Favorite Movies of 2023

I don't have a lot to say here, so I'll make it very brief. These are my favorite movies! I've (obviously) not been doing reviews on the blog this past year, but I am still updating my Letterboxd, so when it says "Read original review," it's linking to that.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! Feel free to share your own favorites!

Favorite Movies

1. May December
Stunning, unclassifiable cinema. I've liked a lot of what Todd Haynes has done in the 21st century, but the slipperiness of this film feels like a return to the complex semiotics he was playing with in his '90s work.

[Read original review]

2. The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki came out of retirement not just to make the best animated movie of the year and a dense, self-reflexive meditation on loss and creation but also to make sure that people remember that his movies can pivot from cute magical hijinks to grim nightmare fantasies full of bird poop and blood. The gooey-ness of Miyakazi films is underappreciated, but it's front and center here. I guess that might sound off-putting, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't enjoy this movie on some level, so don't knock it until you've tried it.

[Read original review]

3. Knock at the Cabin
Speaking of not knocking (hahaaa) until you try it, I feel like I still encounter a lot of people who still have not forgiven M. Night Shyamalan for his wilderness period. Those people are missing out majorly. Without expending a lot of energy, you could probably convince me to say that this is the best film of his career. Obviously the best performance of Dave Bautista's career.

[Read original review]

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Replicates the slow, horrific march to the grave that Scorsese achieved in The Irishman, only this time, it's a genocide. I'm very much into this late-style Scorsese.

[Read original review]

5. Afire
People don't seem to like this one as much as the previous few Christian Petzold movies, and it certainly doesn't have the mythic, political overtures as, say, Transit, but in place of that, it is as vicious a character piece as he's ever done.

[Read original review]

6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The fact that this flopped at the box office is so incredibly depressing to me. This should be a family film instant classic; Rachel McAdams should be getting an Oscar; Kelly Fremon Craig should be getting Greta Gerwig money, acclaim, and household name status. I suppose prospects of it finding an audience streaming on [checks notes] Starz is unlikely, but I'm hoping.

[Read original review]

7. You Hurt My Feelings
Most of the time with Nicole Holofcener, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's what's nice about it. Good to see that her partnership with Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to bear fruit. Bonus points for tunneling into some very specific anxieties of mine this time around.

[Read original review]

8. The Holdovers
I thought for sure after the nostalgia-baiting trailer and opening stylistic pastiche that I would find this too cute, but no, it's very good! Sure to be a new sad-sack Christmas classic. It will probably be up for all sorts of awards, and I can get behind that.

[Read original review]

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most technically and aesthetically adventurous mainstream American animated movie in years, more so than the first one by a considerable margin, and that alone was probably enough to land this in my top 10. On top of that, though, I was actually into the story, and while I am entirely prepared to eat crow if the sequel resolves all of the threads in this movie with a wet fart, for now, I am actually excited to see what happens next.

[Read original review]

10. Godzilla Minus One
In addition to just being a very entertaining monster movie, I want to highlight how great the design and effects are on Godzilla himself (itself? themself?): maintaining the lovably bulgy proportions of the old "dude in a rubber suit" Godzillas while also containing the scale and menace that CG can provide. The best effects of any effects-driven movie I saw this year, which should put American studios to shame.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: BlackBerry—In the year of the "brand biopic," this caustic take on a brand doomed to fail stood out. Great performances all around, too: Glenn Howerton just screams the whole movie, and it is very watchable.

Would Have Been in the Top 10 If It Were Actually a Feature Film: That collection of shorts adapting Roald Dahl that Wes Anderson did for Netflix—I've enjoyed Wes Anderson's output of the past decade even as he has divided some of his fans while tunneling deeper and deeper into the hermeticism of his aesthetic. However, this is easily his best work since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel. An utter delight, and the "it's a stage play, but also an audiobook" format proves surprisingly flexible for telling four very different stories.

Best Documentary: In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50—A compelling rumination on mortality and Robert Fripp's dictatorial regime within the band. Terrific music, of course.

Best Action: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One—I mean, it's a new Mission: Impossible movie, so of course. There also wasn't a ton of competition. A very limp year for American action films.

Best Action Sequence: John Wick: Chapter 4—That said, I gotta give props to John Wick fighting his way up that staircase (twice!) near the end of this entirely too-long series finale. For as much as Cruise gets all the Keaton comparisons (mostly valid), that one sequence feels like the strongest evocation of silent comedy I saw in a mainstream American film this year. The train crash scene in Dead Reckoning comes at a close second, though.

Movie I Laughed Most Watching: Bottoms—This bizarro-world high school comedy is something of a return to the '90s/2000s heyday of the spoof movie, e.g. Not Another Teen Movie, though rather than parody anything specific, Bottoms instead just goes for the weird and the heightened. It doesn't all work, but most of it does.

Best Joke: Barbie—Ken mansplaining Pavement to Barbie is probably only funny for the very narrow swatch of boring, approaching-middle-age men that I consider myself a part of, but this was a big moment for us.

More People Should Talk About This One: The Starling Girl—Evokes its Christian fundamentalist milieu with more accuracy than anything I've ever seen in a movie even approaching mainstream, and while for me that alone would be enough to rush out to see this film, it also does a terrific job telling a very human story that I found riveting. Maybe the contours of this movie just appeal to me more than most people, but I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: Infinity Pool—In what may become an annual fixture of this list (MaXXXine may come out this year!), I have to shout out Mia Goth's performance here, which is far and away the best thing about Infinity Pool (a movie I enjoyed otherwise, I should stress). For Your Consideration: Mia Goth draped across the hood of a car, shouting the protagonist's name while reading negative reviews of his ill-begotten novel.

Best Audience Con: Skinamarink—Basically an avant-garde film marketed as a horror film, and it somehow made $2.1 million! I liked it, for what it's worth, but mostly, I respect the audacity.

Best Vibes: Rye Lane—A very fun, frothy rom-com with a tremendous sense of place, style, and music. Just a good time overall, I felt good watching it, and I have nothing but good memories about it.

Most Vibes: Enys Men—I almost gave this the "best" vibes award, but I don't think "best" is the best way to describe something that feels this mysterious and at-times threatening. Still, it's unparalleled in the thick atmosphere it creates. Good thing, too, because that's basically all it does.

"Not Her Best, But I Appreciate That She's Still Doing Her Thing" Award: Showing Up—Every Kelly Reichardt movie feels like a miracle for existing, especially in a film economy that doesn't make a lot of space (or funding) for these kind of without-a-marketing-hook pieces of gentle rumination.

"Good For Her" Award: Poor Things—I didn't love this as much as some people did, but Emma Stone did great work with out-of-left-field performances this year (see also: The Curse). Very interested to see what else she does now that she seems to be in her weirdo phase. Also, good for her character; seems like she had a great time.

"Good For Him" Award: Beau Is Afraid—Ari Aster, man, I think it's cool that you are comfortable enough to spend $35 million setting fire to all your good will you've earned so far. I genuinely respect that.

"Don't Know How to Work This In, But I Feel Like I Should Include This One" Award: No One Will Save You—Probably doomed to be forgotten as it lies buried on Hulu, but this is a very fun, exciting, clever alien invasion thriller.

Most Played in the Room Adjacent to Me: The Super Mario Bros. Movie—My son got majorly obsessed with Mario and Donkey Kong this year, so as soon as this got put on Netflix, it was curtains for my hopes of getting him into European arthouse cinema during his midday movie/rest time.

Worst Animated Movie of the Year: Nimona—Despite there being two animated movies in my top 10, this was a particularly bad year for feature-film animation, and this was the worst of the worst that I saw (consider yourself lucky, Disney's Wish). Thoroughly irritating, and it looks bad.

Worst Movie of the Year: Your Place or Mine—Probably not actually the worst movie of the year, but I watch so few streaming-dump "content" movies that it feels pretty egregious when I do happen to sit through one.

Best Non-2023 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2023: Theorem—This film simply refused to leave my brain since I saw it in March. A bourgeois family has a sexual encounter with the divine and the spirals into oblivion: the story all of us Christians living a middle class American existence should be wrestling with.

Favorite Music of 2023

I'm back, baby!

Well, for this post and a year-end movie post, at least. In terms of this blog, the big thing about 2023 is that I stopped posting regularly—and it felt nice! Not that I didn't enjoy blogging every week for eight years, but as I alluded to in my year-end movie list last year, life has just become very full and busy for me over the past couple of years (in mostly good ways), and it's been something of a relief not to have the constant pressure to keep a weekly blog deadline; I honestly don't think I realized how strong that pressure was, and going on hiatus felt like when you suddenly realize you've been holding your breath and let it out in a rush. So speaking of holding breath, I wouldn't hold yours for the grand return of the weekly mini-reviews posts.

Anyway, y'all came here for music, not for a rehash of the "I'm so busy" jig that all adults spiral into if you ask them how things are going. So: music! 2023 was a weird year for me. More than any other year I can remember, I had a hard time finding music that I loved. My usual genre blind spots have become blinder than ever (I have literally zero idea what is going on in metal, and I have mostly bounced off most of the biggest hip-hop acts of the year, though based on commercial performance [dubious, but still], I'm not the only one struggling to connect with contemporary hip-hop), and the Top 40's very chaotic, TikTok-influenced hodge-podge yielded nothing that grabbed me. I believe this is what academics call Getting Old. That said, even within my home-base genres of rock and jazz, it was harder for me to find music that I was passionate about. Part of this certainly has to do with the increasingly fractured and marginal place listening to new music has in my life because of all the other demands that pull at my attention—again, I invoke Getting Old. I dunno; my "to-listen" list is longer than ever this year, so it's not as if I didn't have options. I'm confident that there are albums out there that I haven't given much time to that would have had a good chance to make my top 10 (for example: Saved! by the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, née Lingua Ignota), so maybe I just need to change my habits.

Whatever the case, enough reflection. There was still plenty of good music this year, so let's get on with it. I come not to bury 2023 but to praise it!

As always, I'd love to hear what music y'all readers (if you're still out there!) enjoyed this year! I view this as the beginning of a conversation—a semicolon rather than a period, if I can get English-teacher-y. Let me know what I'm missing!

Favorite Albums:

1. Sufjan Stevens: Javelin
Sufjan's most straightforward and accessible songwriting in quite some time, which might seem like it would be an issue for someone like me who definitely prefers Weird Sufjan. And initially, I was a little underwhelmed: "Carrie & Lowell by way of Illinois" was my initial, slightly disappointed reaction, but this grew in my estimation with each listen until here it is as my favorite of the year. The thing about straightforward, accessible songwriting is that it is straightforward and accessible, even for a pretentious curmudgeon like me, and I became bowled over at the beauty and clarity of this music. Plus, magic of all magic, he was able to turn "There's a World," probably the worst track off Neil Young's Harvest, into something delicate and gorgeous.

2. Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer & Shahzad Ismaily: Love in Exile
This isn't the kind of music people mean when they talk about ambient jazz, but it's the descriptor that comes most readily to mind when I try to describe this album: a 72-minute exploration of space and mood, Arooj Aftab's meditative vocals weaving in and out of the soundscapes laid down by Vijay Iyer's spare but precise piano and Shahzad Ismaily's Moog. I'm fairly familiar with Iyer's output and a little with Aftab's, but Ismaily' is entirely new to me, and he's a quiet revelation on here. Hypnotic music. Perfect in its own cosmic way.

3. Emergency Group: Inspection of Cruelty
Not a lot to explaining why I like this: it sounds like the early goings of electric jazz, especially Miles Davis c. In a Silent Way or A Tribute to Jack Johnson or maybe Tony Williams's Emergency!—aka some of my favorite music of all time. Probably my most-listened-to album of the year if I were able to keep those metrics. It just goes down so groovily and easily.

4. Kate NV: WOW
I don't know if this makes sense to anyone else, but this album sounds like Adventure Time music to me. I don't know what else to say.

5. more eaze: Eternity
Bandcamp (and, I suppose by extension, more eaze herself) classifies this as a "track," but it's 43 minutes long, so I declare an album. It's a beautiful piece of longform electronica that reminds me of early The Orb in its playfulness.

6. JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: SCARING THE HOES
About as much fun as you'd imagine a collaboration between these two being, i.e. very. Riding a line between uproarious and vaguely disquieting while spinning some ridiculous samples, these two are a match made in alt-rap heaven. And you really beat the delirious rhymes: "Let me tell you what I'm gonna do / Tell no lies, just tell your truth / I'm a big dog like Marmaduke / Park itself when I come through." Bespoke slant rhymes from above. Great album art.

7. Mandy, Indiana: i've seen a way
The debut album from this experimental electronica band is surprisingly diverse, pinging around from synth-core to ambient to industrial to more openly club-y material, but for as divergent as some of these sounds can be, there's a cohesive sense of space and tone that makes this feel like a unified vision of eclecticism rather than just scattershot pastiche.

8. Lonnie Holley: Oh Me Oh My
I wish it hadn't taken Michael Stipe and Bon Iver being on one of his albums for Lonnie Holley to get on my radar, but better late than never, right? He's a bona-fide Southern weirdo in a way that appeals to me quite a bit, somehow very earthy and material while also coming across as a kind of cosmic mystic. Very much my speed.

9. Fever Ray: Radical Romantics
Not a particularly surprising album from Fever Ray, but still good. Also, it has some of the best worst cover art of the year.

10. Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I'm a very fair-weather Lana fan, but the weather turned out to be very fair this year. The title track and (especially) "A&W" are two of her best songs, and the rest of the album is very strong, too—except for the "Judah Smith Interlude," which may be my most-skipped track of the year.

Great 2023 Songs Not On These Albums:

Chief Adjuah: "Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning"—The pivot Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) made in his LP this year kind of threw me: there's a continuity in leaving spiritual jazz for West-African-inflected folk music that makes sense in retrospect (the connection between West Africa and New Orleans is one that Adjuah himself made very clear in his promotion of the record), but it's a left turn I certainly didn't see coming. Anyway, cool and interesting album, but one that only really coalesced into something I loved in its loping 15-minute title track, a more stripped back and somber song than many of the other compositions, with Adjuah intoning like a prophet over some picked string instrument (the liner notes aren't very specific) and Weedie Braimah's insistent, driving percussion.

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: "First Peoples"—I sometimes find what Idris Ackamoor does a little corny, but when he and the Pyramids hit, they hit. Exhibit A: this track, winding higher and higher around its reedy riff.

jamie branch: "burning grey"—RIP to weird jazz great jamie branch. Glad the third Fly or Die came together anyway. This track in particular rips.

Janelle Monáe: "Champagne Shit"—I could have picked any number of tracks from The Age of Pleasure, but I picked this one.

PJ Harvey: "The Nether-edge"—I wasn't a huge fan of the new PJ Harvey album, but this slinky, pulsing track lodged itself deep inside my brain and wouldn't leave.

Kieran Hebden & William Tyler: "Darkness, Darkness"—The "cosmic folk" great William Tyler working with Four Tet. I mean.

Octo Octa: "Late Night Love"—Kind of the consensus "this is the electronic dance track from this year that all the critics are into," and I dunno, critics can be right.

on4word: "Jigsaw Falling Into Place"—This is perilously close to a meme instead of real music, and the popularity of an album that recreated Radiohead's In Rainbows exclusively using samples from N64 games turned what was already a niche trend into a full-blown avalanche of imitators. But it's really good! Especially this song, which feels like boss music or maybe a really intense level where you have to outrun a robot while doing tricky platforming or something.

The Smile: "Bending Hectic"—And speaking of Radiohead, if we're not ever going to get a real new Radiohead album, I'll have to keep banging the drum for the almost Radiohead releases. When "Bending Hectic" changes gears, it thunders.

Spoon: "Sugar Babies"—Spoon just don't miss, and somehow it always sounds like something they just threw together in an hour. Surely false. Love the infectious shuffle of this one.

Xiu Xiu: "For M."—The moment when Xiu Xiu's album of already pitch-black sludge and terror pushes itself so far that it turns nearly ambient, and it's kind of beautiful.

Young Fathers: "I Saw"—I don't really understand what Young Fathers' whole deal is, and maybe that's their deal? The beginning of this song sounds furious, spitting out lyrics and that Viking-drum rock beat like venom, but then it morphs into something much sunnier and more anthemic? I can't parse it, but it's good.

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:

Andrew Swafford: Sonnets—My buddy Andrew 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+