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The more I read about how bleak and wonderful Logan is, the more I put off watching it. Was I ready to see an old, weakened, weary Wolverine scraping by as a limo driver? Or worse, an old, fragile Professor Xavier with dementia? Or a broken-down world of the near future where the other X-Men are dead and institutions are at the beck and call of evil corporations? Dammit, why is pop culture so political now that even popcorn movies remind us of the mess we’re in? Whatever happened to escapist feelgood movies where all we had to worry about was whether A would get together with B—oh right, we don’t want to watch those because most of them are idiotic.

But I couldn’t not see Logan. And as I sat there watching Hugh Jackman, even ropier than usual, in the role that he has embodied so well in ten movies, many of which did not deserve him; the great Patrick Stewart as King Lear as Prof. X; Stephen Merchant as Caliban, illustrating my belief that if you want to get the job done exactly right, cast a comedian; and the mostly silent but brilliantly expressive Dafne Keen as young Laura, I thought: Why should we be so upset that our superheroes have grown old? We’re older—it’s seventeen years since the first X-Men movie with Stewart and Jackman. Everybody grows old. Age and death will get us all, but as Logan demonstrates we can tell age and death to go fuck themselves.

Logan is Wolverine unleashed onscreen for the first time, the Wolverine of the best timelines in the comics—ill-tempered, brutal, unwilling to join the fight but doing the right thing anyway. And paying for it—he may regenerate, but he feels all the pain. James Mangold’s superhero western, with its homage to Shane, left me exhausted but exhilarated. The good guys may be in hiding, on the run, isolated and mocked, but they’re around and they will do what they must.

Plus I really like the explanation of how the mutation is manifested in the female.

Don’t take your kids to see Logan, no matter how they insist. This X-Men movie is for you. If you grew up in the peak Chris Claremont era of X-Men, it may feel like the end of your (over-long) childhood. You are your own mutant now.

Movie: Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi

Hidden Figures is the rousing true story of three African-American women (played with maximum warmth and badassery by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae) who were vital to the success of NASA’s programs at the height of the space race, who did their jobs at a time when racism was the law in the United States. At a time when reality has come to mirror dystopian YA narratives, I think Hidden Figures should be shown to all schoolchildren. The future is full of possibilities, kids, no matter what the grown-ups say.

This is the kind of movie that makes you regret not paying attention to your math teachers. “If only I’d put in the effort instead of having out of body experiences in pre-calculus,” I heard myself say. And then I remembered that I am mediocre in math, unlike my classmates who were snoring in their seats when they were called on by the teacher, and then went to the board, derived the formula, and solved the problem correctly. I can grasp the concepts well enough if they are explained to me in words, and sometimes I can intuit the answer but I could not tell you how I arrived there to save my life. But there’s always a need for popularizers, and if you have to make science sound romantic, email me.

Book: So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano

I thought I’d read Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence before watching the movie by Martin Scorsese, but gave it up at page 40 because I have no appetite for suffering right now, esp. suffering for one’s beliefs. Someday I’ll pick it up again—it took me several attempts to get through Jane Eyre (because I could not see why she’d go for that).

So I ended up reading another short novel about remembering stuff you forgot and then wondering if you are yourself: So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano. It reads like his other novels, so I started wondering if I’d already read it and just forgot. It starts with the narrator, a writer, getting a phone call from a stranger who says he found the writer’s address book. The writer didn’t even notice he’d lost the address book, and he doesn’t need it, but he agrees to meet the stranger and get it back. The stranger is very curious about one of the names in the address book, but the writer cannot remember who that person is and why he has his number. The thick plottens, the stranger’s associate insinuates herself into the writer’s life, and then the writer starts remembering the individual in question…It’s melancholy, and haunting, and you are transported to some grotty little café in Pigalle where it’s always raining and everyone looks like they’re pondering the meaning of existence even if they’re just trying to split the tab. France, your elections are coming up, in the words of Princess Leia, you’re my only hope.

I’ve been steeling myself for days, and tomorrow I’m going to watch Logan.

He stars in the BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes (Hated the fourth season, by the way, frantic and incoherent) and is the screen incarnation of Stephen Strange. We first noticed him as the villain (Not Briony Tallis) in the film of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. He was Peter Guillam in the 2011 version of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Christopher Tietjens in the miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (teleplay by Tom Stoppard). He was the voice of Smaug in the Hobbit movies, Hamlet onstage, and a mesmerizing Richard III in The Hollow Crown. Benedict Cumberbatch is Literary Adaptation Guy, sort of a male equivalent of Helena Bonham-Carter.

Last year he announced that he would produce and star in an adaptation of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male

our favorite spy adventure thriller featuring a cat as a major character.

Earlier this year it was announced that he would star in the BBC adaptation of what may be Ian McEwan’s finest novel, The Child in Time.

And now Cumberbatch will produce and star in the adaptation of the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn.

Patrick Melrose, there’s a character to push an actor to their limits. (When I first saw the headline I thought they meant a reboot of Melrose Place haha.) Abused by his domineering father, left alone by his wealthy, passive-aggressive mother, he goes through all the self-loathing, addiction and bad behavior money can buy. It’s a harrowing, oddly hilarious read and I can’t wait to pick it up again.

What other literary adaptations can Cumberbatch star in? Denis Villeneuve (Arrival!) is adapting my favorite SF novel Dune, and while it will almost certainly not be as gorgeously bonkers as the movie Alejandro Jodorowsky never got to do, I expect great things of the project. Cumberbatch is too old to play Paul Atreides, but maybe Duncan Idaho? Thufir Hawat? Hasimir Fenring?

Movie: Paterson by Jim Jarmusch

Here is a poem by William Carlos Williams, the guiding spirit of Jim Jarmusch’s movie Paterson.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Williams wrote a very long poem called Paterson, about a city in New Jersey. It starts like this:

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automations.

The city is a man and the man is the city, and in the film he is played by Adam Driver. Paterson (no first name given) wakes up at the same time every day next to his wife Laura (Goldshifteh Farahani) and walks to work. Paterson is a bus driver. He listens to the passengers’ conversations but does not join in. He eats his lunch on a bench with a view of Passaic Falls. After his shift he goes home and has dinner with his rather flaky but delightful wife, listens to her latest plans (she wants to be a cupcake mogul and a country singer), then walks their bulldog, Marvin. He stops at the neighborhood bar for a beer. Then he goes home and goes to sleep. The following day his routine starts again, with slight variations.

If I knew I was going to watch a week’s worth of this I might have declined, and I would have regretted it. Nothing much happens in Paterson, and that is the point. Our bus driver (Adam Driver playing a bus driver named Paterson in a movie called Paterson, galaxies away from Girls and Kylo Ren) is a poet, watching and listening. Out of the ordinary, trivial details of daily life he writes poetry. He has a different way of seeing, which Jarmusch lets us experience. (In the morning Laura tells him she dreamed of twins, so everywhere he sees identical pairs.) Overheard tidbits make their way into lines of verse. His questions are mirrored and answered in the outside world.

This silence, solitude, reflection that the wellness industry has appropriated and sold back to us as “mindfulness”, this is where Paterson’s poetry comes from. This is not loneliness, this is creation.

I love this movie. Arrival and Paterson are my two favorite movies of the year because they pay tribute to the power of language.

Book: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

A noir crime novel and a dark comedy, Eileen reads like a collaboration between Patricia Highsmith (the Ripley novels) and Shirley Jackson (We Have Always Lived In The Castle). Eileen lives in a squalid house with her alcoholic ex-policeman father and works in a boys’ prison. Her hobbies include shoplifting and entertaining fairly chaste fantasies about one of the prison guards, whom she stalks on weekends. Her dream is to get the hell out of there, and her chance arrives in the form of a beautiful psychologist assigned to the prison. A thrilling read.

Mark Haddon’s first book for adults (which children also loved) was The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time, which by being deliberately affectless (the narrator-protagonist has Asperger’s) reduced us to puddles of tears. The Pier Falls, a collection of stories, employs a similar very clear, pitilessly detailed style to destroy the reader. The title story is a minute-by-minute account of a disaster which kills dozens of holiday-goers. We look on in horror and fascination, and in the seconds that remain of these strangers’ lives we understand that they are just like us. Another story, The Island, retells the myth of Ariadne, the Minoan princess who helps Theseus to slay the minotaur, only to be abandoned by the hero on the island of Naxos. (The story of Ariadne really bothered me when I came upon it as a child in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: How can a supposedly noble savior turn out to be an ungrateful asshole? As I grew older I learned the answer: Humans are like that.) Haddon’s version brings us face to face with Ariadne’s terrible loneliness. Unsought solitude is the curse shared by the characters in this collection, and while I would not recommend it to anyone in search of a cheerful diversion, I prescribe it to readers who are feeling glum, disheartened, depressed. (And, of course, fans of excellent writing.) You think you have it bad? Read this.

So that’s the unplanned theme of the week: awfulness and compassion. I direct you to Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, which feels like a fishbone in your heart that you can’t dislodge. Casey Affleck stars as Lee, a handyman who has endured unspeakable tragedy and cannot forgive himself. We see this silent, angry, broken person and somehow feel affection for him. For Chrissakes, Lee, come on. His brother (the ever-dependable Kyle Chandler) offers him the possibility of a new life, and his ex-wife and nephew (Michelle Williams and Lucas Hedges, both wonderful) want him to take it, but he’s locked up so deep inside himself that no light can get in. The amazing thing about Manchester by the Sea is that for all its bleakness it’s also funny. During the most awful moments there are bursts of humor that bring up the absurdity of being human. (“It’s not a good disease,” says the attending physician. “What’s a good disease?” “Poison ivy.”) Watch it.

Still from the documentary Kedi

I was just talking about the street cats and dogs of Istanbul. We were interviewing the director of Hagia Sophia for the travel show when a very self-possessed cat walked over and sat between my co-host and myself, to remind us who the real boss was. Now there’s a documentary about the Turkish felines.

Update: It turns out that the interrupting cat was the same one who had greeted Barack Obama on his visit to Hagia Sophia. His name is Gli and he has a very memorable face.

Photos from LoveMeow

If you love something, you let it go. Cat people understand this intuitively. You never quite possess a cat, and the sooner you acknowledge that, the better. Cats will chase the tinfoil ball, if they are in the mood, but they will almost certainly not bring it back. We forgive them for this because there is no other option.

I have no trouble linking cats to the divine. Chris Marker’s transcendent short film of a sleeping cat is nothing if not an image of Nirvana, pure being, whatever you want to call it. The look in a cat’s eye guides us toward an idea of freedom, as Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested. Having spent a lifetime studying the structures of ancient societies, the French anthropologist understood well the prison cell into which technological man had locked himself. Only at rare moments, Lévi-Strauss posits near the end of Tristes Tropiques, do we see beyond this cell. One of those is “in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.”

Read it in the Paris Review.

Watch the trailer.