All posts tagged: real-life

The Dark-Horse Oscar Contender Everyone’s Watching

The Dark-Horse Oscar Contender Everyone’s Watching

Published by skeptic

Society of the Snow tells the real-life story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a plane that crashed into the Andes in 1972 and left its passengers, a rugby team and their supporters, starving and stranded for 72 days. It’s a gruesome tale—the survivors eventually resorted to cannibalism—that’s been dramatized many times before, most notably in 1993’s Alive, but the director J. A. Bayona’s rendition may be the most immersive take yet. The crash scene is meticulously re-created—people being sucked out of the fuselage, bones shattering as the seats get ripped from the floor, bodies crumpling toward the cockpit. Most of the movie takes place in the mountain range’s blinding snow-covered slopes, the victims’ skin bluish with frostbite, the sound of howling winds incessant. Almost every shot highlights the frigid, terrifying reality of what happened. As such, the film is an often-nightmarish viewing experience, but I couldn’t stop watching—and I wasn’t alone. Society of the Snow is, according to Netflix’s in-house viewership data, the streamer’s first hit of 2024, becoming the most-watched film on the …

‘Philip Roth’ Has Overshadowed Philip Roth

‘Philip Roth’ Has Overshadowed Philip Roth

Published by skeptic

In “Borges and I,” a classic page-long story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer presents the reader with a conundrum: How are we to distinguish between Borges, the living, breathing human being, and the affected and somewhat dandyish persona his writings have helped create? Although the two do share certain tastes and characteristics, it’s “the other one” who has a “perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” Borges writes. Ultimately, the author concludes that, though he is mortal, this writerly projection of himself is the one that will endure.“I do not know,” the essay concludes, “which of us has written this page.” Something of this strange dilemma—untangling who an artist actually is from the inflated version of himself he creates on the page—comes to mind while reading Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize. His novel is a gleefully irreverent satire of so-called cancel culture, virtue signaling, and early-21st-century hypocrisy set largely on the campus of the Rubin Institute, a fictional center of higher learning staffed by an intellectually gifted but morally bereft …

The Poets of Palestine – The Atlantic

The Poets of Palestine – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Recently reading through the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in their introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider preparing meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies. I was flipping through Jerusalem rather than scrolling through news updates about the Middle East. I found comfort in the co-authors’ attitude of community, especially when many conversations on social media, in mainstream U.S. coverage, and in real life threaten to turn the lost lives of the Israel-Hamas war into abstractions. I quietly leave the room whenever the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is casually discussed at work or among friends, because I do not want to treat death as a watercooler topic of conversation. I am the son of Palestinian immigrants, and I have …

“The Iron Claw” Hits Hard

“The Iron Claw” Hits Hard

Published by skeptic

Sean Durkin’s first film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, was about the complex aftermath of one woman’s escape from a modern Manson-esque “family” centered around sex and drug use. His second, 2020’s The Nest, looked at a high-society couple in 1980s Britain who buy a mansion and are subsequently haunted by the decision, struggling to stay above water as the property sucks up all of their money. Both movies were immersed in an atmosphere of gloom and anxiety that somehow didn’t overwhelm either; even as Durkin tormented his characters, he had real, obvious love for them. That’s exactly what makes his newest work, the wrestling drama The Iron Claw, such a triumph. The Iron Claw is, like many films released in the lead-up to the Oscar nominations, based on a true story. It chronicles the lives of the Von Erich brothers, professional wrestlers who were mentored by their tough-love father, rose to fame in 1980s Texas, and were eventually plagued by tragedy. Usually, these biographical movies lean into the drama, exaggerating the shocking stuff for the …

Cruelty and Apathy Collide in ‘The Zone of Interest’

Cruelty and Apathy Collide in ‘The Zone of Interest’

Published by skeptic

Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, begins with a black screen that lingers for at least a full minute. There’s music in the form of a groaning score, as well as a smattering of noises—faint whispers, rustling leaves—that can be heard through the discordant notes. Otherwise, though, nothing appears. That nothingness continued for so long at my screening that I began to question whether a technical difficulty—a defective projector, maybe?—had occurred. It had not; Glazer, who’s known for making unsettling, experimental movies such as Birth and Under the Skin, intended to teach the audience how to absorb his new film, his first in 10 years. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Ears first,’” he told me earlier this month. “What you’re going to hear in this film is as important as what you’re going to see. Arguably more so.” The Zone of Interest is two films in one: the film you see and the film you hear. The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, …

Modern Britain Is a Scene From ‘Slow Horses’

Modern Britain Is a Scene From ‘Slow Horses’

Published by skeptic

“No one enters Slough House by the front door,” the novelist Mick Herron writes in Dead Lions, the second book in his series about an “administrative oubliette” for useless spies exiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic-intelligence agency. “Instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it.” The rest of Slough House isn’t much better: a nest of abandoned keyboards and empty pizza boxes strewn around by agents who would rather be anywhere else. On the top floor is the lair of the spymaster Jackson Lamb, stinking of “takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer.” Herron’s spy-novel series is now 13 years old, the same age as Britain’s floundering Conservative government. After years of obscurity, his books are now best sellers, and Apple has so far adapted three for television under the name Slow Horses, after the first novel in the series. The reviews of the show’s newest …

Hayao Miyazaki Is Thinking About the End

Hayao Miyazaki Is Thinking About the End

Published by skeptic

The Boy and the Heron, which could be the Studio Ghibli co-founder’s final film, is more of a bold reinvention than a somber farewell. Studio Ghibli December 8, 2023, 12:26 PM ET The first sound in Hayao Miyazaki’s new movie, The Boy and the Heron, is an air-raid siren, heard over a screen of black that quickly explodes into tumult and destruction. It’s 1943, and a firebombing has set a Tokyo hospital ablaze, killing the mother of 12-year-old Mahito Maki, the movie’s protagonist. Miyazaki depicts the incident with nightmarish bluntness: Mahito running toward the building, then being held back as flames consume the entire screen, overwhelming any chance of saving his mother. The death is a moment of shocking reality from a filmmaker and an animator who, for decades, has blurred real life with fantasy, building a reputation as one of cinema’s foremost masters of dreamlike imagery. The scene also has a jarringly autobiographical edge: Although Miyazaki’s mother did not perish in World War II, his early childhood was defined by the conflict, and he …

Ammon Bundy’s Last Stand – The Atlantic

Ammon Bundy’s Last Stand – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room. The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green. Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust …

How Learning to Fly Helped Ground Me

How Learning to Fly Helped Ground Me

Published by skeptic

In May 2022, an air-traffic controller in Florida received a frantic call. The pilot of a single-engine Cessna 208 had collapsed, leaving the sole passenger—with no experience at all flying a plane—to fend for himself in the cockpit. Remarkably, the controller was able to direct the passenger to take the controls, reach an airport, and safely land. The story went viral for several days, perhaps in part because we can all imagine ourselves in that nightmare come true. Could we figure out what to do? Would we live to tell the tale? In the past, I would have asked myself those same questions. But this time, I had answers, and knew I was up to the challenge of landing a plane. At age 52, I had just earned my pilot’s license. All my life, I assumed that flying an airplane was something other people were born to do, not me. Then, during the pandemic lockdowns, my life took an unexpected turn. Unable to go on a trip, something I love doing, I turned to traveling …