We come to this place for magic

Geeking out about a great slew of movies heading into the 2024 Oscars.

Good morning to all and welcome back to this newsletter, which is usually about books, but is sometimes about movies. Today, it’s about movies based on books.

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Let me start by welcoming those of you who arrived here via my piece in the Washington Post this week about the Dune books. (First time I’ve used my author bio anywhere to pump my Substack.) I launched this newsletter in 2020 to write casually about books I liked, in particular books I think of as less obvious / under-covered / overlooked. But really this was/is also place to put my writing about books when I don’t have the time or patience to polish and belabor an essay to the point where it’s publishable for a major books publication. I’ve written about and reviewed books for great places like The Paris Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Air Mail, NPR, The Millions, and many more, but on this Substack I can freely gush/whine/instruct/future-gaze all I want, with no concern for news peg or word count.

My “Dune” piece in WaPo had an obvious news peg: the new “Dune: Part Two” movie came out last week. I thought it was terrific, better than the first one (my wife commented that a person who hasn’t read the books could probably still enjoy and understand the second movie without having seen the first, and I agree) and mostly very faithful to the books (with the exception of its handling of Paul’s sister Alia, who is a major player toward the end of the first Dune book but has not yet been born when the second movie ends). As a reminder, the two Denis Villeneuve “Dune” movies cover the first Dune book; he has said he would like to make just one more movie to complete the trilogy, and I suspect that “Dune: Part Three” will focus mostly on the second book, Dune Messiah, but also take elements from the third book, Children of Dune. (A new hot take at The Hollywood Reporter declares: “Dune 3 Has a Big Problem: The Next Book Isn’t That Great.” Disagree!)

As entertaining as the new “Dune” movie was, even more exciting to me is how it has reignited excitement around big blockbuster movies—specifically seeing them in movie theaters.

Back in September, I used my issue about “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” to gush about movie theaters and how my wife and I cherish their existence and root for their survival, so I won’t repeat myself too much. But with those two summer blockbusters and now “Dune 2” you’ve got three movies in the past seven months that were truly cultural events. They demanded to be seen promptly (in the theater) not only because they were best enjoyed on a large screen but also so that you won’t fall behind in the social media discourse. My entire Twitter feed has been “Dune 2” memes for the past week; if you want, you could add “Saltburn” to that list for the same reason—for two weeks, the internet was obsessed with it.

It seems to me 2023 was a great year of movies. Not a great year for the movie business, of course; two prolonged strikes will have consequences for years to come.

In a March 1 New York Times op-ed, Mark Harris writes, “For Hollywood, 2023 was not so much a disaster as a preview of disasters to come. Sure, one of the big stories last year was the Barbenheimer phenomenon — two celebrated hits that marched arm in arm toward a combined 21 Oscar nominations — but everywhere else you look, the prognosis is grim… 2023 was a time of downsizing, diminishment, shelving, sidelining, retrenching, retreating and bet-hedging. And 2024 is the year of consequences… As for new projects, the industry’s current whispered motto seems to be: Just survive till ’25.” I note the date of the op-ed because the headline, “How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?”, looks a little silly one week later amid the smash box office success of “Dune 2.”

But if you look at the Oscar nominated films from 2023, there’s so much to love. We’ve seen all ten of the Best Picture nominees (after watching “Maestro” this week just in time) and I can’t remember a year where I so enjoyed every single one on the list.

“Poor Things” was probably my favorite movie of the year in terms of pure enjoyment—so creative, hilarious, and surprising; I’d like to see Mark Ruffalo win, but it looks like it’s RDJ’s year for one of those Oscars given more for career achievement and goodwill than for the specific performance nominated. “The Holdovers” was such a triumph too (Giamatti is my favorite actor, period), graceful and empathetic while still being very funny, much like “Sideways,” the previous Payne/Giamatti collab. “American Fiction” has so much to say and such cultural urgency right now, and such outstanding performances by the whole cast, and especially Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown. “Past Lives” was wonderful and subtle. “Maestro” was anything but subtle, but featured two jaw-dropping performances by Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan; I’d be equally happy to see her, Gladstone, or Stone win Best Actress. (One quick aside on Bradley Cooper: I think he has been unfairly mocked for his obvious Oscar campaigning, and two pieces sum up the trap he fell into quite well: this one at Variety and this New Yorker piece that points out “an actor must somehow be dedicated but not try-hard, authentic but not award-hungry”—in other words, Cillian Murphy.) “Barbie” was subversive and smart and more than a comedy, and deserved a Best Director nomination. (Speaking of movies that were deserving, The Iron Claw got shut out of the Oscars and while it’s a brutal watch, and it feels like no one saw it, the performances were outstanding and I would have liked to see Zac Efron and Holt McCallany nominated.)

It just feels so different from the year prior, when “Everything Everywhere All At Once” swept the categories. (I will only say we didn’t really ‘get it’ and this was the review that best captured my feelings.)

Sure, “Oppenheimer” is likely to sweep the big categories, which will make Sunday an anti-climactic evening. I’m rooting for Giamatti or Wright, but expecting Murphy. Rooting for Ruffalo or Brown, but expecting Downey. But I won’t complain if/when “Oppenheimer” wins Best Picture and Director because even though so many of the other films were terrific and deserving of recognition, I don’t think you could say any other was more of a Big Masterpiece With Something to Say than “Oppenheimer.” Maybe “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but if you read the book, it’s hard not to see the movie as imperfect.

And that brings us to the books. Five of the best movies of the year came from books. (“Barbie” being on the Adapted Screenplay list rather than Original Screenplay is stupid and is based on Barbie being a “pre-existing character” from Mattel.) I’ll start with the three I’ve read.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” (not nominated for Adapted Screenplay!) is based on Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. I’d put it in my pantheon of reported books that are about real world history but read like thrillers, along with In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (about the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, just before things in Berlin turned truly ghastly) and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (about Al-Qaeda and 9/11). The book reads like a mystery because it doesn’t reveal to the reader for quite a while who was pulling the strings behind the Osage murders; the movie chooses to show you immediately, which makes it a lot less suspenseful, though still plenty compelling.

“American Fiction” is based on the 2011 novel-within-a-novel Erasure by Percival Everett, a brilliant and extremely underrated writer who may now finally get his due thanks to the movie. It would be impossible for any movie to fully capture the extent of an Everett novel, with its caustic satire and byzantine plot twists, but “American Fiction” comes close. If you’ve never read Everett, I highly highly recommend him, and would point you to The Trees, Telephone, or I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has a new book out later this month, James, narrated by Jim from Huckleberry Finn.

“The Zone of Interest” is a (very partial) adaptation of a 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name. It is one of my favorite Amis novels, and I remember it being very darkly funny. The film, of course, is not funny at all. As far as adaptations go, it departs dramatically from the novel. Amis’s story focuses on three characters at Auschwitz: Paul Doll (based on the real-life Commandant Rudolf Hoss), Angelus Thomsen, a young officer who reports to Doll; and Szmul, a Jewish prisoner commanded by Doll to do inhumane grunt-work like cleaning out the ovens and hauling dead bodies. (I’m aware this all sounds as brutal, or even more brutal, than the film, but Amis manages to make it comedic). In the novel, Angelus and Paul Doll’s wife Hannah flirt at a possible affair, and both are privately disenchanted with the Nazi regime. For the movie, director Jonathan Glazer zooms in on the Dolls, uses their real names (Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss), skips Amis’s other characters, and never takes the viewer over the wall into the camp whatsoever. It all makes the film so different from the novel as to not even feel like an adaptation, but it certainly made for a powerful statement.

“Oppenheimer” is based on a Pulitzer-winning, 720-page biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, that, as I wrote in September, sounds plenty fascinating, but if I’m being honest I’m not sure I’m up for it. What I wish I had done was read the book first, but now that I’ve seen the movie, the motivation to read the book is admittedly much less.

Finally, many moviegoers likely don’t realize “Poor Things” is based on a 1992 Scottish novel (that I haven’t read) by Alasdair Gray; here’s a great piece about the book and its weirdness from WaPo critic Michael Dirda. (Let me also recommend this fun WaPo piece about fictional books in this year’s Oscar movies.)

That’s about all I’ve got. Read books. See big movies in the theater. And when big movies are based on books, read the book first.

Got thoughts on this year’s Oscar nods? Don’t just reply directly to my email, post a public comment! Thank you to those who commented on my last issue. See you next time.