No Expectations 058: Mood Ring
The belated ‘Best Films of 2023’ list. Plus, a lukewarm Grammys take and Netflix’s ‘The Greatest Night in Pop.’
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Headline song: Dehd, “Mood Ring”
Thanks for being here. After last week’s gracious feature on Substack Discover, the newsletter hit another milestone of 4,000 total subscribers. Unreal. If you’re new to No Expectations, it’s a weekly music and culture blog. Each week, you get a wildcard main essay, a new 15-song playlist, as well as updates on what I’m listening to, watching, and reading. Since I’m a Chicago-based writer, this is a very Midwest-centric blog. So, if you live in this city too, you’ll also receive a weekly roundup of upcoming local shows to check out.
This week’s newsletter is mostly about movies so if you’re just here for the music, feel free to scroll down to the playlist in the “What I listened to” section. If you dig what you read, consider signing up for a paid subscription. It’s the cost of one Old Style beer per month but it gives me time to make the newsletter better.
Chicago, go see this show at GMan Tavern on Saturday
If you live in the Chicagoland area, there’s a killer show happening Saturday night at Gman Tavern featuring a lineup full of No Expectations favorites: Villagerrr, Lily Seabird, and Burr Oak. Longtime readers will recognize headliner Villagerrr from Columbus, OH, and Burlington, VT’s Lily Seabird from the many newsletters hyping their records so I’ll keep this brief. Playing just their second Chicago show ever, Villagerrr will be performing subtle and compelling tunes off their forthcoming AOTY-contender Tear Your Heart Out, which is out March 22 via Darling Records. Seabird brings her stellar band of guitarist Greg Freeman, bassist Nina Cates (Robber Robber), and drummer Zack James (Dari Bay, Robber Robber) to rip through the stunning Alas, which came out in January. Get there early for Chicago’s Burr Oak, who are also excellent. Tickets here. If you’re a subscriber and make it out, I’ll buy you a beer.
My 15 Favorite Films From 2023
Music has always been my main beat and I’ve never been a film critic. While I’ve written about a few movies when I worked at places like VICE and Netflix, I always felt like I was faking it. Compared to people like Roger Ebert and the critics I read religiously today like
, Vikram Murthi, Richard Brody, and several others, they tap into something elemental and insightful in their reviews that I can never fully nail when I try. That’s OK though. As a culture writer, it’s probably good to not have all of your interests fodder for a potential freelance assignment.Next to music, film is almost just as influential in my life. It’s shaped my tastes, made me think more deeply about the world and my own life, and provoked me in unquantifiably profound ways. There are few more formative memories than making my way through the IMDB 250 as a kid, going to Blockbuster, and having my childhood friend Ian over to watch the consensus classics. When you’re that young, you can see why critics consider a film great or you can think they’re full of shit with the confidence only teenagers possess. While it might be a cliche now to say how sick it was to see something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Pulp Fiction at 13, I cannot understate what it was like to be a bored teen in the Midwest and grapple with those films.
When I started No Expectations, the fourth newsletter I ever published was a list of my favorite films of 2022. “I’m trying to go to the movies more in 2023,” I wrote then. “It’s much easier to queue up something on the too-many streaming services I either share a password or pay out-of-pocket for but getting out of the house is a capital-G good.” While my intentions were noble, like most New Year’s resolutions, I beefed it pretty hard. I only made it to the theater about a dozen times in 2023 and watched the majority of new films from the comfort of my home. According to Letterboxd, I logged about 150 movies—respectable, but rookie numbers to my film buds—and my watchlist still ballooned to a Sysephean 1650 total. I’ll get around to it eventually.
I’m doing better in 2024 keeping up with movies. While it’s tough to juggle new albums, the two or three podcasts I check in on, writing a weekly newsletter, turning in freelance assignments, and listening to a full Grateful Dead show every day, I’ve still managed to watch about 30 films already this year. Pretty good! This roundup is late because I tried to catch up on everything (and of course, there are a bunch of notable omissions featured below) and I wanted to think a little deeper about what I liked and why I liked it. I decided to go for gut-decision favorites over critical consensus and even was confident enough to try out a ranked list. I also included some movies that may have premiered in 2022 in places like New York or Los Angeles but I decided to consider some of them 2023 movies since they debuted in that calendar year in Chicago.
Hope you find something to dig. I’ll be back to regular music-focused publishing next week.
15. The Starling Girl (dir. Laurel Parmet, streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime)
Director Laurel Parmet’s debut feature film is a tender, upsetting, and unflinching coming-of-age story of a teenage girl (Eliza Scanlen) squaring her repressive, ultraconservative Christian upbringing with her desires. While the film is a knotty look at how dogmatic religious sects can stifle, it’s mostly about the protagonist’s journey to find some sense of freedom and self. No one has her best interests at heart, not her family who are hiding their problems and pushing them under the rug, not her church, and certainly not her youth pastor (Lewis Pullman, Bill Pullman’s kid) who grooms her. There is a stomach-churning depiction of a criminal age-gap affair—so be warned—but it’s handled with tact and care by Parmet. The shots are stunning and the music supervision is cathartic. Perfect ending too.
14. Earth Mama (dir. Savannah Leaf, streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime)
Another first-time feature-length director Savannah Leaf floored me with Earth Mama, a visually stunning and emotionally potent tale about an expecting mother and recovering addict Gia (an incredible Tia Nomore) navigating her way through a bureaucratic hell. She has two kids in foster care—who were removed during her addiction—and is working to get them back. The story follows her as she clocks in at a low-paying job at a mall photography center, attends a drug recovery program, visits her kids, and navigates her pregnancy. While she does everything right—staying clean and following the court-mandated rules—things still go wrong. Filmed with mesmerizing color and inventive cinematography, Leaf has a masterpiece in her. Guest stars include rapper Doechii, Dominic Fike, and Erika Alexander.
13. Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson, streaming on Prime Video)
Wes Anderson is one of the most successful working directors in the sense that he can double down on his own sensibilities from movie to movie. His unrelenting style has become so ubiquitous it’s become a meme. Just go on TikTok or search Twitter and you’ll find user-created parodies of Anderson’s visual aesthetics. Sure, most of these are poorly-made facsimiles that fail to understand why his style is so compelling. It’s not just that these scenes look elegantly composed or cute, it’s that there’s an underlying emotionality and intentionality in the way he shoots them. Asteroid City, his latest which is now streaming on Prime Video, proves that thousands of people parodying his style on social media can’t dilute his effectiveness. Without giving away the plot, which is decisively meta, this might be my favorite movie of his I’ve seen in over a decade. The ending was an emotional gut-punch and a powerful statement from an artist who even in success stays misunderstood. His Roald Dahl shorts on Netflix are also spectacular.
(Blurb adapted from 8/17/23)
12. Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet, for rent and purchase on VOD)
The most frustrating thing about the discourse surrounding Barbie filmmaker Greta Gerwig being snubbed for Best Director at the Oscars is how it ignored Justine Triet’s deserved nomination for Anatomy of a Fall. The French court drama is a thrillingly-paced look at the aftermath and investigation of a supiscious death. A man is found dead after a bizarre fall from the top floor of a chalet he shares with his wife (Sandra Hüller), a famous author, and his son (Milo Machado Graner). Was he murdered by his spouse or was it an accident? The inescapable ambiguity and contradictory pieces of evidence build to a boiling point. It’s so well-made, well-written, and well-acted (especially by the dog). Though there’s some unintentional comedy in the French court system’s inherent eccentricities, this one earns its hype.
11. The Civil Dead (dir. Clay Tatum, streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime)
Clay Tatum’s The Civil Dead is one of the most inventive comedies of 2023. When I watched it, it stayed with me for weeks. It’s an actually novel take on a ghost story where a struggling, lazy Los Angeles photographer (Tatum) who chooses to pay his rent through scammy, get-rich-quick schemes encounters an old friend he lost touch with (Whitmer Thomas, who co-wrote the film with Tatum) but can’t seem to get rid of. It’s equal parts sweet and misanthropic but it’s legitimately funny throughout. It’s part buddy comedy, part LA dirtbag mumblecore, and part ghost story. You can really tell Thomas and Tatum are best buds in real life from their onscreen chemistry. While the movie didn’t get the buzz of others featured on this list, I’d bet it’d have the highest hit rate among No Expectations readers.
10. Sick of Myself (dir. Kristoffer Borgli, steaming on Paramount+ with Showtime)
Remember that movie The Worst Person In The World? Well, that title seems more fitting for the protagonist of Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself. This is exactly the kind of movie I really love: a pitch-black satire that’s as biting as it is funny. I trend toward films in that genre that are more like Triangle of Sadness or Bodies, Bodies, Bodies than The Menu or Glass Onion. Sick of Myself falls in the former camp. Basically, the pitch for this is, “What if Ruben Östlund directed Safe instead of Todd Haynes?” The result is a really bracing comedy about millennial narcissism, art, victimhood, shallow inclusivity, sycophantic journalism, and the ways selfishness manifests itself differently in people. There are make-up jump scares that feel straight out of Cronenberg’s catalog and a sex scene that’s honestly so brilliant it should stop the puritanical debates about whether or not scenes like that are gratuitous. I didn’t enjoy Borgli's other movie from 2023, the Nicolas Cage-starring Dream Scenario, as much but that one was pretty good too.
(Blurb adapted from 8/3/23)
9. The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne, streaming on Peacock)
Watching Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, I thought about how they don’t make dramas quite like this anymore. Well, that’s the point. The filmmakers took great pains to not just capture the 1970s of its Massachusetts boarding school setting but to make the film itself look like one of the mid-budget dramas that succeeded in that decade. Though shot digitally, it’s edited to give off the grainy, organic appearance of real film. Even its graphic design—from the main credits to the title card—is a pitch-perfect approximation of the era. More than that, the film transcends its nostalgia with a resonant story about unlikely friendships. Paul Giamatti unsurprisingly soars in a role written for Paul Giamatti as a depressed, alcoholic, and prickly professor and so does Da'Vine Joy Randolph as a grieving mother who works at the school. But really, it’s newcomer Dominic Sessa’s lanky charisma that truly shines. It’s a warm, complicated hug of a movie.
8. Fremont (dir. Babak Jalali, streaming on Mubi)
While The Iron Claw was 2023’s buzzy drama featuring Jeremy Allen White, Fremont was by far the better movie that featured the moody star of The Bear. Directed by the Iranian-British filmmaker Babak Jalali, this Sundance-debuted movie follows the interior life of an Afghani immigrant (Anaita Wali Zada) who ended up in Fremont, CA after working as a translator for U.S. forces in her home country. She has a job at a fortune cookie factory and her social life consists of her coworkers and immediate neighbors, also immigrants from Afghanistan. She’s lonely and conflicted but decides to open herself up to romance. It’s a sweet, reflective, and cutting look at assimilation and alienation. Alongside Zada and White, are great guest stars in Gregg Turkington, Boots Riley, and more. Shot in black and white and streaming on Mubi, make sure the subtitles are working when you stream it. During my first viewing on that service, I quickly realized something was off: while English was subtitled, the dialogue in Dari was not. That was not an intentional choice. It’s probably fixed now though.
7. Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, streaming on Mubi)
Sometime in late 2022, I was aimlessly scrolling through The Criterion Channel and spotted a vertical titled “directed by Aki Kaurismäki.” Each film in the collection was around ninety minutes or if not, much shorter. After a quick Google search, I read that his 1986 film Shadows In Paradise—which was the first film in the Finnish director’s “Proletariat Trilogy”—was a good place to start. I was floored and soon binged the whole series (Shadows In Paradise, Ariel, The Match Factory Girl) plus a few of his other films. Kaurismäki makes bleak movies. His characters are all ground down by their shitty jobs, their loneliness, and their bad luck in finding love. His palate is gray and harsh but it’s occasionally pocked with vibrant bursts of color. It can be dour but the fleeting moments of connection, hope, and romance the director’s heroes encounter add a needed dose of sweetness to the film. Fallen Leaves is the fourth entry to the Proletariat series—his first addition in three decades. While it follows a similar premise as Shadows where a troubled blue-collar worker kindles a relationship with a lonely supermarket employee, this film is funnier and has a bigger heart. It may take a minute to warm up to Kaurismäki’s slow rhythm and stilted dialogue, but it’s worth it for the emotional core here.
6. Walk Up (dir. Hong Sang-soo, for purchase and rent on VOD)
Hong Sang-soo is a relentlessly prolific South Korean filmmaker who thrives on minimalism. He rarely uses more than a handful of actors and settings. He prefers long, fixed takes full of semi-improvised dialogue. His movies, while slow and sparse, are meditative, thought-provoking, and consistently great. The scripts often feature fairly meta scenes about work, filmmaking, and relationships where you can feel the director being in conversation with his own life and oeuvre. Walk Up is a pretty good introduction to his work since it encapsulates a lot of what he’s interested in and what he does well. It’s an innovative look at one building and the people who live in it. He documents the nosy landlord, the struggling chef, and the director who often visits the place and ends up living there. There are mid-scene time lapses and playfully mind-bending experiments he takes here. It’s unbelievably my kind of movie.
5. Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt, streamed on Paramount+ with Showtime)
Being on deadline is largely a miserable experience. It looms over you until it’s finished and you can never fully relax until you’ve turned it in and the feedback is positive. Showing Up, the latest film from Kelly Reichardt, captures this anxiety better than most in how it shows its artist-hero (Michelle Williams) prepares sculptures for a gallery opening. As she takes time off work to focus on her craft, everything goes wrong: her family introduces drama, her neighbor fails to respect boundaries, and even a neighborhood pigeon throws her schedule for a loop. But instead of imbuing the film with a sense of dread, Reichardt fills every shot with patient grace. It’s a small-scale but powerful movie about the everyday joy and anguish of creating. While the process is never as seamless and painless as you’d imagine, the work always gets done and you end up surprising yourself. Williams is excellent but so is John Magaro (First Cow, Past Lives), and André 3000. As a bonus, it’s set in a Portland, OR art school so there are some needed moments of comic relief documenting life on campus there.
4. Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorcese, streaming on Apple TV+)
Martin Scorcese is a legend and Killers of the Flower Moon is such an impressive addition to his unmatched catalog. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour epic that grapples with a particularly vile and violent period in American history: a series of gruesome murders in the early 1920s on the Osage Reservation in northern Oklahoma. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a hapless fool who moves to Oklahoma to work for his ruthless and wealthy uncle (Robert De Niro), a white man who calls himself “the King of Osage Hills.” Because the Osage people who live on the land discovered oil, they’re incredibly rich, and the white men who live nearby all compete to marry the indigenous women in a transparent attempt to secure their dowry. It’s all pretty disgusting stuff and it gets worse. Scorcese documents these real events with necessary gravity. Lily Gladstone is amazing. If you haven’t seen it, there will be several rockstar cameos and bit parts that will get increasingly surprising as the film goes on. (“Is that Pete Yorn?!?”)
3. Beau Is Afraid (dir. Ari Aster, streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime)
What little I read about Beau Is Afraid made me think I was going to loathe it. The Ari Aster-directed film is divisive for good reason: it’s a gross, chaotic, and overlong trip into one anxiety-riddled man’s psychoses, neuroses, and inescapable mommy issues. It’s also the most fun I had watching a movie in 2023. This might be the all-time award-winner for the most “Not For Everyone” film ever made but it really worked on me. It opens up with Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) planning a flight to visit his mother. He lives in a rundown apartment in a comically crime-infested city. Every worst-case scenario thought that enters his mind is played out hysterically on screen. It gets psychedelic, unbearably dark, and pretty disgusting but I laughed and squirmed more than anything else. Such a thrill. Nathan Lane is incredible in it.
2. The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, in theaters)
How do you make a film about the Holocaust? Is it possible to treat the subject with proper care and tact without engaging in Hollywood tropes that cheapen it? This goal is what director Jonathan Glazer set out to do with The Zone of Interest, where he told Vanity Fair that he set out to “remove the artifice and conventions of filmmaking that lead you down a road which didn’t feel relevant here: screen psychology. The way that cinema fetishizes, glamorizes, empowers—in this context, none of those were appropriate.” The movie centers on the sickeningly ordinary lives of the Höss family, who live right outside the gates of Auschwitz. Rudolph, the patriarch, is the Nazi official in charge of the concentration camp. The atrocities over the gates are never shown directly on screen. But you can hear it, in vomit-inducing detail courtesy of the stunning sound design. It’s a brutal, sparse, and experimental film. Sandra Hüller gives a hauntingly icy performance as Rudolph’s monstrous wife, Hedwig. Shot via surveillance-style, fly-on-the-wall cameras, it’s haunting and mundane. It’s a 105-minute-dry heave that I haven’t been able to shake.
1. Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan, streaming on Peacock)
While it feels boring to place a movie that was such a big movie with a marquee director, all-star cast, and millions of marketing dollars to promote it at the top of my list, I can’t lie and say that another film floored me as much as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be the big-budget summer blockbuster. It’s masterfully done front-to-back and Nolan’s flourish as a filmmaker is perfectly suited for his tortured subject. I wish Chicago had a 70mm IMAX theater but it was still stunning on the smaller screen. Ludgwig Goranssson’s score is breathtaking and apart from my personal alltimer 28 Days Later, it’s likely Cillian Murphy’s best role. There’s a very silly moment at the end that would have knocked it down a peg had I not been so fully immersed throughout the entire leadup.
Honorable mentions: May December, American Fiction, Afire, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Past Lives, Broker, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, Passages, Infinity Pool, Return To Seoul, Alcarràs, Scrapper, Brother
Haven’t seen: Poor Things, Monster, Godzilla Minus One, Napoleon, One Fine Morning, The Boy and The Heron, A Thousand and One, Priscilla, Blackberry, Flamin’ Hot
What I listened to:
No Expectations 058 Playlist: Apple Music // Spotify
1. Dehd, “Mood Ring”
2. Marble Eye, “See It Too”
3. Daniel Romano, “Chatter”
4. PACKS, “HFCS”
5. Prize Horse, “Know Better”
6. Joyer, “Star”
7. Grahan Hunt, “Tashmere Anthill”
8. Interlay, “Lure”
9. Torrey, “Bounce”
10. Hovvdy, “Forever”
11. Katy Kirby, “Fences”
12. Dana Gavanski, “Let Them Row”
13. Fur Trader, “Exit Signs”
14. Valebol, “Salvavidas”
15. Astrid Sonne, “Give My All”
What I watched:
The 66th Annual Grammy Awards
The only way the Grammys are bearable is if you do not care who wins and treat it the same way you would reality television: fun when you’re bored and worth it for a few hours of mindless entertainment. While I was way more excited for the Curb Your Enthusiasm season premiere on HBO that night, I still watched the 66th Grammys telecast. It was fine. None of my preferred artists won the main categories but that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of their music. I am 32 years old: there are more important things to stress over. Friends of the Substack Eryn Allen Kane and Carter Lang won Grammys for their work with Killer Mike and SZA, respectively, which ruled. I don’t need to mention how much I enjoyed Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs’ performance of “Fast Car,” or how it was emotional seeing Joni Mitchell (backed by recent Newport Folk Festival alums) triumphantly perform “Both Sides Now.” Those were clear highlights and so was Annie Lennox’s Sinead O’Connor tribute, which was very fitting and very Sinead in that Lennox called for a ceasefire to the presumable chagrin of the apolitical award show producers. Really, this year’s show felt like an exercise in torturing boomers by making them wait till the very end—through a particularly chaotic Travis Scott performance—to get to Billy Joel.
The Greatest Night In Pop (Netflix)
“We Are The World” is a weird tune that I was not old enough to experience firsthand but this documentary tells the story of how the biggest stars in ‘80s pop music gathered together to ostensibly save the world. The track is a tough thing to wrap my head around because my generation’s “We Are The World” is the disastrous early COVID “Imagine” video from Gal Gadot, but I had a lot of fun watching the talent assembled for this charity single try to nail their parts. It’s worth it alone for the clips of Bob Dylan looking like a fish out of water and getting a needed pep talk from Stevie Wonder. You gain new respect for Huey Lewis too. Justice for Sheila E.
What I read:
On "Six Feet Under," Pitchfork, "evolutions" and evolution as a Music Writing Old (Ian Cohen, Something On)
But with very, very, very few exceptions, there aren’t a lot of ways to age gracefully into a position of security (let alone whatever resembles “tenure”). The reality of music writing (and probably music in general) is that it’s always been the province of the young and hungry and idealistic, that there’s an endless supply of 24-year olds dying to upend the old regime (as I was in 2004). You know those reply guys (and gals) who seem far too invested in “the state of the things” and insert themselves into every conversation? The ones who mourn the death of even the most obscure music website and treat this line of work like it should be protected with government funding? The ones who treat any expression of personal ambivalence about music writing as a sign of moral failure? I don’t care how annoying they seem at the moment, the future is theirs because music writing will always reward the people who straight up want it the most.
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar
Thursday, Feb. 8: Frost Children, MSPAINT at Beat Kitchen. Sold out.
Thursday, Feb. 8: Lonnie, Foundation Orchestra, Noise Shrine at Empty Bottle. Tickets.
Friday, Feb. 9: Interlay, Joyer, Feller at Sleeping Village. Tickets.
Friday, Feb. 9: Poolside, The Undercover Dream Lovers at Vic Theatre. Tickets.
Saturday, Feb. 10: Villagerrr, Lily Seabird, Burr Oak at Gman Tavern. Tickets.
Saturday, Feb. 10: Deap Vally, Sloppy Jane at Thalia Hall. Tickets.
Monday, Feb. 12: André 3000 at Thalia Hall. Sold out.
Tuesday, Feb. 13: André 3000 at the Salt Shed. Sold out.
Wednesday, Feb. 14: Yuma Abe, Lake J (Cadien Lake James) at Empty Bottle. Tickets.
Agreed on the movies I saw (Oppenheimer, Killers, Asteroid, Holdovers, Beau) and added a number I haven’t to my watch list. Thanks for help me continue to justify that Paramount+ subscription…😂