Our parents will be proud of us and our wives will stop making fun of us. Our kids and friends and their kids will totally respect us. As an added bonus, new monthly supporters get a one-time feature in a future TNMN edition. You provide one sentence, and Blake must include it in a future edition.

Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you. Drew and I are both on vacation this week, and so we’re extending last week’s categories for another round. If you’d like, you can make a second submission to increase your chances at winning!

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Monthly supporters get an (optional) one-time single sentence feature in a TNMN edition. Make a joke, complain about something, share something you're working on, a cause you care about, or just about anything else, and Blake must include it in a future edition.

Here’s an example:

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A man with dementia refuses assistance from his daughter.

→ Sir Anthony Hopkins. I don’t say this lightly: Anthony Hopkins’ performance in The Father is among the best he’s ever given in his entire career.

→ Empathetic direction. Perhaps what’s most striking about this film is the perspective from which it was shot, which lets viewers more deeply inhabit Anthony’s dementia without reducing the device to a cheap gimmick.

→ Crying. I didn’t cry because I’m an emotionally-hardened man and I’m not supposed to cry, but if you aren’t as tough as I am and you like to cry every once in a while, watching a man’s mind slowly wither away is certainly one way to do it.

Florian Zeller’s The Father inhabits rarified ground; it is alarmingly rare for a film to not only tell a story but also embed viewers so truly and deeply within the experiences of its main character.

The most obvious thing to say here, though a thing I’m obliged to say because it is the genuine truth, is that Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman deliver heartbreaking, tender, ferocious, raging performances that will long be remembered as some of their finest work.

Equally deserving of the heaps of praise each of these performers collected, back when the film released in 2020, is the subtle, confident direction from Florian Zeller in his feature-length debut. Mental deterioration and aging and losing one’s mind is among life’s greatest and most mysterious tragedies, and, of course, there’s no greater testament to Zeller’s filmmaking brilliance than making such a mystery so legible and penetrating for the rest of us.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.

BOTTLE EPISODE: STREET CLEANER

It is the year 2087, and everyone has all of the information they need (finally). Every child born today is given an unremovable earpiece, which stays put until just before they die and their bodies are discarded. We call the instant before death and discarding The Quiet Moment, because most of us reckon it is just about the quietest moment of one’s life, simply since the earpiece has finally stopped blabbering. Preceding The Quiet Moment is The Removal, which is a prettier way of describing cutting someone’s ear clean off their head. Pain medication would be nice, but I'm told it is better to preserve the supply for the living.

Parents still tell their children how to do some things, like how to fry an egg or wipe their own butts, but learning is more-or-less obsolete, surely, when you can retrieve any single piece of information that’s ever existed, in under three-eighths of a second. And so, the only thing kids really need to learn to do nowadays is how to ask the right questions, and how to remember things for as long as is necessary to do whatever it is they’re trying to do.

Parents used to tell their kids they could be whatever they wanted to be when they grew up, and this was always a lie, my earpiece told me, because it depended on wholly unfair things like genetics and intelligence and generational wealth and the color of your skin. That’s why a coalition of the world’s most powerful governments funded universal access to earpieces, so now every child born on Planet Earth gets one right away. And so every kid is insanely fortunate, because they really can grow up and do whatever they want to do and nobody has to lie to them anymore.

Parents feed their children until the child can feed themselves, and most of the rest of it is handled by the earpiece because it's faster that way. Once the child turns fifteen, they begin doing Jobs. These used to be called Careers, but the implication was that you did the same thing for a very long time, and that’s not required anymore. It’s so antiquated, when you really think about it. What kind of idiot would want to do the same thing, every day, for the rest of their lives?

Instead, you can pick a new Job every single day. If you want to be an astronaut, all you need to do is ask your earpiece where to stand in line and what buttons to press when the rocketship is taking off and breaking through the ozone and each subsequent layer of the atmosphere. If you want to be a writer, ask your earpiece for a story and you can just start writing it. If you want to be a surgeon, ask your earpiece for the nearest scalpel and a facility where ears are being cut off.

The company’s Founder was the first test subject for the earpiece, and the installation went very well, so much so that only a few months afterwards, just about everyone had them installed. Since then, I’m told, things have been nearly perfect.

The other day, I was on the way to my Job, and I stepped in a puddle of viscous red liquid and a man lying face down in it. I asked my earpiece what it was, and (you’re not going to believe this), the earpiece told me. It was the Founder of the company. He was conducting bleeding edge research on kinetic energy, specifically the impact the ground has on the human cranium. I paused and thought to myself: Just how in the world does he think of these ideas? The Founder really is some kind of genius. I asked the earpiece what the results of the study were, and it told me that the Founder’s hypothesis was proven: the ground can cause death if a body falls from a great enough height, and that sometimes upon such a death, red liquid bursts from the impacted parts of the body. I’m no scientist obviously, because when I first saw him, I presumed he was studying the red liquid beneath him, and that he wanted an up-close look at it.

I was saddened by the tragedy because the Founder was a great hero of mine, but he probably would have wanted it this way, to die researching something so revolutionary and useful for humankind. His legacy will be remembered, I thought, no one will ever again die from hitting the ground too hard.

Despite his endless intelligence, though, he wasn’t a very tidy man. The Founder had made something of a mess with all that red liquid, which, my earpiece suggested, seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to try a new Job: street cleaning. I gleefully accepted, because I’d always wanted to operate large machinery. I couldn’t contain myself, and my lips spread from cheek to cheek as I thought about sitting behind the wheel of such a machine, as described by the earpiece.

But first, I needed to get the Founder to a discarding center, which was easy enough once the earpiece taught me how to open the trunk of a nearby dusty old car, and then turn it on. I don’t know how all these people did it before these earpieces. There’s simply too much information to know all by yourself. I hauled the Founder into the trunk of the car and couldn’t stop grinning, thinking about the heavy duty bristles of a street cleaner scrubbing away at that mysterious red liquid. 

It’s a beautiful day to try something new.

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