is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Wrapping up my December watches here before I get to my year-end best-of list.
Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” an epic tale of a fictional Hungarian architect who immigrates to post-War Pennsylvania, is a triumph of craft. On a relatively tiny budget of US$10 million, the director and co-writer has fashioned a movie that looks far better than many films that cost hundreds of millions more. So I don’t hesitate for a minute to praise Corbet’s filmmaking skills or the outsized ambitions that he takes on in this story of European ideals gasping for life in mid-century America. Its visual and dramatic scope feels incredibly vital and relevant to today’s cinema.
Unfortunately the movie is also riddled with problems, not the least of which is its relatively ham-fisted tendency to deliver its points with tremendous obviousness. Whether it’s anti-Semitism or classism or racism, Corbet decries all of these terrible, no good, very bad themes loudly and unsubtly, through a script that at times approaches artfulness but almost always lands in hacky territory.
And then there’s a series of weirdly off-kilter executional problems that nag throughout: the infuriating Hollywood theory that non-native English speakers prefer to hold their private conversations in heavily accented English; an odd inability to follow up on key characters like Alessandro Nivola’s assimilated cousin (despite a 3-1/2 hour runtime); an odd strategy of rendering many female characters as mute, crippled and/or interchangeable; and finally a decision to shortcut the full breadth of the main character’s career by reducing it to a slideshow (literally, a slideshow) in the final act. Architecturally minded viewers might also raise an eyebrow at Corbet’s apparent incuriosity about brutalist architecture and its impact on people and culture; he seems to treat it as an unalloyed good and expects the audience to assume the same which, well, that’s one way to think about a school of building that has produced both monumentally gorgeous and hysterically misguided structures.
Ultimately what’s saddest about “The Brutalist” is that, like many contemporary works that aspire to greatness, it’s less an expression of original thinking than a derivative or an echo of past greatness. Every detail of this movie checks out as an element that you might find in a “great” movie; they’re all impeccably controlled, precise, frequently artful, and unimpeachably “classy.” At the same time they conform obediently to the ideas that define “prestige” films: dramatic setbacks, vague geopolitics, histrionic grandstanding, empty triumphalism. There are very few true surprises here, and the elements that do confound expectations (like the dark nature of some of its supporting roles) go mostly unexamined.
Roundup
Here’s the full list of all twenty-three movies that I saw in December. This is the latest in my monthly round-ups of what I watch. You can also see everything I logged in November, October, in September, in August, in July, in June, in May, in April, in March, in February, in January, and summaries of everything I watched in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016. Also, you can always keep up with what I’m watching by following me on Letterboxd. In fact you can click the titles below to see the capsule reviews I’ve written there for just about all of these films.
“The Candidate” (1972) ★★★★ Rewatched. Second time in a month or so. Just terrific.
“Downhill Racer” (1969) ★★★½ Another Robert Redford movie directed by Michael Ritchie, this one about the world of competitive downhill skiing. Not as solid as “The Candidate,” but a solid outing all the same.
“Die Hard” (1988) ★★★★ Rewatched. My youngest kid wanted to see this after hearing so many good things from his friends. He dug it.
“Groundhog Day” (1993) ★★★★★ Rewatched. This is literally not a Christmas movie but people at work all voted to watch it together for a holiday event.
“The Martian” (2015) ★★★ Rewatched. Whatever script lands on Ridley Scott’s desk, he’ll shoot it. Sometimes a stinker results, and sometimes you get a crowd-pleaser, like this one.
“Before Sunrise” (1995) ★★★★ Rewatched. Charming as ever but also emotionally complex and surprisingly prescient: whether or not they ever intended to film sequels, this one spends so much time pondering the future.
“Joker: Folie à Deux” (2024) ★★★★ I can see why everyone hated this but I genuinely liked it. It’s an ambitious if obstinate artistic vision.
“The Order” (2024) ★★★ Excessively dour noir about some neo-Nazis that rob banks, drawing the attention of the FBI. Well made but still can’t answer the question of “What comes after ‘Heat’?”
“Janet Planet” (2023) ★★★ Every director gets to make a semi-autobiographical movie about their childhood, I guess. This one is pretty good but not sure it’s much more than a nostalgia trip.
“Juror #2” (2024) ★★½ A high-concept riff on “12 Angry Men” that balances on a knife’s edge between taut, ingeniously scripted courtroom drama and schlocky, off-brand B-movie.
“Trap” (2024) ½ A startlingly sloppy thriller from M. Night Shyamalan that takes some really odd left turns. Bad by any measure.
“The Brutalist” (2024) ★★½ Maybe the most celebrated movie of the season. Ambitious but frustratingly obvious.
“Dune: Part Two” (2024) ★★★★½ Rewatched. I can’t think of another movie released this year that’s as good as this one.
“Nosferatu” (2024) ★★ This remake of the original silent film version from more than a century ago is incredibly lush but really boring.
“I Saw the TV Glow” (2024) ★ A trans-themed riff on TV fandom that, sadly, is just an all around shabby production.
“A Complete Unknown” (2024) ★★★½ Commits many of the clichés of musical biopics but succeeds nevertheless, due in no small part to the songs being terrific.
“Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back” (1967) ★★★★ Rewatched. This is a far better snapshot of Dylan in his prime and an invaluable cultural document.
