David Lynch, goons, your favorite Letterboxd reviews

5 Oscars Things with Jeremy Steen

Ahead of the Oscars, I made it through barely any of this year’s nominees (as evidenced by the walloping I took in my friend’s Oscar pool). With plans to fix that in the coming weeks, I caught up with one of my favorite writers and Letterboxd follows, Jeremy Steen. Jeremy’s a writer and musician based in Wisconsin. His fiction appears in The Rejoinder and he wrote an essay for The Oxford American about when his band played as extras in the Terrence Malick film, Song to Song.

“For me, a great movie (or book, or album) is something that is completely itself,” Jeremy said. “This means it can be deeply flawed, amateurish, or even a complete disaster as long as it retains its idiosyncrasies or persistence of vision. Its flaws, instead of a detraction, are a part of what make it special.

“I’ve learned so much about myself as a storyteller through watching film, and a lot of this comes from thinking about the differences between the two mediums. I watched Dog Day Afternoon the other night and I got lost in thinking about how I would approach the opening scene and Sonny as a character on the page. If this sounds like an annoying undergrad writing prompt to you, that’s more than fair but I still find it interesting that Don Delillo was as influenced by a filmmaker like Godard as he was any other writer (which is easy to see after watching something like La Chinoise).

We caught up on his takes on some of this year’s movies, how movies influence his writing, and the state of the internet (much to discuss!).

5 Oscars Things

1. How do you solve a problem like Anora?

The questions revolving around Sean Baker’s big winner at the Oscar’s range from ostensibly meaningful to woefully stupid. Should Baker have forced the cast to use an intimacy coordinator? I don’t know, probably. Answering that question is outside my paygrade. Are Baker and his costars Russian assets, pandering to their oligarchic benefactors and praising anti-Ukrainian aggression? Who can say?

All this being said, the most important representation issue in Anora doesn’t have anything to do with sex work at all. (If you want to read one of the best books about sex work and work in general, I emphatically recommend Heather Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism). Or, if it does, only tangentially so. I am, or course, speaking about the film’s depiction of the humble goon (and I’m not using goon as a verb—get your mind out of the gutter!). Goons abound in Anora and throughout cinematic history. Goons, henchmen, enforcers, thugs, toughs, all these knuckle-dragging, monosyllabic minions are a staple of noirs, westerns, mobster movies, Disney musicals, space operas, and…you get the idea. Was Yura Borisov’s Best Supporting Actor nomination a win orchestrated by a Russia troll farm for the benefit of Putin and his league of black-market caviar dealers? That I can’t say. What I can say is Anora brought representation and newfound respect for one of Hollywood’s long marginalized groups. I can’t answer any of the questions Anora has asked but I can ask that we put our differences aside, however briefly, and salute our goons and their historic achievement.

2. Brutalized by The Brutalist

When I went into see The Brutalist, I’d just read a tweet (a bad idea, I know) saying that the reason everyone was so sad about David Lynch’s recent passing was that society was no longer generating artists of a high enough caliber to replace him. This is a dogshit take for many reasons but the main two are that a) Lynch’s passing was sad in and of itself and b) great artists still exist. This tweet didn’t address the fact that, especially in cinema, great art is harder to produce than ever before, which is as much a result of Hollywood’s takeover by private equity as it is anything else. With this in mind, I decided to check my skepticism of The Brutalist and prepare myself to be wowed by the work of a modern-day master. For this, I was not rewarded, I was degraded, which seems to be Corbet’s MO.

I could go on and on about this movie but, suffice to say, I found it baffling and incoherent at best. As far as the film being a love letter to classic filmmaking goes (I swear, if someone says the words Vista Vision to me again, I’m going to fucking lose it) see Corbet’s use of AI to clean up the Hungarian dialogue before passing your final judgement. Honestly, if you loved this movie, that’s fine. I can see how one could fall under its spell. It does look and sound great (I can’t really complain about Daniel Blumberg’s win for Best Score) but for me that isn’t enough. Filmmaking is also about storytelling and The Brutalist collapses under the weight of its own ambition. And if you’re wondering if the film’s message is inherently Zionist, my answer is yes, obviously.

3. I don’t know how anyone can stand it

All this being said, I didn’t watch one second of this year’s broadcast. Awards shows, late night talk shows, and Saturday Night Live are all media poison, as far as I’m concerned. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to break me psychologically (maybe, one day, I’ll be a villain’s goon and you, like Liam Neeson from a Taken film, need to extract the location of my boss’s lair or something), just strap me to a chair and make me watch Jimmy Fallon host The Tonight Show or something. I’ll flip on my compatriots faster than the Academy’s voters did on Emilia Perez after seeing Karla Sofia Gascón’s old tweets.

4. Letterboxd taught me how to laugh and love (online)

I’m generally decent at socializing. I’ve moved across the country twice in the last six years and managed to make lasting connections in both locations while maintaining my hometown friendships. This is not to brag—it’s just to make the point that I can successfully interact with human beings in the physical world. This is not the case in the digital one. Every time I’ve tried to engage with various social platforms, I collapse into anxiety and self-doubt. I think it boils down to this: I am a coward and I fear the relative permanence of digital expression. That being said, I am an avid Letterboxd user, though I can’t really even say why.

I guess writing reviews about movies has lower stakes than engaging in the Twitter discourse. Of course, in real world terms, Twitter discourse is definitionally low stakes, but the way Letterboxd is set up feels more conducive to someone with a brain like mine. (Watch: now that I’ve put this in writing, they’ll “update” the platform and ruin it for all of us.) Also, I love an assignment so being forced to limit my commentary to a movie I’ve just watched is cathartic on some level. To be clear, I’m not writing film criticism over there. My shit is dumb.

But yeah, I’ve somehow managed to get nothing but good things out of Letterboxd. I’ve found a small community of likeminded film fans who have expanded and deepened my knowledge of the form and who, in turn, occasionally enjoy my thoughts and comments. It’s helped me keep in touch with old friends and engage with new ones. This was the promise of the social internet, a promise that’s mostly been abandoned by the tech industry. We’ll see how long Letterboxd lasts!

5. Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and complete unknowns

The big bummer for me during every awards season is the reminder of all the films I missed during the year. This year there were considerably fewer than usual. As far as I’m concerned, biopics are another form of media poison, though I did have some interest in A Complete Unknown. I love a disaster movie and Emilia Perez seemed to check all the boxes but I’m currently refusing to resubscribe to Netflix for no reason other than some ill-defined petulance due to their recent clampdown on account sharing and never-ending price hikes.

I would have liked to have seen Nickel Boys which is, according to some people I trust, the best film of the year. But its use of first person POV shots makes me deeply uncomfortable and I’m not sure if I can make it through two and a half hours of that. Eventually, I’ll suck it up and give it a try. For what it’s worth, my favorite movie of the year was probably I Saw the TV Glow, a film completely absent from the Oscar’s. Which is fine. At any rate, I imagine we’ll be hearing plenty more from Jane Schoenbrun in the coming years.

Anyway, here’s looking forward to next year. Movies are the best! Even when they suck!

Follow Jeremy on Bluesky and Letterboxd and check out some of his writing here and here.

Reference Section

• Catch more of Jeremy at the Unkind Rewind podcast.

• IMO, Mikey Madison’s best performance might still be this moment in Better Things (at 3:43)

• For Azure Road, I wrote about sustainable New Zealand fashion brand, Untouched World.

• MWPA is hosting this reading and community organizing event on the 18th (and I’ll be sharing something). Come out!