Home Stretch

This will be my last newsletter of 2024, so as usual, I’m feeling introspective about the year that’s been and hopeful about the year to come. Yes, even this coming year, which will be very hard for a lot of people on many fronts. Hope will be a very big theme of 2025 for that reason alone. My other theme, on a personal level, is to be more discerning.

This is still vague, but I realized a lot of my burn out in the second half of this year came down to just needing to be more selective. Whether it’s about how and where I’m expending energy, what I’m consuming (both media-related and food-related), or how I’m spending my money - all things I should be doing anyway (and usually do anyway!), but sort of got away from me sometime around mid-year. I’ll let you know how I do with this in 2025.

Anyway! Before I present my Best Of Wrap-Up, I thought I’d get a little festive first. Two years ago, I wrote about my embrace of cheesy Christmas romances in a post called “A Skeptic’s Guide to Bad Movies, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love, Actually.” I stand by it and hope you’ll re-read it (despite the wonky formatting) and be inspired to watch Hot Frosty or Our Little Secret this week. (Or the genuinely funny Hallmark parody, A Clusterfunke Christmas, written by Ana Gasteyer and Rachel Dratch, that just got added to Paramount+.)

But sometimes you want to watch something with a little more meat on its bones while still being fun and festive. As we reach the end of “Holiday Movie Season,” may I present these highly recommended underrated gems for your viewing pleasure.

• Mixed Nuts

  • A rare Nora Ephron movie that is neither rom-com nor crime caper, but has elements of both. This movie often gets forgotten about when it comes to classic Christmas movies. Probably because it’s a stage play-esque comedy of errors with offbeat humor in which a motley crew of seemingly unrelated characters eventually intertwine on one absurd Christmas Eve. (Think It’s a Wonderful Life meets Noises Off, sort of?) The cast is also stacked with early ‘90s up-and-comers like Liev Shreiber (being very Liev Shreiber) and Adam Sandler (being very Adam Sandler) and comedy veterans like Steve Martin and Madeline Kahn. It’s the type of movie where you don’t know how or when Parker Posey will show up, but you know that she will. 

• The Holdovers

  • This was one of my favorite movies from last year that I saw too late to include in my Best Of round-up, alas. Paul Giamatti plays a disgruntled teacher at an all-boys boarding school tasked with staying behind with the kids who have nowhere to go during the winter break. All but one of the boys manage to find a way out of it, and a very touching story with biting humor ensues. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “why don’t they make character-driven movies that feel high stakes despite their quiet, indie nature ala Dead Poets Society and The Ice Storm anymore?,” the answer is, they do.

• Pottersville

  • This one is the closest to meeting standard rom-com tropes in that there is a comical misunderstanding and a central romance to root for. But, the two romantic leads in this case are Michael Shannon and Judy Greer, so you already know it’s going to be weirder than anything you’ll find on Hallmark. Case in point - the main plotline involves Michael Shannon’s character being mistaken for Bigfoot and the cute Christmasy town losing its mind over it, all topped with Ian McShane playing a grizzled hunter who may or may not care whether “Bigfoot” is actually a person in a costume. What is not to like about this? Go watch it. 

• Happy Christmas

  • I love a Joe Swanberg movie. If you’re unfamiliar with him, he’s of the same mid-aughts indie ilk as Greta Gerwig and the Duplass Brothers. I recommend checking out Drinking Buddies and Digging for Fire as well, or his Netflix series, Easy. Happy Christmas is in the “dysfunctional family” category of Christmas movies, but slower and decidedly less chaotic than, say, While You Were Sleeping or The Family Stone. Anna Kendrick plays a twist on the manic pixie dream girl trope, in which her carefree ways inspire her suburban mom sister-in-law - played by one of my all-time faves, Melanie Lynskey - to jumpstart her life.

• 200 Cigarettes

  • Not enough time to watch more movies during Christmas week? Good news - this one is set on New Year’s Eve! It is a series of vignettes that may feel a bit like Love, Actually’s punk rock, very New York, cousin (despite coming out three years earlier). Among the vignettes are Paul Rudd and Courtney Love playing the messy friends-to-lovers couple you didn’t know you needed, Ben Affleck playing a himbo bartender, and Martha Plimpton playing an Elvis Costello-obsessed party hostess connecting all of the characters as she anxiously awaits their arrival. This movie came out when I was a teenager and I became instantly obsessed, namely because my queens, Christina Ricci and Gaby Hoffman, are also in it. I have not been able to find it in decades, and it remains my New Year’s Eve white whale, so if you find it, please tell me!

Happy Holidays, everyone! Thank you for spending another year with me and supporting this newsletter. It means a lot to me. <3 See you in 2025, friends!

FUN STUFF: Top 5 of 2024 Wrap-Up Edition

(note: these are the best of what I read or watched in 2024, not necessarily what came out in 2024)

Best Of What I Read:

The City of the Living by Nicola Lagioia

Ms. Ice Cream Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami

Home by Toni Morrison

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

Best Of What I Watched:

(Movies)

Heretic

Polite Society

The Taste of Things

Talk to Me

Wicked Little Letters

(TV)

Ripley

Somebody, Somewhere

Baby Reindeer

Fantasmas

Colin From Accounts

Best Of What I Listened To:

Album: Maggie Rogers (Don’t Forget Me)

Album: Beyonce (Cowboy Carter)

Album: Oshima Brothers (Origami)

Podcast: Taskmaster: The Podcast

Podcast: How Did This Get Made?

Best Of What/Where I Ate:

The sticky toffee pudding from Hawksmoor

The rice balls at Cafe Spaghetti

All the croissants I ate in Paris, and also the truffle ravioli I had at L’Atlas

A, quite frankly, obscene amount of birria tacos from Tacos El Brother

Stovetop popcorn with salt and nutritional yeast - dinner of champions