Terrence Malick’s sixth film, To the Wonder, released last week in select theaters, as well as on demand and on iTunes. It’s a characteristically visceral experience of a film, meaning I STRONGLY suggest you try to see it on the big screen rather than on a computer screen. See here for theater release schedule. 

I have been following Malick’s career with great interest for more than 15 years (basically since I saw The Thin Red Line in 1998), and have written quite a bit about the man and his films. See here, here, here, here and here for a sampling.

So it was with great pleasure that Christianity Today gave me the opportunity to write a lengthy review essay about the film, in which I synthesize the themes and cinematic vision of Malick’s larger body of work by a taking a close look at To the Wonder (which I’ve already seen three times). Below is one section of the review, but if you have a bit of time and you’re a fan of Malick, I’d strongly suggested reading the whole thing.

To the Wonder is about a way of seeing—both seeing the world around us, and seeing ourselves properly, something he embodies not just on screen but in his working process. It’s no coincidence that it begins with the point of view of Marina and Neil’s own cell phone camera (as they travel by train “to the Wonder”). It’s the focusing of our attention via lenses on life: perceiving the beauty in the pretty and the ugly, the thrilling and the mundane, and seeing how it all points heavenward. Christ in all; “All things shining” (The Thin Red Line).

Malick’s camera has a particular gaze. He spends more time than most on almost gratuitous beauty (puffy clouds, swimming turtles, beautiful hands). And his lens lingers on the mundane: empty rooms, walls, appliances, even a laptop displaying a Skype conversation. Everything is interesting to Malick.

Everything except himself. In both To the Wonder and The Tree of Life, the actors portraying the adult Malick (Ben Affleck and Sean Penn, respectively) come across as passive observers—quiet, contemplative, almost awkward bystanders in the movie. They are fitting representations of a man who seems far more comfortable paying attention to the world around him than bringing attention to himself.

Much has been made of Malick’s tendency to hire big-name actors for his films, shoot tons of footage, and then leave them largely or entirely out of the final cut. Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet, and Barry Pepper are among the actors ultimately cut out completely from To the Wonder. Adrien Brody famously thought his three months of intense shooting on The Thin Red Line would result in a starring role, only to find out at the premiere that his part had been reduced to a single line of dialogue. It may be a somewhat cruel trademark (from the big-ego actor’s point of view), but this method is fundamental to Malick’s vision of man’s place in the cosmos.

In this, Malick is suggesting that it’s far more important for us to see well rather than to be well seen. Insofar as cinema has a purpose, it should not be about audiences glorifying actors or actors glorifying themselves, as much as creating an environment of focused vision and contemplation wherein the beauty of this world confronts and perhaps transforms the audience.

The whole of Malick’s oeuvre seems to be a call to put aside our hubris and wake to the Divine all around us. Brad Pitt’s character in The Tree of Life ”wanted to be loved because I was great,” but by the end of the film he recognizes that he was foolish for paying no attention to “the glory all around us . . . I dishonored it all and didn’t notice the glory.”

But when Malick speaks of being awakened to the “glory all around us,” what does he mean? Is it a sort of pantheistic deification of nature? A deistic affirmation of some vague, removed divinity? With The Tree of Life and now To the Wonder, I am convinced that he is speaking of “the glory” of the world not in the sense of being the thing to be worshipped but as pointer to the Being to be worshipped, namely the Christian God. To adopt this way of seeing is to engage with external activators of the sensus divinitatis built into our very being—an innate proclivity to suspect God’s existence.

Read the full review at Christianity Today. I’d also suggest you read this fascinating piece on Malick’s filmmaking process for To the Wonder.

Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty (coming out on August 1, 2013) is my attempt to address this “pendulum” problem head on and present an approach to cultural engagement that thoughtfully resides in the vast and glorious terrain between the extremes to which we are so prone to default. Christians have a hard time with nuance. Gray areas are not our strong suit. It’s way easier to just say “yes” or “no” to things, rather than “well, maybe, depending. . . .” But there are many areas where it’s not that black and white. God gives us minds with the capacity for critical thinking so that we might navigate the complexity of these less- straightforward areas of existence.

Popular culture, and what we consume or abstain from within culture, is one such gray area. There aren’t easy answers in the Bible about whether this or that HBO show is OK to watch. Scripture contains no comprehensive list of acceptable films, books, or websites. Contrary to what some Christians maintain, the Bible neither endorses nor forbids all sorts of things it could have been clearer about.

But scriptural silence about the particularities of 21st century media habits is no reason to just throw up one’s hands and indulge in an “anything goes” free-for-all. Rather, it’s an invitation to think about the gray areas more deeply, to wrestle with them based on what Scripture does say and what we’ve come to know about the calling of Christians in this world. The gray areas matter.

I wrote Gray Matters to give Christians tools to better wrestle with a few of the gray areas that have sometimes proven divisive for evangelicals. More broadly, I hope it helps us to take more seriously our habits of cultural consumption–considering how they enrich, corrode or conflict with our Christian identity. Even if we aren’t tempted to be legalists or libertines, many of us are simply apathetic about the things we consume and the manner in which we consume them. Some of us are downright gnostic in the way that we divorce our media/entertainment habits from the faith we purportedly practice.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I believe that following Christ and appreciating the goodness, truth and beauty of culture are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Reasonable integration, rather than convenient compartmentalization, should define our engagements with culture as Christians. We must go about it thoughtfully, with moderation, and in community. We must do it well because the world is watching; a reckless posture toward culture can impair our witness. More importantly, a healthy consumption of culture can bring glory to God.

I’ll be sharing more about Gray Matters in the coming months (pre-order if you’d like!), but for now I’ll leave you with the endorsements the book has received thus far.

“Brett McCracken is one of this generation’s leading thinkers on the intersection of faith and culture. In Gray Matters, he explores Christianity’s natural extremes with his feet firmly planted in Scripture. He charges headfirst into controversial questions and leaves no stone unturned. The result is a truly spectacular book that carves a path between an oppressive, rules-based religion and a powerless, free-for-all ‘faith.’ If you start reading it, beware—you won’t be able to put it down.”

—Jonathan Merritt, faith and culture writer; author, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars

“Idealism is all the rage among bright young evangelicals today, but Brett McCracken brings something all too rare to the table: he holds his earnest idealism in tension with lucid good sense and winsome moderation. May his tribe increase!”

—John Wilson, editor, Books & Culture

“Martin Luther said the world was like a drunken man, first falling off one side of the horse and then the other. With a fresh and thoughtful look at challenges such as food, music, film, and alcohol, Brett McCracken has offered a new generation a way to stay on the horse.”

—Roberta Green Ahmanson, writer and speaker

“In Gray Matters, Brett McCracken does something quite refreshing—he serves as a wise and discerning guide to the consuming of culture. Many books condemn ‘secular’ culture, just as many books advocate (consciously or unconsciously) accommodating ourselves to culture. Brett has written something much different: a biblically informed and culturally savvy approach to consuming culture in a God-honoring, community-building, and mission-advancing way.”

—Mike Erre, pastor; author, The Jesus of Suburbia: Have We Tamed the Son of God to Fit Our Lifestyle?

“Brett McCracken has long been my favorite reviewer of both music and movies, so it’s no surprise to me that he has written this needed book on consuming culture. A number of wonderful books have been written encouraging readers to create culture, but Brett takes the reader into the everyday world of consuming culture. Brett is an incredibly capable writer, thinker, and connoisseur, and all of this shines through in his work—bringing back into focus that how we engage the world around us matters deeply.”

—Tyler Braun, worship pastor; writer; author, Why Holiness Matters: We’ve Lost Our Way—But We Can Find It Again

“This book is not only clear and engaging, but also careful and wise. Gray Matters is a helpful, critical, reflective exploration of how we should consume culture as Christians that is neither reactionary nor defensive, triumphalistic or despairing.  Few younger Christians have navigated these turbulent waters with as much even-handed clarity as this book does, which makes it an important read.”

—Matthew Lee Anderson, MereOrthodoxy.com; author of Earthen Vessels: Why our Bodies Matter for our Faith

As the last in a long, exhausting, three-month parade of self-congratulatory awards shows and “best of the year” recaps, the Academy Awards sometimes come as more of a relief than a climax. Finally we can shut the door on the year that was and move on to the next big things.

When we watch the Oscars we’re often surprised to be reminded that yes, that film from a year ago was fromjust a year ago. So it goes in our hyperspeed forgetful culture, where it’s hard to remember last week’s viral YouTube clip let alone last year’s blockbuster films. It’s no wonder Academy voters tend to nominate only movies released in the last few months of a year. Everything these days — even the best movies — are so swiftly consumed and disposed. Very little lingers. I’m pleasantly surprised when Academy voters recognize anything from before October (this year’s token early-in-the-year nominee was Beasts of the Southern Wild).

It seems our collective cultural memory is ever more truncated. Who of us can remember the Best Picture winners from recent years? Or if you watch the Oscars more for the fashions, who can remember what anyone wore?

Memory can be as untrustworthy as it is beloved, as fragile and dangerous as it is indispensable. Perhaps because our frantically paced, fragmented contemporary world reinforces the tenuousness of recollection more than ever, many of this year’s films seemed to wrestle with that very theme.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained played with our culture’s collective memories of slavery and the Civil War, wrestling with the iconography of national heroes and institutions and the lingering stains of a peculiar period in American history.

Zero Dark Thirty and Argo also explored American history, albeit much more recent episodes. The former, likeLincoln, received plenty of criticism for its portrayals of the way things happened — in this case the way torture was or was not an influential part of the quest for Osama Bin Laden. The difficulty of that question—and the feverish handwringing from politicians and commentators that accompanied it—underscores the difficulty we have as our society with truth: locating it, understanding it, reckoning with it, even when it’s such recent history.

Ang Lee’s Life of Pi dealt with this in its own (perhaps heavy-handed) way. The film ends with a postmodern monologue that acknowledges the difficulties we have with narratives of our history (who can ever know whatactually happened?) while celebrating the art of storytelling in a “who cares what’s true!” sort of way.

Ben Affleck’s Argo seems to advocate a similar stance toward truth. Both in its celebration of cinematic storytelling as a liberating force (literally) and in its own unabashed stretching of the facts in the historical episode it narrates, Argo traverses the same epistemological terrain as Life of Pi, though perhaps more unknowingly. Affleck probably didn’t set out to make a film that presents so vividly the conundrum of historical truth’s elusiveness and storytelling’s distorting power, but that’s what Argo turns out to be (and not in a good way). In his recent takedown of Argo, critic Andrew O’Hehir calls the film “a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology.” He continues:

Affleck and Terrio are spinning a fanciful tale designed to make us feel better about the decrepit, xenophobic and belligerent Cold War America of 1980 as it toppled toward the abyss of Reaganism, and that’s a more outrageous lie than any of the contested historical points in Lincoln or Zero Dark Thirty. It’s almost hilarious that the grim and ambiguous portrayal of torture in Kathryn Bigelow’s film—torture that absolutely happened, however one judges it and whatever information it did or didn’t produce—was widely decried as propagandistic by well-meaning liberals who never noticed or didn’t care about Affleck and Terrio’s wholesale fictionalization.

It’s unfortunate that Argo appears to be on track to become the next Crash (that is: an extremely undeserving Best Picture winner). Because there were many other 2012 films that more eloquently wrestled with the preoccupations and eccentricities of our present age.

One I commend to you is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a Turkish drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan that explores the theme of the elusiveness of truth in a beautifully restrained, curiously ambivalent manner—one that leaves you unsettled precisely because it hits so close to home. The Imposter is another deeply unnerving, absolutely gripping film from 2012 that explores the tension between truth and storytelling. It’s a documentary that depicts a stranger-than-fiction story of identity theft, breached security, and (most disturbingly) one family’s willful self-deception.

The anxieties about truth on display in all of these films seem fitting for a year like 2012 — a politically charged, rhetoric-saturated election year. A year in which the hiddenness of truth and the reality that there are very few “no-spin zones” left in this world became depressingly pronounced. Ours is a world where subjective narratives of every sort — whether 140 character tweets, cable news talking head banter, or blog commentary — bombard us from every which way at nearly all hours of the day. It’s no wonder skepticism about truth and uneasiness about narrative reliability thread through so many of our films.

This present awareness of our weak connections to truth and our fragility in a world so crazed and chaotic has a positive consequence in film as well: a renewed emphasis on the power of human connection and love as a coping mechanism. This can be seen in 2012 films like Moonrise Kingdom, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, and Rust and Bone—movies where terrible things happen and suffering abounds, but love for one another becomes an almost salvific balm. This is also evident in my favorite film of 2012, The Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid With a Bike (read my review), which powerfully depicts the redemptive power of sacrificial love between a single woman and an orphaned boy who stumbles into her life.

Of course, relationships can be as fragile, fickle and untrustworthy as are our connections to truth. Films like On the Road. Killing Them Softly, and The Loneliest Planet underscore this point, showing how tenuous our connections to one another can be and how quickly they can turn, especially in an environment of skepticism and “every man for himself” individualism. We live in a world where (for good reason, perhaps), people are more guarded than ever. We’ve seen tragedy and expect it. We’ve been let down too many times and will not be surprised by it again. In such a world it’s hard to open oneself up too readily to anything purporting to be substantial — whether it be love, or “truth,” or a stable family.

Some of the best films—of this year or any year—are those which chip away a bit at this guardedness and invite us to believe in things like love and truth again. For me this year, that was The Kid With the Bike. What was it for you?

Originally published on Q Ideas.

As I’ve reflected on Smith’s essay the last few weeks, I’ve thought about a few things. The first is that I believe Smith’s ultimate conclusions about joy as opposed to pleasure are somewhat reminiscent of those of C.S. Lewis, whose reflections on joy ring the truest of all those I’ve come across.

Smith’s essay begins with an assumption that is self-evident to anyone who exists in this world: pleasures are rather easy to come by but joy is a bit more elusive. She then describes a handful of moments in her life when she felt that she touched joy, in particular a London nightclub experience in the 90s at the beginning of the ecstasy craze. But was that really joy? The morning-after letdown makes Smith wonder. Maybe joy exists mostly in the tease, the replication, the mimesis of something far rarer or altogether out of reach?

Reflecting on her drug experience that felt awfully close to joy, Smith writes:

At the neural level, such experiences gave you a clue about what joy not-under-the-influence would feel like. Helped you learn to recognize joy, when it arrived. I suppose a neuroscientist could explain in very clear terms why the moment after giving birth can feel ecstatic, or swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with somebody dear to you. Perhaps the same synapses that ecstasy falsely twanged are twanged authentically by fresh water, certain epidurals, and oxytocin… We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes—especially if they are fraught with danger—do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. When my wild crush came, we wandered around a museum for so long it closed without us noticing; stuck in the grounds we climbed a high wall and, finding it higher on its other side, considered our options: broken ankles or a long night sleeping on a stone lion. In the end a passerby helped us down, and things turned prosaic and, after a few months, fizzled out. What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.

To me, Smith’s notion of joy here feels like bittersweet nostalgia and longing more than anything, which brings to mind Lewis’s notion of it in Surprised by Joy. Reflecting on the common qualities of Lewis’s own list of “joy” experiences from childhood, he writes:

For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasure in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

Smith seems to agree with Lewis that joy is a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. “The thing no one ever tells you about joy,” she writes, “is that it has very little real pleasure in it.” And yet she seems more perplexed than Lewis on the question of why humans would choose to desire joy over pleasure, even when it can cause so much pain:

The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do. The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.

Smith’s recognition of the ultimate disposability and evanescence of pleasure seems to me representative of my generation’s increasing awareness of the general ephemerality of things, and their skepticism of all the tropes (a house, a family, a career, the suburban life…) previously associated (mostly via Hollywood) with a “joyous” life.

Mine is a generation which has grown up seeing about half of all marriages end in divorce. We’ve seen the real estate market collapse a few times, as well the stock market. We’ve seen umpteen holes shot through our heroes and icons (sex scandals, doping scandals, the generally unflattering transparency of 360 degree media).

Meanwhile, the allure of physical possessions seems ever diminished. Books on bookshelves are going the way of the CD. Amassing expensive furniture, investing in home improvements, registering for fine wedding china that will rarely be used… all of it feels pointless in a world whose impermanence is palpable: a world where life is lived via moment-by-moment tweets and Insta-documents quickly forgotten; where natural disaster, terrorism and apocalyptic doom are not feared as much as expected; where market instability, escalating debt and climate change make visions the future look closer to Children of Men than “Tomorrowland.”

Because of all of this (and no doubt much more), many of us are now, on the whole, much more desirous of experiences than things. We’d rather travel, eat amazing food, see movies, have adventures, and live socially in the present-tense than build for anything long-term. Unlike our parents, we tend to rent rather than buy; we work in jobs for years but not decades; we don’t live in one place for very long. We have close friends for “seasons,” but very few for life.

To be sure, the idea of rootedness, permanence and longevity–building an idyllic homestead wherein one’s family can flourish, amidst a tightknit community where “everybody knows your name,” where we can carve out a niche and stake our place for once and all–is desirable, but mostly in a fantasy sense (in the simultaneously nostalgic and eschatological sense, perhaps, of Marilynne Robinson’s reflections on home in the essay, “When I was a Child I Read Books.”) Such a vision confronts us mostly as a stab, a pang, a longing for what we know will probably never be.

And this brings us back to the discussion of joy. For it is precisely in those pangs and longings where joy exists, argues Lewis. “All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire,” he wrote once in a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths. “Our best havings are wantings.”

Though I agree with Lewis that pleasure is surely distinct from joy, I also think they are very closely linked. That is, I believe pleasure–mostly the nostalgic remembrance of a pleasure–can often be a catalyst for joy. Zadie Smith’s experience in the London club likely felt more joyous and profound in her memory–with great distance–than it did in the actual moment. Perhaps in the moment it was closer to pleasure than joy. But without that initial pleasure to look back on and long for, would there be joy?

When I consider instances of joy in my life thus far, most of what I would list probably felt more like pleasure at the time. I think of the summer night in Cambridge when I snuck onto the roof of Clare College with friends, looking out over the moonlit gardens, punting down the Cam river well after midnight, with champagne and laughter in ample supply. I think of the long, late-night undergrad conversations at Wheaton with my roommates: about God, movies, theology, relationships and the like. Or the childhood trips with my family to the Tulsa State Fair, an autumnal tradition rife with the screams and whirring of carnival rides and the smells of all things barbecue and fried. Pleasures all.

The memories of all that, the longing for those happy experiences and the intense recognition that they will never be replicated in just the same way… that’s what stirs up joy. Sehnsucht. And it’s not just nostalgia for the past. It’s nostalgia for a future that a lifetime full of accumulated pangs and pleasures leads us to believe exists. Somewhere. Joy is the ineffable, the transcendent, the sublime stasis which a million little experiences grasp at but can never fully capture. An ultimate settledness for which our hearts now restlessly pine.

This is why Smith feels that there is something melancholy about joy, that it has such a paradoxical capacity to bring us pain. And perhaps that is why in today’s world–so untrusted and unstable, where we’re all so aware of contingency and fragility–the idea of joy makes a lot more sense when articulated as a groaning for completion rather than a smiling-face present perfection. Lewis’ characterization of joy as always pointing away or calling us elsewhere (emphasizing our “pilgrim status”) rings true for citizens of discombobulated late modernity. We know all too well the vacuity that so often accompanies lives of consumption; the limited capacity of things to bring lasting pleasure. (Of course, experiences can also be disposable and empty, though I think they have greater capacity to morph into pleasant memories which ultimately bring joy).

Still, whether we’re curating commodities or experiences, It’s up to us to make the most of the little pleasures we come across. We can either celebrate the presentness of pleasure (YOLO, right?!) and stop there; or we can go further and see in pleasure signposts, recognizing that the ecstatic feeling triggered by a dance party, or a small-batch bourbon, or a down-to-the-wire Super Bowl, is not an end unto itself but rather a means by which we can contemplate our true pilgrim status and the telos to which it all must point.

(Originally published on MereOrthodoxy.com)

Lord, bring us to our knees. Quiet our hearts.

Away from the onslaught of screens and tweets and texts, focus our eyes on you.

Abide in our perceptions, as we taste and see and hear that you are good.

In the stillness of dusk, on ever lengthening days; serenaded by car horns, engines, buzzing iPhones, birds, distant planes, and the mystical fugues of February vespers… speak to us oh God.

Remove us from ourselves. Help us to dismiss our notions of grandeur and relinquish our litany of self-appointed rights: that we deserve jobs, freedom and low gas prices; that our social updates deserve to be paid attention to; that the world revolves around us; that we can do with our bodies what we fancy; that the chief end of life is our own individual happiness.

Remove us from ourselves Lord, and draw us closer to You. Bring us to a distance–a desert, a depth, a hunger, Sehnsucht–so that what we see of ourselves isn’t glamour and greatness, but only your grace. Only your righteousness.

Only you, in fact, for it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Ashes to ashes, let us deny ourselves. Let us give ourselves away rather than grab what’s ours. Let us be crucified with Christ. Let us seek the cinders, Oh God, to be crushed as you were, refined to a new fragrance.

In the darkness, in the desert, in the endless debates, let us look to resurrection. The morning is coming.

Into debt we further go. Under avalanches of paperwork, tasks, and to-dos we further sink. Against our arthritic, cancerous, flaking-away bodies we further fight. The nations wage war and the blizzards take their toll.

But Easter looms.

(Originally published in 2012)

I’ll say little about the film (I haven’t seen it) beyond what us die-hards already know, but there have been a few really nice posters and trailers released in recent months, so I’ll just whet your appetite with those.

First, the HD trailer:

The beautiful UK poster (it comes out in the UK on Feb. 22):

The French trailer (comes out in France on March 6):

And a trio of French posters:

Lately I’ve been mulling over three films that all made my “Top 10 of 2012” list, but which I have not really written about in depth (until now). Over at Mere Orthodoxy I wrote two articles about these films that you can find by clicking on the titles below:

In Defense of “Les Miserables”: A response to some of the outspoken criticisms of the film version of the beloved musical. My take focuses on the unique attributes of the cinematic medium (over the stage, or the page) and attempts to defend the film’s emotionalism as a pure and appropriate treatment of the material. Read it here.

Is Depiction Endorsement? Filmmaker Responsibility in “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Django Unchained”: An analysis of the controversies that have arisen in these films and an exploration of the larger issue of if and in what manner a filmmaker is responsible to clearly distinguish between “depiction” and “endorsement” in their work. Read it here.

My fiancee and I love food. It’s our pastime. One of our love languages. Eating and drinking together and with friends is one of the ways we experience the grandeur of God and the beauty of his creation. It’s the subject (one of them) of my forthcoming book.

Because I adore good food and drink, I thought I’d recap 2012 through the lens of  culinary highlights. Below are my picks for the best things I ate and the best places in L.A. (all of which I recommend to fellow food-lovers!):

BEST OF RESTAURANT DINING:

Appetizers:

• Cliff’s Edge (Silver Lake): Whipped Ricotta with lavender, honey, olive oil
• Red Hill (Echo Park): Arancini stuffed with pork cheek
• Craft (Century City): Cheddar Hushpuppies & Smoked Maple Syrup
• Mesa Grill (Las Vegas): Goat Cheese “Queso Fundido” with rajas and blue corn tortilla chips
• Mess Hall (L.A.): Smoked corn fritters with poblano & pumpkin romesco

Main Course:

• Mesa Grill (Las Vegas): Blue corn buttermilk waffle with blackberry bourbon syrup and vanilla creme fraiche
• Mama’s Fish House (Maui): Mahimahi stuffed with lobster and crab, baked in macadamia nut crust.
• Studio (Montage Laguna Beach): Salmon with Swiss chard, golden raisin and rhubarb
• Ink (West Hollywood): Pork belly, charcoal oil, bbq flavor, petrified yams
• Plan Check (L.A.): Smoky fried jidori chicken, smoked milk gravy, yam preserves, spicy pickled okra
• Craft (Studio City): Butternut Squash Agnolotti
• Wood & Vine (Hollywood): Fried chicken & waffles with maple glaze and sage butter
• Gioia (Park Hyatt Buenos Aires): Homemade ricotta cannelloni with walnuts, spinach and truffle fontina sauce.

Desserts:

• Loft (Montage Laguna Beach): Honeycrisp Apple Souffle with sage ice cream and cinnamon cream
• Charlie Palmer’s (Costa Mesa): Framboise Verrine: raspberry foam, pistachio cremeaux, chambord gelato.
• The Pie Hole (L.A.): Maple Custard pie
• Taste on Melrose (West Hollywood): chocolate brioche bread pudding.
• Ray’s Stark Bar (L.A.): Cherry cobbler with almond streusel and vanilla ice cream
• Ink (West Hollywood): burnt wood ice cream
• Umamicatessen (L.A.): Tres leches doughnuts with cajeta and ceylon cinnamon

BEST OF L.A.

Best place to get coffee: Handsome Coffee; runner-up: Cognoscenti Coffee
Best place to get pizza: Pitfire; runner-up: Pizzeria Mozza
Best place to get amazing cheese: The Cellar Cheese Shop; runner-up: The Cheese Store of Silver Lake 
Best breakfast spot: Haute Cakes; runner-up: Huckleberry
Best dessert spot: Pie-Hole; runner-up: Magnolia Bakery
Best chocolates: Jin Patisserie; runner-up: Vosges
Best bakery: Proof; runner-up: Porto’s
Best burger: Umami; runner-up: Father’s Office
Best local brewery: The Bruery; runner-up: Golden-Road
Best beer selection: Mohawk Bend; runner-up: Little Bear
Best food+beer combination: Playground; runner-up: Beachwood BBQ
Best place to enjoy a cocktail without losing your hearing: Wood & Vine; runner-up: The Varnish
Most interesting food: Ink; runner-up: Umamicatessen
Most interesting drinks: The Bazaar; runner-up: Rivera
Best place to spot a celebrity chef: Joan’s on Third
Trends most likely to continue in 2013: pop-up restaurants, supper clubs, fried chicken & waffles, charcuterie renaissance, artisan and homemade everything.
Trends most likely to fizzle out soon: food trucks, savory doughnuts, artisan pop-tarts for adults, bacon in dessert, cupcakes, smoked everything. 

Perhaps appropriately, many of the best films of 2012 dealt in some way with endings. In the year in which the world was to end, many masterpieces explored the idea of ending, finality, conclusion–whether the end of slavery (Lincoln), the end of innocence (Moonrise Kingdom), the end of life (The Grey, Amour, Les Miserables, Skyfall, Killing Them Softly, etc.), the end of an affair (The Deep Blue Sea), a manhunt (Zero Dark Thirty) or the world itself (Turin Horse). And so now, at the end of the year, I list my ten favorite films of the year, commending them all to you (including the honorable mention list: they’re all marvelous films!). If you haven’t already, you can also check out my picks for best documentaries and best performances of 2012.

10) Looper: Rian Johnson’s stylish, smart, brain-bending film was one of the most crowd-pleasing of the year. Happily, the genre hybrid (time travel meets gangster meets sci-fi) relied more on deft storytelling than CGI theatrics, doing what good cinema has always done: immersing the viewer in a world at once fanciful and foreseeable, glossy and grimy, foreign and familiar. (my review)

9) Les Miserables: Cynics beware: this film is an explosion of earnestness, popular Broadway music and sometimes ostentatious flourishes of stylistic indulgence. Yes, it’s a bit kitschy at times. It may be emotionally manipulative. But it’s also a magnificent cinematic experience. Victor Hugo’s moving story of grace and forgiveness is told with tenderness and passion by director Tom Hooper and his impressive cast. An excellent screen adaptation of a beloved masterpiece of the stage.

8) Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino’s latest pop art revisionist bloodbath is less elegant and a bit messier than his last masterpiece, Inglorious Basterds, but perhaps that’s part of its genius. Slavery and racism are not tidy, elegant things. In characteristic over-the-top fashion, Tarantino applies his singular vision to this touchy terrain and gets away with things no director should (right?). The result is offensive, brash, bold, funny, sad, disturbing, and frequently beautiful.

7) The Grey: I didn’t expect much more from Joe Carnahan’s film than a  typical “angry Liam Neeson” action flick. But man is it more than that. It’s a tough-as-nails film; gritty and bloody and masculine to the core. And yet it’s also deeply poetic, existential and–in the end–quiet and contemplative. Especially in the last 30 minutes of so, The Grey really punches you in the gut. (my review)

6) Moonrise Kingdom: Wes Anderson’s beautiful film is one of the best films about childhood I’ve ever seen. It captures–in characteristically colorful, deadpan, boxed-in form–the magical spaces in which children dwell: playing, exploring, flirting with danger and adulthood, taking in the world with wonder and curiosity. More than just a stylistic exercise (Anderson’s films can sometimes fall in this trap), Moonrise is a somber, poetic “coming of age” story with profound things to observe about how children experience the world. (my review)

5) The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest American epic is ostensibly a riff on the story of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. But of course it’s more than that. What exactly The Master is about is up for interpretation; which is to say that yes, it’s an ambiguous film, but not in a pretentious sort of way. Anchored by spectacular performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master is a gorgeous tale of American ambition–as vast, contemplative and occasionally ominous as the wide-open-spaces of the land it inhabits. (my review)

4) Amour: Michael Haneke shows off his sentimental (sort of) side with this intimate tale of an elderly French couple at the end of their lives. Haneke unflinchingly shows us the horrors of aging as we witness the post-stroke decline of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), while her husband Georges lovingly cares for her even as her condition worsens. The film is straightforward in its purposes but far-reaching in its emotional impact. Anyone who has ever experienced the painful final phase of a loved-one’s life will relate, as will anyone who has reflected on life and love through the lens of aging.

3) Zero Dark Thirty: Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker is every bit as taut, thrilling and realistic as that Oscar-winning film. A chronicle of the CIA’s 9-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden, beginning with 9/11 and ending with the Pakistan raid that resulted in the death of “UBL,” Zero Dark Thirty is a fascinating look at the tips, clues, red herrings and missteps that characterized the arduous search. Too much has been made of the film’s depiction of torture. The film depicts torture, yes, because for better or worse it was a part of the story in the early days after 9/11; but the film does not suggest that torture produced the key evidence in finding bin Laden. More than anything the film is praiseworthy for its expert storytelling, conveying a complicated narrative in three well-paced hours.

2) Lincoln: Steven Spielberg’s excellent historical epic is not a biopic in the traditional sense. It focuses only on the final months of Abraham Lincoln’s too-short life, especially his political effort to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed. Even so, the film–and particularly Daniel Day Lewis’ impeccable performance as the man himself–manages to bring Lincoln to life in a way we haven’t seen before. Beautifully rendered with the photography, music, costumes, sets and supporting performances an old-school period piece like this requires, Lincoln is an insightful, inspiring, and concisely told story of the brilliance of a great American leader at one of America’s most pivotal points. (my review)

1) The Kid With a Bike: The latest from Belgian brother filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is perhaps their most masterful yet. No other film this year affected me as much as this, a deeply humane portrait about a father, his son, a bike, and a search. Riffing on Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neo-realist masterpiece, Bicycle Thieves, the Dardennes offer up a characteristically nuanced, minimalist, jarring look inside a world both foreign and intensely familiar. The film is ostensibly about longing for one’s father, but it’s really about God’s grace: the way it chases us even when we resist it, soothing us like a balm in our most vulnerable and self-destructive moments.  (my review)

Honorable Mention: Bernie; Wuthering Heights; Killing Them Softly; On the Road; The Impossible; Turin Horse; Holy Motors; Skyfall; The Deep Blue Sea; Oslo, August 31st

There were only a handful of iconic film performances in 2012, but there were a good number of excellent performances, often in smaller roles. I thought it’d be fun to make a list of the best 75 performances from films that I saw in 2012. Below are my picks. If there are other noteworthy performances that you think should be on here, let me know in the comments section!

75) Tom Holland, The Impossible
74) Tilda Swinton, Moonrise Kingdom
73) Susan Sarandon, Arbitrage
72) Jennifer Ehle, Zero Dark Thirty
71) Dwight Henry, Beasts of the Southern Wild
70) Mark Duplass, Your Sister’s Sister
69) Tom Hardy, Lawless
68) Noomi Rapace, Prometheus
67) Scoot McNairy, Killing Them Softly
66) Gina Carano, Haywire
65) Bruce Willis, Looper
64) Tom Hanks, Cloud Atlas
63) Anders Danielsen Lie, Oslo, August 31
62) Shirley MacLaine, Bernie
61) Edward Norton, Moonrise Kingdom
60) Kaya Scodelario, Wuthering Heights
59) Isabelle Huppert, Amour
58) Ray Liotta, Killing Them Softly
57) Alan Arkin, Argo
56) Eddie Redmayne, Les Miserables
55) Sam Riley, On the Road 
54) Daniel Craig, Skyfall
53) Tom Hardy, The Dark Knight Rises
52) Bruce Willis, Moonrise Kingdom
51) Suraj Sharma, Life of Pi
50) Mark Ruffalo, The Avengers
49) Robert Pattinson, Cosmopolis
48) Jude Law, Anna Karenina
47) Jim Broadbent, Cloud Atlas
46) Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild
45) Christian Bale, The Dark Knight Rises
44) Rosemarie DeWitt, My Sister’s Sister
43) Jamie Foxx, Django Unchained
42) Matthias Schoenaerts, Rust & Bone
41) Brad Pitt, Killing Them Softly
40) Muhammet Uzuner, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
39) Emily Blunt, Looper
38) Greta Gerwig, Damsels in Distress
37) Anne Hathaway, The Dark Knight Rises
36) Michael Caine, The Dark Knight Rises
35) Thomas Doret, The Kid With the Bike
34) Judi Dench, Skyfall
33) Garrett Hedlund, On the Road
32) Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained
31) Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
30) Ewan McGregor, The Impossible
29) Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
28) Keira Knightley, Anna Karenina
27) James Howson, Wuthering Heights
26) Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
25) Richard Gere, Arbitrage
24) Guy Pearce, Lawless
23) Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea
22) Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
21) Sally Field, Lincoln
20) Amy Adams, The Master
19) Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained
18) Denzel Washington, Flight
17) Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour
16) James Gandolfini, Killing Them Softly
15) Michael Fassbender, Prometheus
14) Liam Neeson, The Grey
13) Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
12) Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
11) Javier Bardem, Skyfall
10) Cecile De France, The Kid With the Bike
9) Naomi Watts, The Impossible
8) Jack Black, Bernie
7) Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
6) Marion Cotillard, Rust & Bone
5) Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
4) Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
3) Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
2) Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
1) Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln