Every book I read and every movie and TV series I watched in February
Francois Truffaut said, “Three films a day, three books a week, and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.” A good plan for spending your life, but for that annoying concept: bills. So I make do with three films and one book a week minimum, which is doable if you don’t fritter your life away on social media, having arguments that will never be resolved. At least books and movies end, though we wish the great ones would not.
Must read
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
So wonderful and gripping, I read it in one sitting. Told in the form of a memoir by a writer whose close friend has died. She takes in his dog, a huge Great Dane that is even more grief-stricken than she is. It’s about friendships between people and animals, how writers turn their own lives into fiction, and the futility of describing suffering in words. I was so fascinated by the memoir that I wondered who the dead writer was. Then I remembered that The Friend is a novel—not factual, but true—that won the National Book Award for Fiction. So now my cats demand that I write a novel about them.
Must watch
Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski
By far the most romantic movie I’ve seen in years. In Communist-era Poland, a musician researching folk music meets a young woman (Joanna Kulig, remember the name) with moxie, and their affair spans the length of the Cold War. Based on the story of the filmmaker’s parents. Watching it is like having your heart broken repeatedly until it feels like happiness.
Read my list at the beginning of every month in Esquire (Thanks, PJ).
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 2nd, 2019 at 15:30
Hi Jessica. In a just world Cold War should have been a best picture nominee at the Oscars instead of Bohemian Rhapsody. I saw it last October in Gateway (at the Quezon City Film Festival, together with Shoplifters, Burning, and Agnes Varda’s delightful Faces Places) and was blown away by the music, the cinematography, and yes, by Joanna Kulig’s mesmerizing performance, alternatingly vulnerable and smoldering. (Doesn’t she look like a cross between Jessica Chastain, Lea Seydoux, and Jennifer Lawrence?). That last scene was both devastating and beautiful.