January 26, 2026

The Red Spectacles, After Life, Morvern Callar, Courtney Marie Andrews, Portishead, Naive Melodies

Happy Monday everyone. If you’ve been trapped by the snow storm that affected one-third of the country, I hope you’ve shoveled yourself out. Here’s what I’ve been watching.

CONSIDER ME SURPRISED: The Red Spectacles (1987) - Thanks to my friend Addison, who suggested checking this one out at DC’s microcinema, Suns. Went in basically knowing nothing, except that it dealt in some way with a futuristic fascist Japan. What I didn’t realize was, after a prologue and set-up that recalls “Judge Dredd,” the film would be a hyper-stylized, quite silly rumination on how to find the perfect bowl of noodles. Don’t really know what happened in the movie but Mamoru Oshii, who also directed the anime classics Ghost in the Shell and Angel’s Egg (The Red Spectacles is live action, FYI), creates so many wonderful tableaux of abstracted action which often verge into the absurdly comical. Somewhere between its Japanese contemporary Tampopo and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. Compliment!

NEEDS A REWATCH: After Life (1999) - I’ve only seen one film by the Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, his wonderful 2018 drama Shoplifters, which typifies his pet subject of found families. This one is rather different: a depiction of a bureaucratic afterlife office in which people get to choose the one memory they’ll keep with them forever. Some know right away, some struggle with the question in various ways. The actors who play the deceased, recounting their stories for the staff of the purgatory, are so natural, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kore-eda simply just asked random people to play the roles and recount their personal memories. (Upon writing this sentence, I realized I actually don’t know if that’s such an outlandish thought. As it turns out, the cast includes many non-professional actors doing exactly this.) In the back half of the movie, their memories are filmed and we watch the filmmaking process occur, scene by scene. It’s a nice little window into the struggle of a director to capture a writer’s vision. I liked it, but did not have the profound reaction others have had, and will likely rewatch. Also: if I could choose one of the happiest moments of my life to rewatch for eternity? Hard to say, but biking through Paris on a perfect fall day this past September might rank… Running into Lake Nebagamon with 40 or so other 14-year-olds after spending two weeks in Quetico Provincial Park in 2011… my first taste of Graeter’s Ice Cream… being in Central Park at any time of year… Lots to choose from. Thank you friends and family for being a part of this wonderful life of mine.

Streaming on the Criterion Channel.

BLEAK AND BEAUTIFUL: I continue to watch the films of Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish filmmaker whose work combines a poetic rhythm and a blistering view of humanity. Morvern Callar, her 2002 film, is no exception. The title character (Her name is Morvern Callar! Before watching this movie and only knowing the title I figured it was a Scottish Gaelic phrase), played by Samantha Morton, doesn’t know what to do with the corpse of her boyfriend, James, who has killed himself. She continues to go to parties, hang out with her friend, go to work, but the body lies still on the floor of their apartment, like a pile of laundry; a grief that can’t be addressed, let alone vanquished. She carries on with her friend to holiday in Spain, even though the friend tells Morvern that James had slept with her too. Morvern is also passing off James’s novel manuscript as her own. Why does Morvern do the things she does, as she dips further into erraticism? Does she feel sadness, guilt? Her behavior doesn’t fall into a neat schematic of how someone grieving would act, at least in a movie. But that’s exactly what makes her compelling. That her behavior isn’t quite trackable, and that Morton’s character is ever so real, shows us that those neat depictions of grief (ahem, Hamnet) sanitize this profound experience beyond recognizability.

The film takes a trip to a Spanish vacation resort populated by partying British youth, which reminded me of 2024’s great film How to Have Sex. With its institutionalized sex games fueled by drunken debauchery, and authority figures in on the game, this setting seems like my own personal nightmare. What a treat to experience it only on film and not, like, in real life. On this holiday, Morvern hooks up with a guy who is also grieving, though she doesn’t disclose her loss. When they have sex, it’s staged like a animalistic dance, a theme Ramsay revisited in her 2025 film Die My Love.

Streaming on Kanopy, Amazon Prime, and with ads on the Roku Channel

Listening this week

Courtney Marie Andrews, a folk rock-ish singer whose gentle voice pairs nicely with her guitar playing, has a new album out called Valentine. She sounds wise without having become wizened, full of hard-earned vitality. Her previous album, 2022’s Loose Future, made me a fan and is definitely worth a listen.

The podcast Bandsplain featured the story of Portishead this past week, the Bristol band that pioneered an electronic, vibe-y approach to indie rock. As the podcast notes, Portishead may be doomed to an eternity of hotel lobby ambience playlists, but their masterpiece debut album, Dummy (1994), deserves a close listen. There’s a profound sadness as singer Beth Gibbons wails, “Give me a reason to love you” on the song “Glory Box,” a lover begging her lover to be better. “Sour Times,” with its frenetic production that recalls a heist movie soundtrack as much as a bad dream, remains one of my all-time favorite songs.

There’s a new compilation of covers of Talking Heads songs called Naive Melodies, mostly by Black artists, which is fitting given the Heads being influenced by afrobeat and covering Al Green. Like many cover albums, not every track works, but I find the sheer amount of cross-genre interpretation to be refreshing. Highlights include “Burning Down the House” by Rosie Lowe, which has a wonderful synthesizer thing going on, though I wish it had a breakdown à la “Dance Yrself Clean,” and EBBA’s jazzy, intimate “Uh-Oh Love Comes to Town.”

And, since I am trudging through the ice and snow to see him play live tonight at Songbyrd Music House, everyone take a listen to Greg Freeman, and his 2025 album Burnover, which recalls hard-rockin’ Neil Young in a great way.

Next week, I’ll write a bit about Sam Raimi’s Send Help, hopefully Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, and whatever else comes my way. Thanks for reading!