start dropping dead in increasingly gruesome ways and Maggie must find the killer or be killed. 

I love a good murder mystery and when you combine it with a female heroine I've gotten to love over the course of seven novels, it's a recipe for greatness. The plot is juicy, the secondary characters are shady and intriguing, and the reveals startle you as you turn each page. Full disclosure, I started reading these books because MacNeal is a Wellesley alum and Maggie Hope also went to Wellesley, so there's nothing more entertaining than reading about a fictional woman who kicks ass and also happens to have attended your beloved college. However, putting that bit of partiality aside, I have truly enjoyed reading MacNeal's prose and how the plots get more riveting as Maggie becomes a more integral part of the spy network. World War II is a period in history that never ceases to captivate my interest, and this series does a phenomenal job of giving you a history lesson in the disguise of an espionage thriller.

The Prisoner in the Castle is well worth your time if you are a fan of the Maggie Hope series, or if you're merely interested in a stand-alone murder mystery (though a lot of the side plots may be lost on you in that case). It has thrills, chills, and a brilliant heroine who is not afraid to fight for her life, and you will not be able to put this book down until you have devoured every single page. It's a quick and engrossing read and perfect for a winter weekend when all you want to do is curl up on the couch and read about a fascinating woman having adventures during a fascinating time in our history.