John Powers
Appearances
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Every December, I look at my list of the things that I've read, watched, and listened to during the year. And every December, I come across things that I flat-out loved yet somehow never got around to talking about. Well, I want to share these pleasures now. Although they're a far cry from raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favorite things.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
I gasp in surprise at all fours. Miranda July's hilariously unpredictable novel about a middle-aged artist who leaves her family to drive to New York from Los Angeles, but only gets to the L.A. suburbs before she falls for a young rental car worker, checks into a cheap motel, and spends a fortune redecorating her room there.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
All Fours is sometimes described as a book about perimenopause, the transitional stage before menopause. Yet this flattens it into sociology and self-help. July's Mind is far too unruly and interesting for that. Perverse, unrepentant, sometimes dirty, and often laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't stop reading passages to my girlfriend.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
It's a one-of-a-kind book about a woman cannonballing into her search for a new self and a new life. you never know where it's headed.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
You know exactly where things are headed in Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, an inventive documentary about the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, who was killed at the behest of the American and Belgian governments.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
This is no grimly realistic sermon, but a jaunty montage film, blending fabulous archival footage, amazing interviews, CIA machinations, and oodles of black music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone. Along the way, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimenprez quotes poet Octavio Paz's line, When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams. Grimenprez's movie unfolds like one of those dreams.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Life has turned giddily surreal in the Hulu series Interior Chinatown, based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Yu. Its high point is the star-making performance by Ronnie Chiang, the Malaysian comedian you may know from The Daily Show. Chiang is uproarious as Fatty Choi, a low-ambition restaurant worker who's suddenly forced into waiting tables.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
He treats the customers so rudely that, ironically, he becomes a sensation. Here, he approaches a white couple at a table. What?
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
The humor is slyer in my favorite mystery novel this year, The Lover of No Fixed Abode, by Carlo Frutero and Franco Lucentini, a hugely popular Italian literary team.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Set in Venice, it's about a middle-aged signora who's an art scout for big auction houses, who finds herself attracted to an enigmatic tour guide leader, Mr. Silvera, who seems to know everything and greets every situation with a different inflection of the word ah. The mystery is, who is he?
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Shimmering with wit and bursting with an insider's knowledge of Venice, The Lover of No Fixed Abode builds to a solution so unexpected that not one person in a million will guess it. It's a minor classic. Two big classics are the 50s movies that got theatrical re-releases this year.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, in which a village hires seven swordsmen to protect them from bandits, and The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouseau's excruciatingly suspenseful story of four exiles in a poor Latin American town who must transport a shipment of nitroglycerin in ramshackle trucks. Both movies are magnificent in themselves. Their action scenes are still breathtaking.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
But they possess a special interest because in them you can see a Japanese director and a French one laying down the template for today's Hollywood blockbusters. And they're better than our current action pictures in one crucial way. From their white-knuckle stunts to their revelations of character, everything in them is human scale.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
My favorite sports movement this year was also Alive with Humanity. It featured Simone Biles, whose all-around gold medal at the Paris Olympics confirmed her as the greatest woman gymnast of all time. Yet what I loved wasn't her style in winning, which was, of course, phenomenal, but her grace in losing.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
In the final event, the floor exercise, where she normally reigns supreme, she was bested by Rebecca Andrade, the superb Brazilian gymnast who'd spent her career losing over and over to Biles. And what did Biles do when she lost? She didn't cry, I'm still the GOAT. She didn't whine that the judges had cheated her. She didn't say that Andrade was lucky or actually no good.
Fresh Air
Billie Eilish & Finneas
Instead, on the medal stand, she and teammate Jordan Childs, who won bronze, literally bowed to Andrade. They bowed to her skill, to her bravery in overcoming multiple surgeries, to her always being a worthy opponent. It was a gesture of respect that, far from diminishing Biles, only made her greatness more incandescent. A valuable lesson as we entered the new year.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
One of the most exquisitely cynical lines in 20th century literature comes in the Italian novel The Leopard. A young aristocrat is telling his uncle, the prince, why he's joined up with Garibaldi's revolutionaries. This is precisely the thinking behind successful TV franchises, which try to change things just enough to seem fresh, while still serving up what the audience loved the first time.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Except for maybe Fargo, no show tackles this challenge more honorably than The White Lotus, the Emmy-grabbing HBO series in which rich, entitled white folks cause trouble at enviably gorgeous beachfront resorts.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Written and directed by Mike White, The White Lotus doesn't merely introduce new characters and locales every season —the latest one is set in Thailand— but also shifts its tone and preoccupations. Still, it follows a template. Like its predecessors, season three begins with an unidentified dead body and then flashes back to show us who's dead and why.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
We watch the guests arrive at the White Lotus, a wellness-centered resort on the island of Koh Samui. These include the well-heeled Ratliff family from North Carolina. The parents are played by Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. There are three 40-something girlfriends led by Jacqueline, a TV star played by Michelle Monaghan.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
There's gloomy Rick, that's Walton Goggins, a scruffy dude who's here with his far younger girlfriend Chelsea. And as always in paradise, there's a serpent. it would take an hour to tell you the plot. Suffice it to say that after a low-key start, the show becomes a stir-fry of financial secrets, dark family histories, drug abuse, kinky hijinks, poisonous snakes, scary gunfire, and oddball comedy.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
White loves to shove his characters and audiences out of their comfort zone. We often can't be sure whether something is supposed to be funny or serious or both. We don't know which characters are actually nice, are deeper than they first seem, or are blithely headed toward bad things. Take, for instance, the Ratliff family, Timothy and Victoria and their three grown-up kids.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Their provincial complacency is on display when they arrive at the White Lotus and meet the hotel managers.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
If you've seen either of the two seasons, you know that Victoria and her kin are likely to face trickier issues than the rivalry between Duke and the Tar Heels. In truth, season three is less effervescent than one or two. Yet the show still superbly acted by its stars, and White stuffs his scenes with pleasures.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I love the comedy of the Ratliff's alpha male son, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger's son Patrick, driving everyone crazy by obsessively making protein shakes in a deafening blender. I love the increasingly fraught dynamics of Jacqueline and her friends. The others are played by Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb, by the way.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Whenever two of them get together, they grow catty about the one who's not there. I was especially knocked out by the scene in which Rick meets an old friend, who launches into a monologue about his sexcapades in Bangkok. It is, I promise you, the most surprising thing you're going to hear on TV this year.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
The White Lotus takes it as a given that its privileged characters have no interest in the culture they're visiting, be it Hawaii or Sicily or now Thailand. They treat it as a theme park or a stage on which they can act out. White clearly hopes to avoid doing that himself, although he does glamorize Thailand. Conspicuous luxury is one of the show's selling points, after all.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
He treats Buddhism respectfully, and he makes a point of trying to incorporate Thai characters. The two best are the hotel's owner, a silver-haired diva, and a sympathetic security guard whose factlessness makes us constantly worry for him.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Now, over the course of the six episodes available to screen, there are eight in all, White repeatedly shows us two very different things, monkeys and Buddhas. This motif is fitting, for White's theme here is the tension between our animal nature and our yearning for a deeper, more spiritual existence, one free from the values and egotisms that imprison us.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
pushing its characters toward questions of life's meaning, this is the most soul-conscious of the three seasons. No matter how safe and comfortable things might seem, White suggests, there comes a time of reckoning when we have to face how alone we really are.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It's one measure of Latin America's arduous history that it spawns so many books and movies about dictatorship. Over the years, I've been through scads of them, from novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to the landmark documentaries of Patricio Guzman to Hollywood thrillers like Missing and Under Fire. What they share is the awareness that history hurts.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Few films have shown this with more delicate intelligence than I'm Still Here, a moving new drama set during Brazil's military dictatorship that began with an American-backed coup in 1964 and ended in 1985. Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Walter Salas's movie is no political tract or manipulative tearjerker, although it may make you cry.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Exploring the dictatorship indirectly, I'm Still Here tells the heroic true story of a wife and mother who steers her family through the rapids of tyranny. The story begins idyllically on Ipanema Beach in 1970, when we first meet the Paiva family. The father is Rubens, played with easy charm by Sultan Melo, a warm-hearted man who was a congressman before the coup.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And by Eunice, that's Fernanda Torres, a rather traditional-seeming wife who bakes great soufflés and wrangles their five high-energy children. Theirs is a happy upper-middle-class family whose home is a kind of Eden, complete with a view of the beach.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Buzzing with openness to friends, to ideas, to laughter, to music —the movie's soundtrack is fabulous— their house is Brazil, as we might dream of it being. Yet such openness is precisely what the junta mistrusts. It tortures or disappears anyone it considers a threat to its notion of an orderly, anti-communist society.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Even as the family dances, plays foosball, and amiably bickers, we await the dreaded knock on the door. It comes. Rubens is taken away for questioning, security men occupy the house, and Eunice herself is called in for a nasty interrogation. Rubens' disappearance is the turning point in Eunice's life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Over the next months, in fact the next decades, she transforms her practical maternal virtues into something mighty. Channeling her grief, she becomes a stronger, tougher, wiser person who protects her kids, digs into the cruel facts of her husband's fate, and learns to fight for other people's rights as well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
From the start, Eunice is a woman of impressive self-command, and the movie shares that virtue. Salas has always been a gifted director, but earlier films like Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries were so busy being artful and important, they often felt impersonal. Here, you feel his profound emotional engagement. Salas grew up in the same milieu as the Paivas.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Indeed, he hung out with the kids, and you feel his affection for that family and its values. He captures them, and 1970 Rio, in a way that feels loving and true. Salas does a superb job of depicting how the dictatorship colored daily life. We see how things could often appear normal, with fun at the beach and happy visits to the ice cream shop.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Yet without laying on the violence or heavy-handed moralism, even the secret policemen we meet aren't monsters, Salas also conjures a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
We feel it in the sounds of helicopters hovering overhead, the TV newscasts filled with lies, the spasms of fearful mistrust that grow between friends, and the way that once your family is singled out, you're treated differently out in the world. Like Brazil, their house of freedom is now in lockdown.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
The counterweight to the dictatorship is the unglamorous strength of Eunice, who goes from making soufflés to becoming at 48 a lawyer who helps make Brazil a better place to live. She's played with surpassing brilliance by Torres, whose performance is so subtle, so internal, and so quietly shattering, that in a just world, she'd win all this year's big acting awards.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Registering each flicker of emotion as precisely as a seismograph, Torres captures Eunice's pain and horror at her husband's fate, but also her endurance, her faith that life goes on. a faith that time vindicates. Even as it's buffeted by misfortune, the family survives and thrives. At one point, a newspaper photographer comes to take a picture of the family and tells them to look somber.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
After all, Rubens is missing. But Eunice insists that everyone smile. She will not let them face the world looking beaten.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Perhaps the most famous line in ancient Greek thought comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who said, You cannot step into the same river twice. That's because reality is not a static thing, but an ever-changing flux. The fluidity of life runs through flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia, which has already been showered with acclaim.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Directed by Gintz Zalbalotis, it takes a simple premise, a sundry crew of animals get caught in a flood, and without a single word being uttered, transports us into a radiant fantasy. At once fun and affecting, Flo made me think of everything from Spirited Away and The Incredible Journey to the story of Noah and the recent floods in North Carolina.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Flo centers on a slate-gray cat whose home is a big house in the forest surrounded by larger-than-life feline sculptures. It sleeps upstairs in a double bed whose emptiness offers our first inkling that there are no people about. And indeed, no humans will appear in the film.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Instead, we follow this watchful, eloquent-eyed loner as it prowls around and gets chased by a pack of dogs, a pursuit interrupted by a deluge that comes whooshing towards them. the water keeps rising higher and higher. And just as the cat is about to be washed away, it's able to jump on a sailboat occupied by, of all things, a capybara.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Soon they're joined by a scene-stealing lemur, who has scavenged various human knickknacks, like the mirror it keeps looking at itself in. It's like the opening of a joke. A cat, a capybara, and a lemur walk into a bar.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
As the three float together on their small ark, they're joined by a golden retriever and a predatory secretary bird, which boasts a crazy beautiful headdress of feathers and a body like an eagle's glued onto a heron's legs.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This odd band of survivors seeks to ride out the flood, a dangerous enterprise that forces them to work together and leads them to rescue others in distress, even if they don't always want to. So Belotus pays these animals the respect of observing them closely.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
He deftly captures the cat's yawns, the movements of the lemur's ringed tail as it's preening, and the amiable torpor of the capybara, a creature whose meme-inducing cuteness was recently celebrated in The New Yorker by Gary Steingart. Forgoing all dialogue but using genuine animal sounds, Flo is a long way from Zootopia or Eddie Murphy's smart aleck donkey in Shrek.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
While it does humanize its characters a bit, my own beloved cat Nico would sooner drown than team up with a lemur, Flo captures the way animals behave in the wild, as in the ruthless fight for dominance between two secretary birds, which leaves one of them unable to fly. The movie weaves together bursts of adventure. Your heart may pound as the cat has to swim for dear life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
With poetic moments of transcendence, I won't spoil by describing. Like Miyazaki, Zobo Lotus uses animation to conjure a big, thrilling world of imagination. Where too much American animation feels frantic, desperate to keep our attention, Flo's images possess a kinetic elegance.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game, complete, alas, with a few visual glitches you won't find in Pixar. Then again, this is not a big-budget Hollywood project. It was made on the open-source software Blender and cost just $3.7 million. To put this in perspective, that's less than one-fiftieth the budget of Inside Out 2.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Flow is conceived as a universal story that weaves together magic and realism. While the cat and dogs could live in our own neighborhood, the rest of the cast comes from the likes of Latin America, Africa, and Madagascar. There's even a whale from the briny deep that surges up, almost biblically, from the floodwaters.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This whale's appearance inland is one of the film's suggestions, melancholy but never overt, that the great flood we're seeing may be a product of climate change. Yet flow is far from a political tract. Rather, it's a classic fable about learning to adapt to life's ever-changing flow, no matter how dire things may sometimes get. And like most classic fables, it offers an enduring lesson.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
A group of creatures overcome their differences and learn to help one another. It's solidarity, not selfishness, that will save them.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Last week I had dinner with friends who'd lost everything in the recent L.A. fires. They spent their days filling out forms, being put on hold, and assembling the ordinary stuff they and their kids need to live. By night they did something different. They played events over and over in their heads, agonizing about what-ifs. What if there'd been less flammable stuff in their yard?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
What if they hadn't forgotten to save certain important papers? What if they'd been warned to evacuate hours earlier, like the people on the other side of town? Such stewing, with its mix of regret, self-recrimination, and anger, is a profoundly human response to catastrophe.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
It achieves some sort of apotheosis in Brigitte Giraud's haunting book Live Fast, which won France's top literary prize in 2022. a work of autofiction, Live Fast looks back at the death of Giraud's husband Claude in a motorcycle accident 20-odd years earlier and ponders the many things that might have prevented this calamity.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
In the process, Giraud wanders the maze of life's great conundrum, the dance between chance and destiny. The basic facts are simple. On June 22, 1999, Claude, a 41-year-old music librarian, borrowed the ultra-powerful Honda CBR 900 Fireblade that his brother-in-law had left in his and Brigitte's garage while on vacation. Heading to pick up his son after school, Claude stopped at a red light.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
When it turned green, he hit the gas, and the monster engine caused it to pop an unexpected wheelie, flinging Claude into oncoming traffic. Jarrell explores this tragedy not with a straightforward narrative, but like someone taking apart one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions that uses crazy, convoluted ways to accomplish a simple task.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Each chapter explains a step that, if it only hadn't happened, might have stopped the accident. These steps include everything from her grandfather's suicide, to her brother taking a sudden holiday, to the development of the Honda CBR 900, which she calls a bomb for kamikazes. This motorcycle was invented in Japan, but was considered so dangerous it couldn't be sold there.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
But it could be exported to Europe. If only it hadn't been. Now, some of Giraud's if-onlys are far-fetched, like thinking that things might have been different if Stephen King, one of Claude's favorites, had been killed in his famous auto accident three days earlier.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Others are self-punishing, like asking what if she hadn't wanted to buy the house that contained the garage that stored her brother's motorcycle that Claude would die on. It's always important to blame something or someone, she writes wryly, even if that someone is you. Giroux gives all this what-if-ing a lucidity that might feel forensic, except for one big thing. It's not cold-blooded.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
In Corey Stockwell's fine translation, live fast takes what could seem like an intellectual exercise, a strange sort of catechism, and slowly, touchingly infuses it with emotion. we start feeling Giraud's enduring love for her husband, a soulmate who becomes more real the more she writes.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
She knows him so well, adoring both the elegant, refined, discreet, modest Claude and his dark side, his B-side, who enjoyed bombing along on a motorbike. Of course, there's a slightly nutty side to Giroux's obsessive attempts to rewrite the past. Yet, I think every single reader will understand her. It's a desire we've all felt.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
A desire that's inspired everything from Greek ideas of the fates to cheesy episodes of Star Trek to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Giroux understands that we can't roll back time and have a do-over. There's no such thing as if-only, she says. But thinking about such things offers a form of distraction, if not consolation.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
We gain a saving illusion of control over losses that feel less random when we can weave them into a kind of story that seems to explain them. Such weaving helps fight a crushing sense of meaninglessness until we're able to move on. which is how Giroux comes off the other side of her grief and why Live Fast is not a downer.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Clocking in at a snappy 159 pages, this is one of those rare books that works in two directions. It pulls you completely into its reality. Believe me, it's a page-turner, but also sends you back out into the mystery of living. It gets you pondering your own losses and how you deal with all those what-ifs that rise up in every life.
Fresh Air
At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Perhaps the most famous line in ancient Greek thought comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who said, You cannot step into the same river twice. That's because reality is not a static thing, but an ever-changing flux. The fluidity of life runs through flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia, which has already been showered with acclaim.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Directed by Gintz Zalbalotis, it takes a simple premise, a sundry crew of animals get caught in a flood, and without a single word being uttered, transports us into a radiant fantasy. At once fun and affecting, Flo made me think of everything from Spirited Away and The Incredible Journey to the story of Noah and the recent floods in North Carolina.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Flo centers on a slate-gray cat whose home is a big house in the forest surrounded by larger-than-life feline sculptures. It sleeps upstairs in a double bed whose emptiness offers our first inkling that there are no people about. And indeed, no humans will appear in the film.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Instead, we follow this watchful, eloquent-eyed loner as it prowls around and gets chased by a pack of dogs, a pursuit interrupted by a deluge that comes whooshing towards them. the water keeps rising higher and higher. And just as the cat is about to be washed away, it's able to jump on a sailboat occupied by, of all things, a capybara.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Soon they're joined by a scene-stealing lemur, who has scavenged various human knickknacks, like the mirror it keeps looking at itself in. It's like the opening of a joke. A cat, a capybara, and a lemur walk into a bar.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
As the three float together on their small ark, they're joined by a golden retriever and a predatory secretary bird, which boasts a crazy beautiful headdress of feathers and a body like an eagle's glued onto a heron's legs.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
This odd band of survivors seeks to ride out the flood, a dangerous enterprise that forces them to work together and leads them to rescue others in distress, even if they don't always want to. Zobelotus pays these animals the respect of observing them closely.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
He deftly captures the cat's yawns, the movements of the lemur's ringed tail as it's preening, and the amiable torpor of the capybara, a creature whose meme-inducing cuteness was recently celebrated in The New Yorker by Gary Steingart. Forgoing all dialogue but using genuine animal sounds, Flo is a long way from Zootopia or Eddie Murphy's smart aleck donkey in Shrek.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
While it does humanize its characters a bit, my own beloved cat Nico would sooner drown than team up with a lemur, Flo captures the way animals behave in the wild, as in the ruthless fight for dominance between two secretary birds, which leaves one of them unable to fly. The movie weaves together bursts of adventure. Your heart may pound as the cat has to swim for dear life.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
With poetic moments of transcendence, I won't spoil by describing. Like Miyazaki, Zobo Lotus uses animation to conjure a big, thrilling world of imagination. Where too much American animation feels frantic, desperate to keep our attention, Flo's images possess a kinetic elegance.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game, complete, alas, with a few visual glitches you won't find in Pixar. Then again, this is not a big-budget Hollywood project. It was made on the open-source software Blender and cost just $3.7 million. To put this in perspective, that's less than one-fiftieth the budget of Inside Out 2.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Flow is conceived as a universal story that weaves together magic and realism. While the cat and dogs could live in our own neighborhood, the rest of the cast comes from the likes of Latin America, Africa, and Madagascar. There's even a whale from the briny deep that surges up, almost biblically, from the floodwaters.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
This whale's appearance inland is one of the film's suggestions, melancholy but never overt, that the great flood we're seeing may be a product of climate change. Yet flow is far from a political tract. Rather, it's a classic fable about learning to adapt to life's ever-changing flow, no matter how dire things may sometimes get. And like most classic fables, it offers an enduring lesson.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
A group of creatures overcome their differences and learn to help one another. It's solidarity, not selfishness, that will save them.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
No, it's a very good point. And they behave that way a lot of the time because they're not trying to get elected to anything. They're not trying to sell a program to anything. They just have to perform on the field, on the court, wherever they might happen to be, the And there is a great disdain for the media among many, if not most, in sports. And the locker room is their domain.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Now, things have changed since the 80s in that for the most part, we're pretty much banned from locker rooms nowadays. The creation of the interview room, I think, is one of the worst things that's ever happened to sports journalism. Because if you think the answers in a locker room are rehearsed and canned and cliched,
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
stepping up, giving 110%, wanting to win for my teammates, it's 50 times worse in an interview room. At least in a locker room, if you have the time and or the patience and kind of outweigh the hordes and can get with a guy one-on-one, especially if you know him a little bit, you might be able to get a little better answer than that.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But more and more now, teams on the college level, certainly, and more and more on the professional level, are banning the media from the locker rooms after games and saying, go to an interview room and we'll bring you somebody and put them behind a microphone.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Well, I think it goes back to my first days as a reporter when I was still in college.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It became apparent to me that the more you could see what was real as opposed to what was served up to you, whether it was in a locker room or in a practice or if you could get somebody to let you into a team meeting or if you could get an athlete away from their domain and put them in a restaurant for lunch or dinner or anything –
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But I think I really learned about that not covering sports but covering news. When I was first at The Washington Post, I spent several years covering cops and courts and politics. And I learned from that that the less formal – The situation was the more you learned. And I do some of my best reporting without a notebook in my hands.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
When I'm just talking to someone and I ask about their family or about last night's ball game and then eventually work my way towards a real question rather than just walking up with a notebook or a tape recorder in my hands. Because when you do that, that's what you are. You're a notebook or a tape recorder. You're not another person. When you walk up and say,
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
hey, can you believe what happened in last night's game? Then you establish common ground and you become a person rather than just a reporter.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You know, it's never been for me because what I have always done is if someone says something to me that I think might be controversial in some way or it's something I didn't know that would thus be news, I'll usually at that point I'll take out a notebook or something and I'll say, let me make sure I have this – get this right or – Do you mind if I quote you on that?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
I don't want there to be any doubt. I don't want anybody I'm working with to be surprised. And I have only once in my career had an athlete claim that he thought he was off the record with me. And that was 30 years ago when I was a young reporter at The Post. I got sent to the home of John Riggins, the star running back who was holding out
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he was in Lawrence, Kansas, and he was refusing to talk to anybody in the media. And I was the low guy on the totem pole at the Post. And my boss said, just go knock on John Riggins' door and see if he'll talk to you, which I did. And John Riggins basically said, get out of here. I'm not talking to anybody. And I said to him, look, John, if I go back with nothing, I'm going to be fired. Right.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he looked at me, said, I'll call your boss and tell him that I wouldn't talk to you. And I said, that's not good enough. Can't you just tell me what it is you want? And he started talking about that it was the Redskins move and Bobby Beathard, the general manager, needed to do this and that. And I never took out a notebook. And I stood there and I asked him more questions.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And we talked for, I don't know, 10 or 12 minutes. And I went back to my car, wrote down everything I could remember and Didn't quote him specifically, but paraphrased everything that he had said to me in the story. And when another TV reporter called Riggins the next day and said, why would you talk to that guy when you're friends with us and you don't even know him?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Riggins said, well, I thought we were off the record. And when the guy called me from the TV station and said, John said he thought you were off the record. I said, did he really think I flew to Lawrence, Kansas because I was personally curious about his contract? And that's the only time anybody has ever said to me, geez, I thought we were off the record.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It's the hardest thing you have to do, at least for me. And I have run into it specifically, as I wrote about in the book, with Jim Valvano, who I had a very close relationship with. I would sit in his office when he was the coach at North Carolina State and had won the national championship at three o'clock in the morning and listen to him talk about looking for the next thing in his life.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he felt as if he'd done coaching at the age of 37. And then came this scandal, for lack of a better word, at North Carolina State where the NCAA came in and investigated and Jim eventually was forced to resign. And I wrote at one point that he sounded Nixonian when he was making his excuses for what had gone on at NC State. And he was furious with me. And he said, how could you
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Write that about me. And I said, because I thought, A, I thought it was true, Jim. But beyond that, if I just blindly defended you, then when I legitimately defend you, it'll have no meaning. And he said it would have meant something to me. And that hurt because I liked Jim Valvano. And I understood the point he was making. I thought you were my friend.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And then you turned around and called me Nixonian. And it was a very hard thing for me emotionally to deal with. And we did before he died of cancer in 1993. We mended the fence. And in fact, Jim, the last time I ever spoke to him said, you were probably a better friend to me than the people around me who were telling me I hadn't done anything wrong.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But it is a very hard line to figure out which side of it you belong on.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You know, I don't think anybody who does what I do has ever really known Tiger. I do vividly remember the first time I ever saw Tiger Woods because it turned out to be a little bit of a harbinger in a way. He was still an amateur. He was just a kid. He was 18. He probably looked 12 at the time. He was playing in Arnold Palmer's tournament down at Bay Hill in 1994.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And I was working on A Good Walk Spoiled, my first golf book. And I was standing on the range with three players, Davis Love, Billy Andrade, Jeff Sluman. And Billy Andrade kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said, see that kid down there? And I looked down and there was this skinny kid hitting balls. And I said, yeah. And he said, that's the next one. That's Tiger Woods. And I'd heard the name.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But I wasn't that interested, to be honest, Dave, because you hear all the time about this guy's the next one in sports. This guy's the next one in sports. I always tend to be skeptical and say, OK, show me. And as luck would have it, I happened to walk off the range a little while later. about 10 yards behind Tiger Woods.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
He was walking alone with his caddy, and there were maybe 15 or 20 kids standing behind the ropes trying to get the autographs of any player walking on or off the range. It was a practice day, and most players will stop in that circumstance and sign a few autographs. Tiger Woods put his head down and walked right between the kids, never looked left or right, and just kept going.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And I remember thinking to myself, who does this guy think he is? Well, as it turned out, he thought he was Tiger Woods. So I think he had it right. But my early memories of Tiger are that he was always programmed and his golf was overwhelming. But I remember feeling disappointed because he was obviously... very bright. He'd gone to Stanford for a couple of years.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You could tell just by the way he reacted to things that he got things quicker than most athletes did. But he wasn't giving anything up. His father, Earl, had programmed him, don't give away anything for free. So you remember those cliches I talked about that you get in the interview room? He was a cliche machine. And if you tried to talk to him one-on-one, he really had no interest.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And the only time I really ever had a lengthy one-on-one conversation with him was in 1998 after he'd won the Masters and had become a superstar at 21. And he actually reached out to me because he was, I think, surprised, I guess, that I was one of the very few people
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
members of the media who was at all critical of his behavior none of us could criticize his golf and other players had told him look John's a pretty fair guy if you've got a problem with him you should sit down and talk to him about it and to his everlasting credit he did he went to dinner at a restaurant in San Diego and talked for about four hours
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And it was very intense because Tiger was very smart, came right at you when he disagreed with you. We argued a lot about his father.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Yes, exactly. And in fact, what I had done was I had compared him in a piece I'd written in Newsweek to Stefano Capriati, who was the father of Jennifer Capriati, who you might remember years ago came on the tennis tour, took it by storm. She was going to be the next Chris Everett. Her father was making deals for her left and right when she was 13 years old.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And I compared Earl Woods to Stefano Capriati, which infuriated both Tiger and Earl. And I remember saying to him, if your father doesn't like the spotlight, why did he write a book about how he made you into Tiger Woods? And Tiger said, well, you know, so many people asked him about it. He thought it'd be easier just to write a book. And I said, really? Then why did he write the second book?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Because there was a sequel. Tiger looked at me and he smiled. He said, okay, you got me on that one. But it was one of the few concessions he made the entire evening. We argued about a lot of different things, but it was a fascinating experience. And I hoped...
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
that it would sort of be a jumping off point where Tiger and I would have a relationship where even if we disagreed, we would talk about it. And it lasted for a little while that way. And then I really believe to this day that his father said to him, you stay away from him. I don't like him. I don't want you talking to him.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And that was really kind of the end of any one-on-one other than hi, Tiger, hi, John, between the two of us.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Well, more accurately, I think it was that I knew back in those days that I could go into the locker room. And because Barry Lorge, my colleague from The Washington Post, was writing a lead and I was doing the secondary story, the sidebar, I had a little more time. And John had come in. He just won the U.S. Open. He'd beaten Bjorn Borg in five sets.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
This was a few months after their historic five-set match at Wimbledon. And Borg had come back from two sets down to tie it at two sets apiece. And I'll never forget sitting there in New York City. John McEnroe grew up less than five miles from the stadium in Flushing. And the entire crowd was on its feet cheering for Borg. And I couldn't imagine what that felt like for McEnroe.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he somehow won the fifth set consistently. came in, gave kind of a desultory press conference. Even McEnroe can be desultory in a press conference. And I thought, well, maybe if I go back to the locker room, I can get something. I just wanted to ask him one question.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
How did that feel at that moment at the end of the fourth set when 20,000 people were cheering for a guy from Sweden in New York City? And I walked back in and McEnroe was the only guy in the locker room because the tournament was over. Borg had left by car as soon as the award ceremony was over. And it was just McEnroe and me in the locker room. At that point, I hadn't met him. I was very young.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You know, the kid reporter at The Washington Post. And I introduced myself and John kind of looked at me like, yeah. And I said, I just want to ask you one question. And I asked him the question about how it felt at the end of that fourth set. And Dave, he just went off. He said, could you believe that? Could you? Do you think if that match was in Sweden, there'd be one person pulling for me?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
I know I misbehave and I understand why people get up. I didn't ask another question for 30 minutes. The only challenge was I didn't have a tape recorder was trying to write everything down because he was talking so fast. So I ended up I was supposed to write a 16 inch sidebar. And I came back and told Barry Lorge what I'd gotten.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he called the desk and said, you got to get John some more space. And I ended up writing 40 inches and they ran every inch of it. So a lot of times people have asked me, well, how did you get Knight to give you the access? How did you get this guy to give you the access? The answer almost always is because I asked. It's really that simple.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Absolutely, yes. But there's an element of no. And the absolute yes is, of course, they're just games. And it's not life and death. And I wince every time there's a genuine tragedy connected to sports when people say, well, this puts life in perspective. Because you know what? It doesn't. The next day, fans are going to be screaming about a losing coach or a bad call or something like that.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It's human nature. It's sports human nature. And yes, I want to say enough already. But there's another part of me, Dave, that believes sports does play a very important role in our society because it does give people a place to go away from the often harsh realities of life. And I... This was driven home to me in a very personal way when my mother died in 1993.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And she died very suddenly and she died young. And it was the worst thing I've ever been through in my life. And I went to bed every night and I couldn't sleep. I just couldn't possibly sleep. And the only thing that distracted me from thinking about my mom was to think about games, to think about games.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Games I'd played in as a kid or swim meets I'd been in as a kid and games I'd covered and stories I'd been a part of and people I'd met in sports and trying. I would literally sit there and try to remember every single play in game five of the 1969 World Series when my beloved and now pathetic Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles. And that got me through that period in my life.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Okay, let's continue. Hands on buzzers. Mayor of New York. Yes, yes, yes. He's a Jew, Bob. Yes. That's right. Ed Koch is a Jew. Ten points.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
I did audition, and I remember the process was – very wild for me because I was a huge fan of the English version. I watched it all the time. And when they asked me to audition for this, they actually sent the sides for Dwight. And there was something very weird. Again, I hadn't done anything, but there was something in me that just said, if I go in, I want to go with my best foot forward.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
I don't feel like I'm Dwight. I feel like I'm more Jim. And so my manager at the time called and said, you know, he doesn't want to go in for, Dwight, he wants to go in for Jim. And they said, great, then he won't come in at all. And so there was about three weeks there where I thought the role was gone, the opportunity was gone.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And then they called and they said, okay, he can come in and read for Jim, which was pretty amazing. And the first audition went pretty well. And then they flew in the producers from LA to New York. And I'll never forget this day. I was sitting in line. It was a It was a bit of a bizarro alternate universe feeling sitting next to six other people who looked exactly like you.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And we were all going in for the role of Jim. And they went through the line of the six guys and I was the last person. And the casting director came up and said, you know, we're just going to take a break for lunch. And in my head I thought, oh, just one more would be great. I was so nervous. So I watched, you know, 50 to 60 people go downstairs. It was at 30 Rock.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And so they went down to the restaurant, came back up with salads and sandwiches. All these people came back. And one guy sat across from me and said, are you nervous? And I said, oh, no, you either get these things or you don't. What I'm really nervous about is them screwing up a perfect show. The Americans always have the ability to screw up these amazing British shows.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And I'm afraid this is going to be another one of them. And he said, oh, great. I'm Greg Daniels. I'm the executive producer. And I genuinely almost threw up right on his shoes.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
No, he later said honesty is the best policy. It's the reason you got the role, which I think he's still just being nice. I won't dare try it again by going into auditions now saying I think this movie is going to be horrible and then see if they give me the role.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
That's a really good question. I mean, I think we were so honored to be a part of that relationship because we have a weird relationship with our fans because a lot of people say, We are our fans, everything. But we literally get to say that because we were going to be canceled the first two seasons, definitely.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Every week, I remember this guy, Jeff Engold, who worked at NBC, he came every week to say, listen, I love this show. It's just not working. We're going to cancel it. And it was at the time of iTunes. And I remember our fans were actually buying the show when they could watch it for free, which was a huge revelation, obviously.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
So because they were buying the show and not watching it on NBC, it showed people that there was a whole new audience that was loving the show so much that they'd actually spend money. So all that to say, we were so involved with our fans from the very beginning. And when I went around and bumped into people who were always so kind about the show, I They were genuinely moved by this relationship.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
There was something that everybody was connecting to this sort of will he won't he type of thing of whether or not I get up the guts to ask her out in the beginning and then followed us along as if we were part of their family or living some version of their lives. For me, I think it was a big responsibility to be a member of that couple. And I loved every single moment of it.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
It will always be one of the most, if not the most, special relationship I will have on screen.