The Holdovers (2023)

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Kicked myself for missing it in the theaters, but Peacock is always there to pick up my self-imposed slack.

Did I Like It: I’ve been struck in recent years, and damn near feel like I’ve been choking on it in recent months, but somewhere along the line we absolutely lost all conception of what nostalgia means. I can’t remember the last time I went through any range of social media posts without some post algorithmically recommended to me that insisted the era in which Wendy’s served all of their food was the absolute pinnacle of western civilization*. Nothing was inherently better in those times; you were just younger then and weren’t terribly bothered by just how screwed up the world could already occasionally be.

That’s all to say that this film feels like perhaps the only object in years to understand the power of that wistful feeling we once properly identified as nostalgia. From its first moments dusting off the Universal logos that died with Back to the Future - Part III (1990) through opening credits that most people would see on TCM, the film manages to feel like a film that could have been released in some bygone year.

All of that is hard enough to do and more than enough to recommend the film. But it goes deeper than that. I may have never lived at a New England boarding school, but I did have a stunted view towards Christmas, and at least one teacher who might have thought I was bright but a little bit of a pain in the ass. There may be funnier Oscar contenders this year, but this one feels the most right.

*First of all, it wasn’t all that long ago. At least I don’t think it was…

Man on the Moon (1999)

Director: Miloš Morman

Cast: Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, my. This, along with Three Kings (1999), My Dog Skip (1999) (my sister was and is crazy for anything with dogs in it), and, naturally, Batman (1989) were the first four DVDs I ever owned. It seems like a long time ago, but also at times feels like it was just yesterday.

Did I Like It: Those first few dozen times I watched the film, I couldn’t help but become a little obsessed with Kaufman (Carrey). Not quite to the degree that Carrey became obsessed. Who could? It is a fairly apt primer into the ethos Kaufman strove for in his all-too-brief career. If you are getting ready to watch the film for the first time, it will bother you, it will annoy you, and it will occasionally be very funny. At no time will there be a moment where any of this is done by accident. At it’s very best, and if you’re with Kaufman in what he was trying to do, you’ll start to re-think what entertainment can actually be.

And yet, a movie hits differently after you have not seen it in quite a while, but saw so many times at a particular time in your life. The flaws creep up. I now realize that there was no way Kaufman was playing Ms. Pac-Man when George Shapiro (DeVito) tells him that he closed the deal to get him to star in Taxi. That show premiered in 1978, and didn’t start popping up in arcades until 1982. That’s a nitpicky thing, and the kind of thing I only pick up on in movies after I went past the age of 16, but now that we’re on the topic of DeVito, Taxi, and George Shapiro: the movie does go to great lengths to re-create scenes of that show, but has to bend over backwards to be a world that includes George Shapiro, Andy Kaufman, and Taxi, but doesn’t also include Danny DeVito or Louie De Palma.

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014)

Director: Ken Burns

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Edward Hermann, Meryl Streep, John Lithgow

Have I Seen it Before: We watched the first couple of parts as they aired, but we were moving into this house as it aired, and lost track of the series until quite recently after I got hooked up with PBS app and its comprehensive Ken Burns collection.

Did I Like It: Once again, it becomes somewhat impossible to effectively criticize Burns’ work. Within the framework of his genre, he is the best at what he does. Each film is immaculate, and I have seen more than a few imitators in the historical documentary, and it is imminently possible (in fact, likely the default) to screw it up.

So then this rumination must go to the subject, or in this case, subjects. With Burns’ fair eye, all three Roosevelts of particular note (Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor) are given full credit for their strengths. With all seven parts running the viewer just shy of fourteen hours, it would have been a significant blunder for some key element of any of the three lives to be assessed. They each so fully engaged with their lives and the worlds in which they found themselves, that many, but not all sins can be forgiven.

They’re failures are given a substantial analysis as well. Teddy (it will truly be difficult to refer to the subjects with due deference, so I assume the reader will forgive undue familiarity) nearly completely whiffed on any degree of courage where race relations were concerned. Franklin was at his heart far too pragmatic to bring a foolproof reworking of the social contract and a perfect peace to a post-war world before succumbing to the ravages of infantile paralysis. That doesn’t even begin to cover the myopic, cowardly internment of Japanese-Americans. Even Eleanor viewed it as a necessity, and it is one of the few times she was confronted with a question of moral right and failed to meet the occasion. Had she been clearer-headed on that, and as steadfast as she had been on everything else, she could have very well turned her husband around on the matter.