Hiatus

Hi everybody!

I'm not sure if anyone noticed (or cared), but I haven't posted anything in nearly two months. Mostly, I've just been too busy, or at least too tired to put together a post on Sunday morning after having been so busy for the preceding week. At first, I thought it was just going to be a couple weeks, and then I'd come back with a super-sized review post and be back to the races, but that has obviously not happened, and by now it's gone on long enough that I feel like I just need to admit to myself (and to my dozen readers!) that I probably won't be writing anything on this blog in the near future. Probably not until the school semester ends, at least, and even then, I'm not sure if I'll be up to doing the same pace as I've done for the past eight years.

The truth is, it's felt kind of nice to have a break, nice enough that it doesn't bother me not to be posting for so long. Back in the year-end movie post, I mentioned that I was considering winding the blog down, and this is definitely that, though I'm not ready to call it quits entirely. At the very least, I still would like to do year-end lists and maybe some prog rock posts. But for the time being, I think I am done with weekly review posts.

If you still want to see me reviewing movies, I do update my Letterboxd account with basically the same type of reviews as I would have put on here. There's also the podcast my wife and I do, if you're interested in hearing my thoughts about children's books. So it's not as if I'm purging my horrible opinions from the internet (though I am closer than ever to having the wherewithal to delete my Facebook--maybe a summer project). But as for this blog, don't expect to see much new writing here.

Anyway, to those who have stuck it out for the long haul, thanks for all years of reading! I'm sure I'll hear from y'all whenever I do get around to making another post.

Until then!

Favorite Music of 2022

If you missed my Favorite Movies of 2022 list, here it is! Now here's my companion music post. I usually do the music post first, but my scheduling is weird this year. I'm genuinely sorry for how long this took, but at least here we are now!

I don't have a lot to say up here. Per usual, my usual disclaimers: I don't listen to enough metal, I feel out of touch with whatever's going on with rap, I'm slowly turning into a jazz dad. I also haven't had as much time as usual to review music on my weekly posts, so when there's a chance to link to a review, I will, but that doesn't happen a ton.

Anyway, enjoy! As always, I view this as a conversation-starter, not a definitive list; there's always more to hear, and I'm on the prowl to hear it! So let me know what music you enjoyed in 2022.

Favorite Albums:

1. The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention
Am I just nostalgic for Radiohead? Probably! This side project is the closest we're going to get to new Radiohead music for a while, and I ended up listening to it a ton in 2022. Probably not going to blow anyone's mind, but it's good music, y'all!

[Read original review]

2. Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen
I remember hearing the debut album from Brittney Parks, aka Sudan Archives, a few years ago and thinking it was good but never really returning to it. I should probably go spend some more time with it, because Sudan Archives's second album dominating my listening habits for the last month of 2022. A diverse collection of pop styles bent into beguiling, surprising shapes by Parks's penchant for exploration, I just couldn't get enough of Natural Brown Prom Queen. It really scratched an itch for me, an itch I didn't realize I had, honestly. Probably the catchiest album that I listened to this past year.

3. Makaya McCraven: In These Times
I coined a term last year to describe Blue Lick's Hold On, Hold Fast: plan-period core, and while this funky, orchestral-tinged jazz record doesn't really have a lot sonically in common with Blue Lick's experimental skitter, this was definitely the album I kept flipping on as soon as the bell rang and my planning block full of grading or lesson prep began at school. I hope this doesn't come across as me saying that In These Times is "background music," because nothing could be further from the truth. It is, above all, a surprising album, relentlessly inventive, folding big band flourishes into jazz fusion grooves that juke into twinkling string flourishes or percussive digressions. Love McCraven, love this record.

4. Alvvays: Blue Rev
I spent a long time more or less addicted to "In Undertow," the hazed-out anthem from Alvvays's previous album, so it's no surprise I cottoned to their album this year. I don't think there's anything I'm quite as in love with as "In Undertow," but there are an awful lot of ear-wormy tracks lurking in this record. "Easy On Your Own?" is probably the one sticking with me most right now, but plenty of other tracks could overtake it. It feels like over the past 5-6 years, we've seen a lot of bands trying to revive '80s/'90s indie rock sounds, and this is basically doing that UK fuzzy twee pop thing, but that's cool because Alvvays has the melodic chops to prove they could have cut it back in the heyday of that style.

5. Mary Halvorson: Amaryllis
Mary Halvorson is one of the great 21st century jazz guitarists and overall jazz innovators in general, and 2022 was a great year for her. Amaryllis is my favorite of the duo of records she released in May (the other being the still excellent Belladonna): technical yet playful, mind-bending, weirdly catchy. Belladonna is the more obvious showcase for Halvorson as a guitarist, but the fuller sound of Amaryllis gives her a much bigger canvas. I love her ability to make me think, "Oh, I think I know where this is going" right before juking into some completely unprecedented direction.

6. Jenny Hval: Classic Objects
The obligatory Jenny Hval spot. It feels like I put her in here every year. Looking back at my archives, I guess that's not true, but it's comforting to imagine her music as a constant presence in my life. As long as she keeps delivering songs like "Jupiter," I don't imagine that changing any time soon.

7. William Basinski & Janet Schaefer: "...on reflection"
Supremely relaxing. A piano piece edited ("woven," as the liner notes say) around itself for 43 minutes. I just got done assuring you that In These Times isn't background music, but "...on reflection" absolutely is, intentionally so, and it's beautiful.

8. Seabrook Trio: In the Swarm
A terrific jazz trio prominently featuring a diddley bow, which gives this album's uneasy, proggy sound an oddly Americana flavor. It's a weird juxtaposition, but I like it a ton.

9. SAULT: Earth
This enigmatic British soul group released six(!!!) albums in 2022, all of them worth a listen, each of them an incredibly distinct sonic object, from the symphonic choral music of Air and its sequel to the sincere gospel of Untitled (God). My favorite of the bunch is Earth, probably because it sounds a lot like a Parliament-Funkadelic record, which is hard to pass up.

10. Beyoncé: RENAISSANCE
In the 6 years since Lemonade, I had kind of wondered if Beyoncé had decided to wind down into a quiet, safe legacy act, what with misguided Lion King tie-in movies and such. But nope, she's still got it. There are some absolute monster dance-floor tracks here; my favorite is the stunning, Donna-Summer-sampling closer "Summer Renaissance," but few tracks on this album aren't monsters. Much as I continue to find the "Beyoncé as divine-right monarch" thing off-putting in theory, I continue to find her music irresistible in practice. Just banger after club banger here. I dunno if the house revival that Beyoncé and Drake seemed to want to will into existence will happen, but if all we got out of that was this album, I'd say we still ended up on top.

Great 2022 Songs Not On These Albums:

Arcade Fire: "The Lightning I, II"—It was a bad year to be an Arcade Fire fan, for reasons both quotidian (the new album was kinda meh) to catastrophic (Win Butler is a serial and pretty unrepentant sex pest, it turns out). But this track, the lead single for the new album, really captured the old magic. The moment when it shifts from "Part I" to "Part II" is that same goosebump-inducing crescendo they've been mining their whole career, and dammit, it still works. I don't know how I'll feel about Arcade Fire going forward, post-allegations, but at least there's this unintentional swan song.

Björk: "Fossora"—A lot of the press surrounding the new Björk album described a "mushroom rave," and this is the most mushroom ravey on the record. It melds the woodwind-heavy arrangements of Utopia with heavy, almost industrial beats in a way that evokes dank underground caverns, and I'm very into it. Oddly catchy.

Father John Misty: "The Next 20th Century"—I had a hard time getting into the new Father John Misty album, which was, bizarrely, very swing-jazz heavy, but this song, the final track, blew me away, and not just because it's mid-song explosion of guitar noise is a change of pace from the rest of the record. It's a song that opens with the lyric, "The nazis that we hired for our wedding band played your anthem like I wasn't there for the father-daughter dance," and doesn't let up with that sort of eerie, politically uneasy juxtaposition. Captures perfectly the weary paranoia I feel about the future. The prospect of another 20th century is a dreadful, apocalyptic one, but at least we'll get another round of good music.

Floating Points: "Vocoder"—I'm not 100% sure if it actually is a vocoder that Sam Shepherd's using on this club banger, but whatever it is, that liquid metal texture it has is incredible.

HAIM: "Lost Track"—At least once a year, it seems, HAIM just casually release these earworms that simply won't let me go. I couldn't even begin to estimate how many times I flipped this song on because it was stuck in my head.

Kendrick Lamar: "Mother I Sober"—A lot of Kendrick's album this past year felt like a response to his landmark Pulitzer award: a lugubrious, over-cooked record anxious to say Big Things. It was okay. "Mother I Sober" is maybe the most lugubrious and over-cooked track on the album (either that or the honestly kind of unlistenable "We Cry Together"), but for whatever the reason, it's the song of his I've returned to most from this album cycle, even more so than the critical favorite "The Heart Part 5." Built from a solemn piano loop and a knotty, emotionally anguished narrative (even for Kendrick) surrounding cycles of abuse in Black communities, it's a tough listen, but I find it riveting and profoundly poignant. I'm sure for some the "I broke the cycle" conclusion of the song feels like a self-aggrandizing manifestation of the savior complex Kendrick Lamar (and his fandom) has wrestled with for years now, but I find its admission profoundly moving.

Maren Morris: "The Furthest Thing"—I've heard Maren Morris compared to Golden Hour-era Kasey Musgraves, and while that's kinda true in places, this is really the only track of hers that registers as fully indebted to the Musgraves masterpiece. Golden Hour is great, so of course this is great, too, and the song has that knack that a lot of Morris's work has, i.e. taking fairly archetypal material (in this case, missing a distant lover) and making it feel distinct to her. Some really great, understated piano from co-writer Greg Kurstin on here, too.

Caroline Polachek: "Billions"—I guess I should start getting into Caroline Polachek. She kinda fell off my radar after Chairlift disbanded, but this song is great.

Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Kaiser, & Alex Varty: "Pacifica Koral Reef"—I'm cheating by including this, because it's basically an album: a 55-minute track, the only track from the one-track album of the same name. But it's good! Wadada Leo Smith is still out there doing his thing, and I love him for it.

CC Sorensen: "Alter Destiny"—An intoxicating synth (I think?) loop mixed with what sound like field recordings of frogs and other nocturnal creatures. Great, vibey, mildly kosmische stuff.

Spoon: "The Hardest Cut"—We need to be careful not to underappreciate Spoon, because it's not nearly as easy as they make it seem to churn out lithe indie pop-rock year after year like they do. One of their bouncier tracks in recent memory.

Szun Waves: "New Universe"—Szun Waves' typical electronic pulse mixed with spiritual jazz sounds great in this standout track from their album Earth Patterns, which was my #11 album of the year (if that makes any difference to you).

Jessie Ware: "Free Yourself"—Jessie Ware is easily the best person doing this disco-revival thing that's been going on for the past few years, and this is easily one of her best songs in that vein.

 

Honorable Mention:

Alison Swafford: Sonnets—My buddy Alison made a great album this year! It's a loose concept album inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets, and you should go listen to it (and buy it!) if that sounds at all interesting to you. One of my most-listened-to albums of the year, and I would have put it in the top 10 if that didn't feel like a conflict of interest.

Mini Reviews for January 30 - February 5, 2023

Still (slowly) working on that 2022 music post. It will come out eventually, mark my words!

Movies

Infinity Pool (2023)
This was a lot of fun, and it seems like everyone making this movie had a lot of fun, too, including (especially!) Mia Goth, who basically crams every single impulse of her career into her character's arc here. She's having a five-course meal. It's also a much funnier movie than I was expecting. I suppose there's a way to make a satirical story about rich people behaving badly on a poor island nation into something scary, and the movie tepidly gestures toward that, but it's mostly just outrageous in an Old Testament kind of way that mixes its oddly archetypal premise (you can create clones to accept the capital punishment you deserve) with the extreme debasement that Alexander Skarsgård undergoes in response to his initial hubris of being enamored at finding a beautiful young fan of his writing. Watching Mia Goth just humiliate this dude over and over again is hilarious. Certainly not for everyone, but it is for me, for sure. Grade: B+

 

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
I went in expecting something weird and messy, and it is to a degree, but it's not manic in the slightest, which was really what I was geared up for. Instead, it's this thoroughly melancholy and pensive piece of theater about the passage of time and the ways that we use story to create meaning out of that passage. Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton have unexpectedly great screen chemistry, and the storybook framing of the movie is not nearly as twee as it should have been. I was really moved by the end. That last scene in the park with Idris and Tilda walking into the horizon is perfect. Grade: A-

 

 

Yes, Madam! (皇家師姐) (1985)
I watched this for this week's episode of Cinematary (listen to it here!), thinking it was a good, early Michelle Yeoh showcase. And it's about 30% that! The other 70% is a fairly unengaging film about some bumbling low-level thieves getting up to Three-Stooges-esque shenanigans. This was probably a victim of my expectations, and it may have been more engaging if I had approached the movie understanding what it would be like, but I came here for Michelle Yeoh, dangit! Anyway, Michelle Yeoh is very good in the scenes she's in. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Silent Movie (1976)
It's more of a pseudo-silent movie in the vein of Modern Times or a Tati film (has Mel Brooks watched Tati??) than a true silent film, and it's a bit too reliant on title cards for my tastes. But there are some good gags here, impressive considering that visual gags aren't usually Brooks's strong suit. My favorite is the scene with Burt Reynolds showering and slowly acquiring more hands (you'll know it when you see it). That said, this runs out of gas majorly by the end, and also, there's a running "joke" where the punchline is simply a character yelling the f-slur (plus a quick transphobic aside in another case), and while I know it's no fun to make the very innovative observation that an old Hollywood movie is queer-phobic, those bits definitely put a damper on this movie's charm for me, which is a problem when this movie coasts so heavily on the quaint charm of its concept. Grade: B-

 

L'Atalante (1934)
When I approach movies that are typically considered among the greatest of all time, they usually inspire one of two responses: 1) I am as enthusiastic about it as its reputation warrants, or 2) I like the movie fine but don't get why it's considered one of the greats. L'Atalante is definitely in the latter camp, and I'm not sure why people think this is so amazing, especially when Murnau's Sunrise beat this movie to its punch several years earlier. That said, this movie is often very lovely, and I'm glad I watched it. I like the ship's crew, who are fun to watch. Also, the underwater sequence is really good. Anyway, good movie. Not sure why it's so canonized. Grade: B+

 

 

Books

Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1928)
About as dull as its title suggests, though once the titular pigeon goes to WWI, the book gets strangely high-minded and philosophical about the nature of conflict. Still, most of this is about a young Indian boy training a pigeon, without a lot of development of either the boy or the pigeon. Beautiful illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff, though. Stay tuned for a Newbery Chronicles podcast in the next couple weeks. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for January 23 - 29, 2023

In case you missed it, there's a new podcast episode in the Newbery Chronicles: this time, the 2020 Newbery Medal winner, New Kid.

Movies

Crimson Gold (طلای سرخ) (2003)
This is way more narratively and thematically straightforward than I was expecting from a Jafar Panahi-directed, Abbas Kiarostami-written film: basically a crime film with a class commentary at its core. And it's really good at that! The transition from the scene in which the protagonist is invited, momentarily, into a ritzy apartment to the scene in which the climactic heist takes place is gutting, and the rest of the film does a good job of setting up that hinge moment. I guess I should put an asterisk by the word "straightforward," though, because it's entirely possible that my relative ignorance about early 21st-century Iran has made me miss some more thorny political context that's wrapped up in this; there are a few moments in the film—e.g. the motorcycle ride where the two guys talk about head coverings—that make me think that there's more going on there in that regard. The older I get, the more I just feel so ignorant about everything, especially things that happened during my lifetime that I should have at least a basic awareness of. Anyway, I may be a dummy about this movie. Grade: B+

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971)
Some truly vile Christian nationalist propaganda. This is great for a hate-watch laugh—the scene of the pedo-stached public school teacher (credited as "Comrade Teacher") instructing a class that "premarital sex is necessary" is the funniest thing I've seen in a movie in maybe years—but boy did it curdle for me by the end. 95% of this movie's outlining of the alleged threat of a communist takeover of the United States is so deranged that it's hard to take seriously, but there's something piercingly real about the final five-ish minutes, when the inevitable altar-call conversion happens. While every single performance in the film is sub-community-theater cornball acting, the scene where the woman breaks into sobs as she accepts Christ as her Lord and Savior is uncomfortably naturalistic, and the Rev. Estus Pirkle, who sounds like a huckster madman as he explains geopolitics, becomes disarmingly, insidiously down-to-earth as he counsels this woman to salvation. It's the one part of the movie that's not outrageously unhinged from reality, which is important because it's the only part of this movie that anyone in the pews could have conceivably experienced in real life. The verifiable thing, the conversion, has to be credible to open the door to the outrageous lies that populate the rest of the movie—as clear a document as I've ever seen of the intertwining of sincere religious experiences with a reactionary political project. Evil, evil stuff. Grade: D

The Burning Hell (1974)
Significantly less funny than If Footmen Tire You (that's bad), but it's also significantly less politically putrid (that's good), but it's also still foregrounding a psychologically abusive fire-and-brimstone, scare-people-into-the-sinner's-prayer preaching (that's bad), but it's got some fun, nightmarish imagery in the parts that depict hell (that's good). It's funny how much less sinister the Reverend Estus Pirkle comes across here than in the previous film. Rather than some deeply evil right-wing grifter, he mostly just comes across as a simpleton in this movie, saying things like one million is a 1 followed by 9 zeros and that Moses sent Korah to Hell in the Book of Numbers. So-called biblical literalists always show their asses when they stake so much on eternal conscious torment in hell. Some real "Michael Scott thinks there are dementors in prison" energy, all of them. Grade: D+

The Believer's Heaven (1977)
This third Estus Pirckle / Ron Ormond collaboration is weirdly beautiful in a way that the other ones couldn't be; the combination of hymns and '70s-style Baptist congregants with ghostly-looking home-grown special effects in depicting a folk-religion version of heaven makes it unexpectedly reminiscent of Spencer Williams's The Blood of Jesus, which is I think the gold standard for this kind of revival-tent cinema. There's also, as I've seen others point out, something accidentally proto-Lynchian about the tone here, especially when you get the (deeply uncomfortable) showcase of disabled people. But unlike the other Pirckle/Ormond flicks, this one is crushingly dull. Rev. Pirkle has cleaned up a lot, and with that fancy suit and shock of white hair, he's looking way more like a slick televangelist than a down-home country preacher, which is boring. Also, while we get a few scenes in hell, this film just has nothing interesting to say at all about eternal life. The same hateful, manipulative theology as The Burning Hell but with none of the brimstone that made it exciting. It reminds me how most people don't ever read the "Paradiso" part of Dante's Divine Comedy; it's just a lot more fun to see people in elaborate torture than to see people frolicking in fields or whatever. Maybe that's not what's in "Paradiso," but I stopped after "Inferno" like everyone else. Grade: D

The Monster and the Stripper (The Exotic Ones) (1968)
Extremely boring for something this weird: 10% travel brochure for New Orleans, 50% burlesque performances, 25% footage of a caveman-looking swamp monster who gets captured and put on display in the strip club, and 15% crime caper involving misappropriated money connected to the mob—100% couldn't hold my interest. After watching Ron Ormond's post-conversion movies with Estus Pirkle, I thought I'd go back to one of Ormond's older, heathen movies for context, and I gotta say, I think I found the one guy whose art got more interesting during his Jesus phase. Grade: D-

Mini Reviews for January 16 - 22, 2023

In case you missed it, here's my Favorite Movies of 2022 post! I'm hoping to get the 2022 music post out in the next week, too, so stay tuned!

Movies

Skinamarink (2022)
I was constantly pinging between scared, bored, and nostalgic here. Scared and bored are probably self-explanatory: the movie is very spooky at times, and also intentionally dull, too, and those two modes have a symbiotic relationship, for sure. I'm not sure the scares would be as effective if this wasn't incessantly switching among staticky shots of mundane stuff like Legos and ceilings, though I do agree with my friends I saw this with who felt that the movie was kind of impatient in the way it was channel-flipping between different images. The nostalgic feelings I had are weirdly specific; I've seen a lot of people talking about how this movie recalls the feeling of being a child in a dark house in the middle of the night, which is true, but also, when I was growing up my family had a VHS tape that contained most of the public-domain cartoons that are playing on the TV throughout the film, and it was bizarrely cozy to have those cartoons exhumed from deep in my early childhood memories. I'm positive that wasn't the intention of the filmmakers, but that's kind of the thing with childhood memories: the strange mix of fear and comfort, stupid sound effects and incomprehensibility. Also, gotta love that this film is in its own way a feature-length tribute to Archive.org, which the opening credits explicitly shout out. Anyway, good movie, pretty cool that something this out-there is getting a relatively big audience. Grade: B
 

Human Nature (2001)
What a bizarre failure of a movie. The screenplay by Charlie Kaufman certainly has ideas about the ways that bourgeois cultural values suppress more liberated ways of living, but embedding those ideas in a screwball farce framework in the model of Bringing Up Baby or The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is a fatal mistake because Kaufman simply does not know how to (or won't) fill his writing with the moment-by-moment jokes that usually sustain this kind of film. As a result, it's a deeply goofy movie that is only actually funny on a few occasions. It's interesting to see a Kaufman screenplay operating at this thoroughly silly tenor, but maybe the reason why his movies tend to be so much more lugubrious is that it doesn't work at all here. And if I hadn't seen Michel Gondry's name in the credits, I don't think I would have believed he directed this movie, because it's pretty much asleep at the wheel, stylistically. Incredible that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was only a few years away for both of these guys. Grade: C

Possession (1981)
Probably the best case scenario for "What if demon possession were a metaphor for the dissolution of my marriage?" It's as good as it is because of just how relentlessly committed the cast is to pushing this idea to the outer limits of what seems physically possible, screaming and writhing around for minutes on end. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of extreme metal or some other bruising kind of performance whose entire point is to see what aesthetic opportunities lie outside the realm of comfort and convention. A lot of this, I think, is meant to be subjective; when we see the couple screaming at each other in their apartment, we're supposed to be seeing what their argument feels like rather than what it actually literally is, and the same goes for any number of extreme sequences, including a notorious one in which Isabelle Adjani's character describes having a miscarriage in the Berlin metro and we cut to a surreal and deeply unsettling show of her flailing about in an empty metro station as unknown liquids spew from her body. It's wild, and I thought it was good in the sense of leaving me somewhat shell-shocked, though I can sympathize with people who find all of this off-putting. There's also a lot of stuff about espionage and the German political situation in the waning years of the Cold War that I'm not really equipped to dig into, but I enjoyed the way that they added a wacky paranoid conspiracy aspect to the movie. Sure, maybe your wife is harboring a demon in her apartment, but have you considered what that means for geopolitics? Grade: A-

Melvin and Howard (1980)
I had a hard time getting on this movie's wavelength. The DVD case and first ten minutes of the movie indicated that this was about a guy who allegedly met Howard Hughes and then believed he was a beneficiary of Hughes's will, but the film quickly drops that in favor of an extremely low-key ramble through the man's humble (but somehow incredibly volatile) life. The movie moves seamlessly between very radical life changes, and there were at least a couple of times that I didn't realize what was happening until it was already passed because the movie makes so little to-do about its many, many left turns. By the time the final fifteen-ish minutes bookended the film with more Howard Hughes will drama, the shape of the movie kind of came into focus for me as a deeply sympathetic meditation on the directionlessness of being a lower-middle-class person with little agency in your life, but even then, I'm not completely sure what to make of it except that I ultimately enjoyed it. I imagine if I ever rewatch it, my feelings on it will be clearer now that I know what's going to happen. Grade: B

La Strada (1954)
Extremely depressing. Giulietta Masina has an incredible capacity for radiating innocence from her face, and most of the film involves us seeing that innocence betrayed time and time again once her character is sold to an abusive circus strongman "husband." For as much as Fellini is known for exploring the ideas of unfettered exuberance and life as a carnival-like bacchanal, this movie seems like a bitter refutation of anyone trying to find philosophical contentment within that view of life, as The Fool's "pebble" speech to Masina's character which tries to generate meaning and purpose into the chaos of life is the thing that convinces her to stay with her abuser, since her life must have "meaning" despite the pain. The movie kinda takes a long time to get there, and I'm not sure it quite needs to take that long, even though this movie is fairly short in terms of Fellini films (only 1h40m), but maybe that's a me problem, as I'm finding it increasingly difficult to give my undivided attention to movies I watch at home. Also, I feel dumb for not realizing before now that Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown is a remake of this. I know some people hate Allen for this, but I kinda love how often he's drawn from the well of "I'm going to remake a movie many people consider one of the greatest of all time." I wish more people would do that, because it's usually at least interesting when it happens. Grade: B+

Favorite Movies of 2022

This year, I've had the distinct feeling that this blog is winding down. Even by the tiny numbers I would usually get, my readership has been especially small this year, going from 3-4 dozen per post to now 1-2 dozen, and I don't get as many comments (either on social media or on the blog site itself) as I used to. I've never been in it with the intent to gain a huge audience, but perhaps the waning readership is indicative of my own waning interest in this project. Life as a teacher plus father of two is pretty full right now, and I'm having less and less time (and energy) to devote to doing my Prog series, incidental non-review posts, summer projects, and even just non-movie write-ups in the weekly reviews posts, essentially turning the blog into just an outlet for me to repost my Letterboxd reviews, which makes me wonder what the use is of maintaining this site as well as my Letterboxd account. Furthermore, one email subscription option after another has fallen through, which means that the small circle of people who follow this through email alerts haven't been able to get updates in a while, and I'm not even sure if they're reading anymore.

I'm not ending the blog—not right now, anyway. But I do think that the blog's end is probably on the horizon. I'm not sad about it; this year marks a whole decade of this blog, and that's a good run. My life in 2023 is monumentally different from my life in 2013, and while a lot of those differences have made my life better, it's getting to the point where they've made it less conducive to blogging. If/when I decide to end this blog, it'll be a with a sense of satisfaction and finality on my part. I'm happy to have maintained this site for as long as I have.

Anyway, all of this is a long, mostly unrelated preamble to my annual favorite movies list, but it felt appropriate to have this kind of state-of-the-union in a space where I usually put year-end reflections. Here's the list, though. As always, I didn't get a chance to see everything, and not everything I wanted to see came to Knoxville, etc. But as of this writing, here's my favorites of 2022!

Favorite Movies

1. The Fabelmans
2022 has been marked by a few films that stick out for their old-school technical craft (and I do mean that as shade toward the majority of Hollywood releases, which are less technically competent than the output of any era of Hollywood I can think of), but among the Top Guns and Avatars, this one rises to the top of that already rarefied crew by being suffused with fascinating, knotty self-critique. A late-career home run from our boy Steve.

[Read original review]



 

2. Nope
I hope Jordan Peele continues to make weird, ungainly, mad-scientist-brained movies until the theaters collapse.

[Read original review]

3. TÁR
Real "makes ya think" cinema of the highest order. Cate Blanchett gives the performance of her career.

[Read original review]

4. The Northman
Robert Eggers goes full pulp with this viking revenge saga, but Eggers is fundamentally incapable of not being a little nerdy weirdo, so it's also got the shaman Willem Dafoe stuff, which is what truly elevates this.

[Read original review]

5. The Banshees of Inisherin
The funniest bummer of the year.

[Read original review]

6. Kimi
The most conventionally exciting movie Steven Soderbergh's made in a while, and I do love a good bit of conventional excitement. There have been a lot of paranoid, claustrophobic thrillers this year, many of them good, but this one's my favorite.

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7. RRR
Speaking of conventional excitement: who doesn't want to see a bunch of British colonizers get devoured by an army of jungle animals? Just good, clean family entertainment.

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8. We're All Going to the World's Fair
It's been marketed as a horror movie, and there are a few spooky things about it. But mostly it's a reflection of what digital life is like. Do you spend too much time online? You might feel seen by this movie.

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9. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
This was a weirdly good year for stop-motion films released on Netflix, and this was without a doubt the best of them. I can't believe it's taken this long for Guillermo del Toro to make a stop-motion movie.

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10. Crimes of the Future
Cronenberg doing his thing. "Surgery is the new sex" is the movie quote of the year, maybe?

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Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande—A lovely little movie about a woman exploring her sexuality as she approaches old age. I didn't hear many people talking about this movie except for the (fair) critiques about how it deals with sex work, but it really is nice.

Best Action: Avatar: The Way of Water—Of the two "its last act is one big action setpiece, and it's the best part of the movie by far" films released this year, Avatar absolutely eats Top Gun's lunch.

Stop-Motion Film Released on Netflix Runner-Up: Wendell and Wild—The truly strange, bursting-at-the-seams brainchild of Henry Selick and Jordan Peele. Glad there's still room, at least in the streaming ecosystem, for weirdos like these fellas.

Jordan Peele Makes a Weird, Ungainly, Mad-Scientist-Brained Movie Runner-Up: Wendell and Wild—See above. Good year for Netflix animation; good year for Jordan Peele.

"Here's Another Good Animated Movie Released on Netflix, WTF Is Happening" Award: Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood—Richard Linklater rotoscopes his childhood, and the results are a fun little boomer dream.

Look, I Just Need to List Out a Couple More Good Animated Movies Released on Netflix This Year, Because It's Unbelievable to Me How Many There Were: My Father's Dragon and The House—Netflix has always been a secret bastion of interesting animation, but my god, they outdid themselves this year.

Pixar Corner: Turning Red—Maybe the most unfairly treated movie of the year, what between the disingenuous conservative moral panic and Disney's unceremonious dumping of it on Disney+. Release your best movies in theaters, you goons!

"What Are Some Other Paranoid, Claustrophobic Thrillers?" Award: Barbarian—Dances all over the "is this a horror movie or a thriller?" line, but whatever this is, I had a great time with it. A couple months later, and I'm still thinking about Justin Long singing "Riki Tiki Tavi."

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: X / Pearl—Seriously, what a year for Mia Goth. Easily the best thing about Ti West's duo (soon to be turned trilogy) of horror pastiche.

Unexpectedly Hilarious Award: The Batman—I dunno, I laughed a lot here. Colin Farrell in particular is very funny, but also, I just think the "The" in the title is funny.

"Never Dully with Sully" Award: Bones and All—People seem somewhat divided on Mark Rylance's performance here as the doddering Southern gentleman cannibal, but I thought he was great. One of the interesting tensions in Bones and All is the way it is constantly teetering on the edge of being something much goofier and pulpier than it presents itself as, and Rylance is a key part of complicating that balancing act.

Best Joke: Everything Everywhere All at Once—I just laughed so stupidly hard every time this movie wrapped back around to Raccacoonie.

Best Ending Credits: White Noise—I wish my grocery store played LCD Soundsystem over the PA.

Worst Movie of the Year: Lightyear—A completely cynical piece of trash and the more dire signs of Disney/Pixar's decline yet. Thank goodness we also got Turning Red this year, or the thought of Pixar's future would be unbearably bleak.

Best Non-2022 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2022: The Long Day Closes—Aching, personal filmmaking. Terence Davies at his absolute best.

Mini Reviews for January 9 - 15, 2023

School's back. Yay.

Movies

M3GAN (2023)
About as good as the Chucky reboot, and honestly weirdly similar in premise, like so similar that I'm surprised that this got made at all. But despite still being a movie about an animatronic A.I. doll that imprints on a child and goes to murderous lengths to preserve that child, it's different enough in execution, and the emotional throughline is surprisingly strong, re: the struggles of modern parenting (esp. the surrogate parent that Allison Williams's character becomes) and the way that digital technology complicates it. It was fun! If I saw it in another setting, I might have been a little cooler on it—it's not going to blow your mind—but Friday night (Friday the 13th, no less, baby!) in a theater moderately but boisterously full is the best way to see a movie like this, and I had a good time. Grade: B

 

The Menu (2022)
This gestures toward some sort of class commentary and/or a critique of the "brilliant artistic genius" worship, which is cool I guess, but it gets lost along the way in its utter disdain for experimental art, which ends up kind of devouring the movie. If I'm being charitable, I'd like to think that the intent of this movie was to show how capital (both financial and social) ruins the integrity of art, an idea I can get behind 100%, but what comes across a lot more strongly is this fairly immature posture of, "If something isn't conventionally pleasant then it must have been made by some cynical, pretentious bastard who has lost his art up his ass," and I just think that is a profoundly annoying and intellectually incurious position. I get that "high" art is usually inextricable from the exploitation of the system that allows it, but the movie gets distracted from that point to act morally superior to being into abstract art in general. When everyone is complaining about not getting bread or when Anya Taylor-Joy is talking about cheeseburgers, it reminded me of people (including a younger me at times—I'm people!) who think they're nobly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when they declare that experimental literature has no plot or that you can't sing along to avant-garde music or whatever. Look, I like cheeseburgers, and I definitely prefer them to the kind of high-concept fine dining depicted here, but sometimes, it's okay to say that you just don't like something instead of proclaiming that anything abstract or convention-defying is fraudulent. Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees, because this particular abstract and convention-defying piece of art kills people, but I dunno, it took me out of the movie. Also, that attitude is presented in a way that has nothing to do with the class dynamics purportedly at play, and at the risk of being the poli-sci version of Anya's terrible foodie date (a legitimately hilarious character, by the way), this movie has no concept of the kind of dialectical materialism needed to actually talk about the relationships among workers, patrons, and capitalists. I kind of hate myself for writing that previous sentence, but I really can't see anything meaningful in this film's "eat the rich" attitude. I did love Ralph Fiennes's incredibly arch turn as the chef mastermind, and as I mentioned before, Nicholas Hoult is incredibly funny as the sycophantic culinary enthusiast. Even if there's not really a lot going on under the hood of this movie, I did enjoy some of the line readings from those two, especially Fiennes's monologues before each course. I kinda wish this didn't try to have social commentary at all besides being a droll, blackly comic revenge fantasy for the service industry, because it could have been a lot more enjoyable as something just purely that. Maybe this movie should have just been, you know, a cheeseburger. Grade: C

 

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
A reasonably fun little murder anti-mystery. There are three unambiguously great things about it: 1) Rachel Sennott's performance, which is consistently hilarious (her reading of the line "Your parents are upper-middle class" deserves an Oscar), 2) the footage of Pete Davidson's character at the end, which is almost as funny as Sennott's performance, and 3) the lighting; this has some of the best and most innovative lighting I've seen in a long time, which is all the more impressive with like 75% of the movie being pitch dark except for some glowsticks and cell phone screens—half of American filmmakers seem to have lost the ability to film legibly in the dark, so I really, really appreciate a movie that is both dark and legible. All of that said, I'm not sure if I completely understand what's supposed to be adding up here by the end. Young people are narcissistically attached to their phones? Young people use the language of therapy and online social justice movements in hyperbolic and inappropriate ways? This seem like fairly obvious, even vapid social commentary to me, and the fact that I don't have a lot of access in real life to the brand of wealthy, liberal-arts-educated, extremely online Gen-Zers depicted here makes it hard for me to know where on the spectrum of satire this is supposed to land. Maybe I'm overthinking it and this is just a fun goof riffing on contemporary language and habits, but the ubiquitous trailer to this movie definitely advertised the film as some sort of treatise on The Youth, so I don't think I'm completely out of line asking, "What's the point?" Whatever the case, this was enjoyable enough on a moment-by-moment basis that I'm giving it a thumbs up, but I'm faintly skeptical. Grade: B

 

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
It's really hard to dislike a movie so affable and enthusiastic and silly, but it's also really hard to like a movie that is quite literally a Funny or Die video stretched to feature length. I knew going in that this was telling an intentionally fabricated version of Weird Al's biography (which is a good premise! I had hopes for this!), but I also kinda expected it to have some deeper cuts from the dude's career. The only featured songs are the exact ones you'd predict: "Eat It," "Another One Rides the Bus," "Amish Paradise," etc. Nothing even remotely off the beaten path. Not even "Albuquerque." Grade: C

 

 

Little Children (2006)
I've never really connected strongly with these suburban psycho-sexual ennui films, and this isn't really breaking new ground in that regard—it's basically American Beauty, but with a master's degree (which is at least a step up, considering that American Beauty is pretty sophomoric). This being directed by Todd Field, though, it's at least making some fairly interesting formal decisions, suffusing the whole thing in a sense of dread and paranoia rather than the usual emotional palate of these films, and the way it seemingly intentionally leans into but never quite commits to camp is certainly a choice that demands to be grappled with. The plot/acting end up going to some pretty questionable places by the end, though, and the bemused, voice-of-God narration is an abject disaster, and whatever interesting textures are here are swallowed by the rest. Grade: C+

 

Television

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (2022)
I love the idea of a horror anthology miniseries where every episode is done by a different director putting their unique stamp on the story. In practice, this basically lives and dies by the execution, and unfortunately, most of these episodes are pretty mediocre, even by people whose work I would otherwise be interested in, e.g. Ana Lily Amirpour and Jennifer Kent. That said, there are two unambiguous triumphs: "The Viewing," directed by Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy), which takes Cosmatos's '70s affectations and incredible eye for set design and applies them to a nightmare house party by a rich eccentric, and "The Autopsy," directed by David Prior (The Empty Man), which is a truly gross and terrifying account of a medical autopsy. "The Autopsy" in particular is just fantastic, easily the best episode in the series and one of the best visual media I ran across in 2022. Too bad the rest of the series couldn't hit that high. Grade: B-

 

Books

New Kid by Jerry Craft (2019)
I was excited to read the first graphic novel to win a Newbery Medal. However, I found the book mildly disappointing only in the sense that this feels like it's missing the connective tissue between big events that would pace the novel better and flesh out these characters a little more. The author apparently based this on his own experiences as a black student at a rich, predominantly white private school, and it definitely has a lot of the expected beats re: racial/class microaggressions and having trouble fitting in, so I don't want to be too critical if this truly is how he experienced it. But it just feels a little incomplete, especially as the book rushes toward its conclusion. More thoughts to come on the podcast my wife and I are doing about the Newbery Medal winners! Stay tuned! Grade: B-