Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month?
Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends.
It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been playing, reading, listening to, or watching.
Patrick Recommends: A Short Stay in Hell
Books, man. They're cool. I'm reading a lot more of them lately.
This one, though, this one has stuck in my brain. Most of my life, I would have described myself as an atheist, but in reality, I'm agnostic? I find it impossible to imagine the world exists in complete spontaneity, yet I cannot comprehend how any of it would actually work. Plus, I'd like to be wrong about never meeting people like my Dad again. Do I think I will? No. Do I want to be wrong? A little bit.
Which means I'm often drawn to stories that attempt to explain what I find unexplainable: taking seriously the concept of an after life. How would it be structured? What would you do there? What if morality wasn't a determining factor of what happens? What if it was, all told, more banal and weird than you'd anticipated?
A Short Stay in Hell posits the vast majority of the world guessed wrong on the architects of the afterlife (d'oh, it was Zoroastrianism), which means most people are forced to endure a version of "hell" before moving on. No fire and brimstone, but, in theory, a lesson. These lessons are in different categories, and you're assigned a different one. Some mean you'll encounter other people, maybe even friends and family, while others posit a lonelier learning experience.
Here, Soren arrives in a library with everything that could ever have been written, aka the Library of Babel. Soren's goal is to find the book that tells the story of his life, albeit without spelling and grammatical errors. "Ever written," of course, means ever written, which produces a library stretching towards infinity. You have all the time in the world, there is no more fear of death, and other people are there trying to accomplish the same goal. What could go wrong? Well.
I thought a lot about Stephen King's equally absorbing Revival while reading A Short Stay in Hell, both of which are deeply cautionary tales of what a slightly different afterlife might entail. Both of them are probably right: maybe we're better off if nothing is there.
But, you know—it's fun (and scary) to think about.
P.S. There a sequel "anthology" series to this. It's not that great.
Rob Recommends: Criterion Channel’s “Corporate Thrillers”
The Criterion Channel has put together an incredible collection of crowd-pleasers this month for its Corporate Thrillers Collection. In many ways the collection is also a showcase of how many incredible character actors Hollywood boasted in the 80s and 90s, and how these movies full of mundane settings and men and women in business suits gave us so many memorable asides and sharp exchanges and trusted the audience to follow along.
I’m working my through and obviously you have all-timers like Michael Clayton and Wall Street here, but don’t deny yourself the pleasures of The Firm, where Tom Cruise ignores all the red flags that his wife sees waving from a mile away and takes a too-good-to-be-true offer to work at an insular, mysterious Memphis law firm under the tutelage of Gene Hackman and Hal Holbrooke. It’s a fine pairing with The Devil’s Advocate, perhaps the most excessive “Al Pacino Dark Mentor” movie. Like someone decided to remake Scent of a Woman as a Bruegel painting co-starring Keanu Reeves.
I am not even going to tell you why you should watch Disclosure. It‘s a deeply of-its-time movie where sexual harassment happens to a man and the inversion of expectation prompts a lot of silly “baby’s first feminism” reflections. That doesn’t mean it’s badly executed as far as that stuff goes but it’s not why I’m telling you to watch it. The only hint I will offer is that it’s a shame you can’t play Ripper on the Criterion Channel.
If I’m being pedantic only a handful of these are corporate thrillers. The rest are more properly classified as legal thrillers or financial crime movies. But as a set, they feel right at home together, and you can just hit play anywhere on this list and have a pretty good time.
Chia Recommends: No Other Choice
It’s a rare year when I’ve seen most of the Oscar best picture nominees, which makes 2025 rarer still. Not only had I seen most of the list before the nominees were announced, I was also surprised by a snub that I thought was a shoe in. After Parasite’s win in 2020 you’d think the academy voters would have maybe clocked the similarities and checked out Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice, but unfortunately I think a fair amount of people probably missed this movie in an absolutely stacked year.
No Other Choice tells the story of a salary man Man-su who has a pretty blessed life. His family is healthy and happy, he’s been able to hold on to his (quite spectacular) childhood home, and can seemingly indulge in small luxuries here and there. They are the very definition of upper-middle class, until one day he tries to stand up for his fellow workers’ jobs as they’re being laid off in a company buy out. The new owners aren’t having it, and Man-su is sacked for not firing his co-workers. Almost a year later and he hasn’t been able to find a job, has to rehouse the family dogs because they can no longer afford to feed them, and might have to sell the family home just to make their savings stretch a little longer.
What follows is a deeply moving, hilarious, and upsetting look at the systems of capitalism and economic pressures that cause Man-su to believe he has “no other choice” in a series of escalating schemes to hang on to his family’s economic and social status. You can see immediately why I would compare it to Parasite, but don’t take the comparison to say that No Other Choice is simply aping the type of story that got Parasite so many wins at the Academy. While some of the broad themes are the same, No Other Choice stands on its own, exploring entirely new aspects of the social striations that pressure us all to make compromised choices in our lives.
The final scene absolutely devastated me, and left me both with a sense of dread and a tiny spark of hope and understanding for everyone as we all try our best to make it by in the oppressive systems we live in.