Last year, when I spent all that time in Florida, I didn’t eat as much. And when I did eat, I generally ate better. Smaller portions. Healthier foods. I also got a little bit more exercise, just from walking more and having lots of nervous energy. As a result, when I weighed myself at the end of 2024, I’d lost about 20 pounds. I looked better. I felt better. (All things considered, of course.)
So, I decided to conduct a small experiment: On January 1, I began documenting my weight at the start of every month, just to see if I could keep it off.
Suffice it to say, things went in the opposite direction. And, if I’m being totally honest, not only did I put all the weight I lost back on, I actually gained a little more, too.
Every December, frequent moviegoers like me fall into the same familiar ritual: looking back at the movies we saw and ranking the ones that made an impact — for better or for worse.
There’s no real science to this; it isn’t about “the best films according to an algorithm” or awards-season prognosticating. It’s just about calling attention to the movies that stuck with me, the ones I couldn’t wait to discuss afterwards, that I’m still thinking about weeks or months later.
With so many movies released in any given year, there are bound to be a few gems that slip through the cracks.
Eephusis one of those films you probably didn’t hear much about when it played in theaters earlier this year (if it even made it to your town). But it’s available to watch digitally, and you should do yourself a favor and check it out. Especially if you ever played little league or on a town team (at any age), or you’ve ever considered yourself a baseball fan.
In the article, Pelly writes that the annual Spotify Wrapped campaign — part curated lists of most-listened to tracks and artists, and part marketing campaign for Spotify itself — “nudges listeners away from deep consideration and towards accepting a corporate-branded scorecard reflecting a very specific perspective on musical value. It encourages music fans to believe that the records they streamed the most must be the ones they liked the most, which is surely not always the case.”
Song Sung Blue is a movie for anyone who thought Deliver Me from Nowhere needed a few more hit songs. While the film about a Neil Diamond tribute band isn’t exactly a downer, like the Bruce Springsteen film is, it’s not entirely the upbeat entertainment the trailers and commercials promise, either.
In 1987, my grandparents took me to see the original production of Chess in London’s West End. It was thrilling, with its Cold War–inspired story and tech-forward production design, featuring a tiled stage that mimicked a chessboard and that lit up accordingly, and also rose, tilted, and helped bring the story to life visually. How very ’80s.
The real star of the show, though, was its pop-music score, written by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, with lyrics by Tim Rice, which was first released as a concept album in 1984. It was high-octane musical-theater music, with songs that ranged from rock-infused grooves to heart-rending ballads, and that required big voices to do it justice. Some of those songs, such as “One Night in Bangkok” and “I Know Him So Well,” became pop hits in their own right, and for good reason. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to that album over the years.
But, despite what my 13-year-old sensibilities thought, Chess wasn’t perfect. So, when the show crossed the pond to Broadway in 1988, the creative team made a lot of changes. Too many. In the process, they made a real mess of the show, including adding more to the story and changing some lyrics, all of which confused audiences. The production closed less than two months after it opened.
All these years later, Chess has remained a cult favorite — a show that’s loved for its music, but whose complicated book has given it a reputation for being a bit tricky. Multiple attempts have been made to clean it up, but the show just kept feeling like a series of powerful songs stitched over a geopolitical think-piece. After a while, that just became part of its charm.
Thankfully, the show’s creators haven’t given up. The new Broadway revival of Chess that opened last month at the Imperial Theatre (site of its 1988 production) has arrived with a kind of swagger that feels both overconfident and long overdue. This production doesn’t untie every narrative knot, but thanks to a powerhouse cast (especially the three lead performances), it gets more right than it gets wrong. In short, it exceeded my cautiously optimistic expectations.
Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is good, but not great, and it feels a bit disappointing after A Star Is Born and especially Maestro(one of my favorite movies of 2023). Both of those films exhibited the confidence of a director fully in command of his vision, but this latest one feels looser and a bit unsure of itself.
Cooper’s latest has moments of real insight and emotion, but it also meanders and is occasionally frustrating. You can see what he’s going for — something raw and human about creativity and connection — but the final product just doesn’t quite get there.
Despite what so many people think, Hanukkah is not “Jewish Christmas.”
Many years, it doesn’t even fall at the same time as Christmas. Oh, sure, it’s usually within the same month. But it’s not uncommon for Hanukkah to be over days, or even weeks, before December 24.
If you’re like me, and you never did get around to seeing the recent Tony Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, or you did see it and you wish you could see it again (and again), director Maria Friedman has given audiences a time machine that goes right back to the Hudson Theatre, preserving her buzzy Broadway production for future generations.
Friedman, a British actress and director making her cinematic debut, didn’t just park a camera in the aisle during an actual performance. Rather, she’s produced a film that’s a bit of a hybrid, one that effectively captures the electricity of live theater and gives you the kind of intimacy you can’t quite get even from the best seats in the house. Yes, that means the film is stagey. But that’s exactly the point.
Merrily is in theaters now as a special-event release, and for musical-theater fans, it’s a genuine holiday gift.
Martin's Musings 