Culture diet #4

Six months of movies, books, and live performance.

Yes, I usually write about names, brands, and the language of commerce, but not always. This is one of the “not” posts, and it’s kind of long, so probably best consumed in the Substack app or your browser for the full experience.

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Movies

I’ve attended four local film festivals so far this year. (Read my story about why I love film festivals.) January brought ten (!) days of Noir City, which was minimally noirish this year — the theme was “Face the Music,” and all of the films involved music or musicians — and thus a bit of a letdown, although I did enjoy seeing King Creole, possibly Elvis Presley’s best film, for the first time. In March the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, back in the Castro Theatre after that venue’s extensive renovation, held a one-night screening of It (1927), starring the delightful Clara Bow and featuring top-notch live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Silent Film Orchestra. I returned for several days of the full festival in May, catching a rare screening of Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly, plus The Abyss, The Clown, and my top pick, Ernst Lubitsch’s timelessly charming So This Is Paris. At the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s WinterFest I saw the heartbreaking Israeli feature The Sea, which follows Khaled, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, on his seemingly mundane yet perilous quest to see the Mediterranean. (The Jewish Film Festival’s summer dates are July 16 through August 2 in San Francisco and Oakland.) I missed most of the San Francisco International Film Festival, catching just two films: the poignant Risa and the Wind Phone (from Argentina, but inspired by the famous Japanese “wind phone”), and Boots Riley’s fantastically surreal I Love Boosters, which I touched on in a May post. I Love Boosters is currently in theaters; you can watch the trailer for Risa and the Wind Phone here.

The best of my non-festival viewings:

The Sheep Detectives. Unquestionably the best ovine movie since Babe, and completely enchanting from start (the baaing MGM logo) to finish (the pen-and-ink sheep illustrations). The title is no metaphor: These very convincing CGI sheep really do solve a murder while wrestling with big existential questions. And have I mentioned Hugh Jackman? And Emma Thompson? As Sam Adams wrote in his review for Slate: “At first, I couldn’t believe that this movie about crime-solving ungulates existed. Now I’m so glad it does.” I confess I wept just a little bit at the end.

Backrooms. I didn’t love it (interesting premise, muddled execution), but I’m hugely impressed and happy that this horror-esque debut feature from Kane Parsons — who turns 20 in June — has made it to the big screen and is doing spectacularly well. Also impressive: the film’s big-name stars, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. Still in theaters.

The Christophers. Ian McKellen as a famous-but-fallow artist and Micaela Coel as a would-be art forger in a sly comedy with several twists. The acting is terrific, the writing is brilliant. (I snort-laughed when McKellen called his greedy adult children “the heirs abhorrent.”) Still in theaters and available to rent on streaming platforms.

Eephus. I subscribed to Mubi so I could finally see this 2024 film, which had had only a fleeting theatrical engagement. I am not a sports fan, but for some reason I love baseball movies, and I really love movies like Eephus that observe the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. Eephus follows the final game of two amateur New England baseball teams composed of quirky cranks, lovable schlubs, and miscellaneous misfits. The unseen narrator is the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who died earlier this year at 96. (He also had a small role in A Private Life, a French mystery starring Jodie Foster that I saw in January.) And the title? An eephus is a rare pitch “known for its exceptionally low speed and ability to catch a hitter off guard”; the word was coined in the 1940s by Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell, who said eephus “ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.” (In Hebrew, efes means “nothing.” Sewell did not speak Hebrew.) If you don’t have Mubi, you can also rent Eephus on various streaming platforms. Watch the trailer.

My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 - Last Air in Moscow. I’m still thinking about this shattering six-hour documentary, which I saw in a single afternoon at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive and wrote about in February. It’s currently streaming on Mubi.

Two memorable rewatches on the Criterion Channel: O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Michael Clayton. I also did my annual rewatch of The Women (1939). (I wrote a couple of years ago about some interesting words in The Women.)

Streaming

Slim pickings here. My only recommendation is AMC’s The Audacity, which I raved about last week. Although I loved the early seasons of Hacks, I haven’t been motivated to finish the final season. Love Lisa Kudrow; can’t seem to tolerate Comeback. Couldn’t make it through a single episode of The Pitt (I’ve never liked hospital dramas¹). Quit Ladies First halfway through; the film squanders a top-notch cast (Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Kathryn Hunter, Richard E. Grant) on a trite, unfunny plot, “hammering home the same point ad nauseam without anything smart or sharp to add,” as The Guardian’s critic summarized. Let me know in the comments if you have suggestions to get me out of this slump.

Theater

Or maybe more live theater is the answer! I drove up to Ashland in April for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, my first visit there since pre-pandemic. I tore myself away from the blossoming trees and burbling creek — springtime in Ashland is a joy — to see three plays in two days: Come from Away (which I’d seen twice during its original San Francisco run), A Raisin in the Sun (which I’d never seen on the stage, only in the filmed version), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I’ve seen countless times (theater, film, ballet) and never tire of. All three were beautifully staged and acted, and it’s always a delight to be surrounded by enthusiastic live-theater audiences in what amounts to a company town.

Back in the Bay Area, I saw just one play in the recently concluded ACT season: Paranormal Activity. The theatrical version is based on the films of the same name, which I’d never seen and was only vaguely aware of. It was sensational in every sense of the word — I can’t remember another play whose credits include “illusions designer.” The nearly sold-out crowd included an unusually high proportion of people under 30, and they were into it. So gratifying. I’ve subscribed to the whole 2026-27 season, which includes John Proctor Is the Villain, a new work by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and a new adaptation of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (wait, what?) from Emma Rice, one of the most imaginative directors working in theater.

Other live performances

San Francisco Ballet: A superb season; the company under artistic director Tamara Rojo just gets better and better. The Blake Works, choreographed by William Forsythe (b. 1949) during the pandemic and set to music by British singer-songwriter James Blake (b. 1988), was a standout.

Joffrey Ballet: At Cal Performances, a weird and wonderful Midsummer Night’s Dream — not Shakespearean but rather a “picturesque fusion of classical and contemporary ballet” set during a Scandinavian solstice festival. Loved it. Watch a clip.

Kelli O’Hara: I almost bailed on O’Hara’s solo show at Cal Performances because I’d mistakenly said yes to a ballet matinee in San Francisco and figured that was enough culture for one day. I’m so glad I mustered the energy to get over to Berkeley that evening, because this was a rare treat. O’Hara’s gorgeous soprano — she co-starred in Fallen Angels, won a Tony in 2015 for The King and I, and is a regular on The Gilded Age — and engaging stage presence made me want more. Oh, look: She’s doing a one-night-only show with Sutton Foster at S.F. Symphony next month. A definite yes.

Lara Downes and Friends: Another Cal Performances evening, this one featuring Downes, a virtuoso and versatile pianist, in a program titled “This Land: Reflections on America.” The “friends” included Tarriona “Tank” Ball and a besequinned Judy Collins, who is 87 years old and clearly having the time of her life.

SFJAZZ: One of my favorite live-music venues, with performances almost every night of the year. I saw terrific shows by Keb’ Mo’ and Madeleine Peyroux.

Books

I’ve read just one work of fiction so far this year: The Director (2025), by Daniel Kehlmann, which had been recommended by a friend. It’s a fictionalized treatment of the life of the Austrian film director G.W. Pabst (1885–1967), perhaps best known to American audiences as the man who made a star of Louise Brooks. (See my story about Pandora’s Box, which screened in Oakland’s Paramount Theater in 2023.) I’m never entirely comfortable with the fictionalized-history genre, and I know too much about the real Pabst not to object to the liberties Kehlmann takes with the historical record. Still, it’s well written (and well translated from the German) and worth reading if you’re interested in the intersection of Hollywood and Nazi Germany.

I went on a Daniel Okrent spree, starting with a reread of The Guarded Gate, his superb 2019 history of immigration in the U.S. (The subtitle — “Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America” — gives you an idea of his point of view.) I moved on to Great Fortune (2003), Okrent’s saga of the making of Rockefeller Center, and finished with his just-published Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy. What a writer! What subjects! Highly recommended.

Some biographies: Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, by Carla Kaplan; Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue, by Sonia Purnell; The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire, by distant relative Joseph Sassoon.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is novelist Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her brilliant, appalling mother: part monster, part heroine. I listened to the audiobook and was completely enthralled by Roy’s narration. Another memoir, also narrated by the author: Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, by Nicholas Lemann, son of New Orleans and dean of Columbia’s journalism school. His forebears were German Jews who emigrated to Louisiana, owned plantations, kept slaves, and gradually lost their Jewishness; Lemann examines this history with unsentimental compassion and draws us into his rediscovery of Jewish observance.

Julia Ioffe’s Motherland is both “a feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to anarchy” and a multigenerational memoir about the women in Ioffe’s family, spanning Leninism to Putinism to emigration to the U.S. Simply brilliant.

One very qualified recommendation: I’d wanted to read Ametora for years — the title is a Japanese word meaning “American traditional” — because I’m interested in the history of clothes and because experts like Articles Of Interest have cited it. The history is interesting, the illustrations are fascinating, but the editing … leaves a lot to be desired.

See also: My reviews of Why We Talk Funny and Verb Your Enthusiasm, both of which were sent to me by their publishers.

On my nightstand (thanks for the suggestion, Jason Kottke!):

Fascist Yoga, by Stewart Home (2025)

Art

SFMOMA: Over multiple visits, I’ve been taking in the “reimagined” Fisher Collection, nearly 250 works from the holdings of the late Don and Doris Fisher, founders of The Gap. The “reimagining” includes thoughtful new wall text and audio explainers. Tip: Start on the sixth floor (“Memory and Matter”).

Legion of Honor: It’s always a treat to visit the Legion, out on San Francisco’s western edge, and the current “Etruscans” exhibit is a total delight. Be sure to check out the details on the gold jewelry, and don’t skip the short video in the little screening room just off the gallery. Through September 20.

Skirball Cultural Center: I drove down to L.A. for the opening of “Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976-86,” which consists largely of items from the vast collection of my friend Andrew Krivine, who’s been collecting since the late 1970s and now has a trove of some 7,200 pieces — posters, albums, stickers, clothing, and more. It’s a fabulous show, and the Skirball — high up on Sepulveda Boulevard — is one of the nicest places in L.A. to spend the day. While you’re there, check out the other new show, “Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution,” which focuses on the role played by cultural outsiders in creating the popular art form. Hmm, a themeline! (“Punk Culture” through September 6; “Inventing America” through February 28, 2027.)

LACMA: While in L.A. I went to the newly opened Geffen wing, which has sparked controversy for all kinds of reasons I couldn’t care less about, because I loved the building, the art, and the way it’s organized (by oceans of the world).

Looking out from the new Geffen wing of LACMA toward the glass dome of the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum. Photo: Nancy Friedman, May 18, 2026.

New favorite YouTube series

Brooklyn Coffee Shop, featuring Pooja Tripathi and Darryl Gene Daughtry Jr. as supercilious baristas. (The series is filmed in an actual Williamsburg coffee shop called Larry’s Cà Phê.) This episode features Laura Ramoso, whom I discovered on Instagram and who bases her character sketches on her Italian father and her German mother.

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Previously in Culture Diet (with links to #1 and #2):

1. Two exceptions: Nurse Jackie and Getting On. But I’d call them dramedies or dark comedies rather than hectic dramas like The Pitt (or what little I’ve seen of The Pitt).