Last year was a whopper of a year (I may post my gratitude/things-I-recall-with-fondness list from New Year's Eve at some point, or maybe it'll remain shrouded in mystery!!) but in the land of Pat, one major development was the glorious end of grad school. This came with a few perks (traveling to Japan without a laptop to inaugurate the era of "going somewhere without a looming sense of shirking responsibilities") but the one that rippled most thoroughly through the year was that I was finally able to start nibbling at the crumbs of culture again after about seven years of it being increasingly hard to set anxiety aside to, like, see a movie. Hooray for therapy and also materially changed circumstances!
After the jump, some movies (and maybe stray culture) I liked in 2019, a year that critics are calling "over"!
Moviefilms
Getting into theaters regularly this year was kind of a delight. (Shoutout Chicago's Arclight, Music Box, and Landmark Century for keeping it real!) Here's the five that are sticking with me in a big way.
1. Parasite. I don't know anybody who's meh on this movie, and I'm not saying anything original, but it's about as close to a shot-by-shot technically perfect movie as you can make, while being a lethally brutal and incisive study of class warfare (and failures of class solidarity at the bottom of the heap). It methodically makes you feel all the things, and then leaves you to sort out the ideas afterwards. I recently discovered that there are people who, like Choi Woo-shik, actually think the montage at the end of the film is "real" within the narrative - not just Ki-woo's fantasy, which speaks to how deeply ingrained the lie of class mobility has become in spite of brilliant allegories like this. Woof.
2. Little Women. While I think Parasite is top-to-bottom perfection of craft, this one did everything I ever want a movie to do emotionally and intellectually. Basically: I cried seven times? Coming in with no knowledge of the book or earlier adaptations, Gerwig's crosscutting approach worked near-perfectly for me, and her mastery of tone and environment is really stunning. The fact that this, like its source material, isn't more broadly being acclaimed is an indictment on our misogynistic culture. (See also: [waves vaguely at everything.]) A masterpiece in that rarest of terrains: art about fully-dimensional people working earnestly to be, and to do, good. I loved this with all my heart.
3. Cats. I may not have had more fun in a movie theater this year than seeing this with the right group of people. There was never going to be a "good" Cats movie, and so we all should be grateful they made the most Cats movie. Only two actual complaints (wirework choreography jars with actual - impressive! - dancing; also, they should never have tried to beef up the "plot") because everything else that goes wrong goes wrong in the most outlandish, no-holds-barred way possible. Movies like this mostly get sanded down to death by the Disneys of the world, so the fact that something this spectacularly unhinged could escape intact is a genuine, unironic triumph. I genuinely enjoyed it for all its incoherence and wrongness. It should live forever as a midnight movie (you can feel that Rocky Horror/The Room energy even now, so hopefully it makes the leap quickly).
4. The Lighthouse. I do not recommend this movie! And I never
need to see it again! But the movie was very effective at having its
intended effect on an audience ("make people feel uncomfortable and insane") and it is a
crime of the highest order that Willem "God among mortals" Dafoe is not
on the fast-track to an Oscar for his jawdropping work here. "You liked
me lobster!" "Why'd you have to spill yer beans."
5. A Hidden Life. Terence Malick, man. You're either in or out at this point, and you know (a) exactly what you're going to get and (b) whether you love it or hate it when you hear that he's made a movie about a religious objector in Nazi Austria. It had a kind of slow power on me. There's something grief-stricken that emanates from the usual Malickian ecstasy at the natural world, paired with the moral clarity of Franz Jägerstätter, and a real "stations of the cross" vibe to how slowly the inevitable occurs once he realizes the evil that has taken root in his community. But it did weigh on me, heavily, and whether or not it's just because the film's moral clarity aligns with exactly my point of white-hot rage in the era of Christians-voting-for-Trump, it's not leaving my brain any time soon.
Also really dug: Knives Out, which was both fun and (fleetingly) pointed, with a great final shot and a solid ensemble cast in a year of great ensembles. 63 Up, Michael Apted's latest and possibly last update on his gang of 7-year-olds, with the hardest-hitting reminders of what life does to a person.
Specifically hated: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or, Tarantino is incapable of making a movie that isn't gasoline-soaked with misogyny. Some brilliant filmmaking sequences in pursuit of just the ugliest ideas; it's never been clearer that Sally Menke was the genius who elevated QT's work to the level of art. Yesterday, which takes a basically can't-lose premise and refuses to do anything with it, up to and including "rudimentary romcom 101 narrative competence" from the dude who supposedly mastered the genre. No thank you. And Star Wars, about which: ugh. What a grueling checklist of a movie, wasting the best cast the franchise has ever had while catering to the worst kinds of online bullies. I wish I had paid for Cats a second time instead.
Not technically a movie but I still haven't gotten good enough at watching TV to have enough TV shows to say anything meaningful except that: Fleabag is everything it's cracked up to be and more. I'm mad that I didn't hear about S1 when it premiered (granted that I was out of the country whatever) because the whole thing, all twelve episodes, is superb. What could be a gimmick turns out to be an unbelievably powerful and evolving aesthetic choice, and man do I love every beat of that story, and every inch of Waller-Bridge's performance. And everybody else's. Fleabag's so good. Fleabag for president.
Bonus culture: not all art happens in movies! Some is on headphones
Music obsessions of 2019
I continue to love Lucius, spinning their hypnotic cover of "Ghosting" more than just about any other this year. Darlingside balances out my propulsive indie folk ticket, keeping their earlier work heavily in rotation.
As for new albums, I spent a lot of time in the headspace of Father of the Bride by Vampire Weekend ("This Life" is a masterpiece of the "peppy songs with sour messages" genre), Chance's The Big Day ("Let's Go On the Run" is my jam, notwithstanding its petering-out ending), Andrew Bird's My Finest Work Yet (which feels tied to our moment more than his earlier work has) and like everybody else on the planet listened to a ton of Lizzo even as I insisted on singing "Creep" over "Jerome" every single time. St. Paul & the Broken Bones was a new-to-me group this year whose Sea of Noise underscored a lot. And the various recorded iterations of Hadestown (Broadway-produced by a pal, who knew!) meant a lot of listening to "Wait for Me."
Books: The Movies of Paper!
Still ramping up on reading for pleasure, but Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Andrew Sean Greer's Less were probably the two (early!) highlights of new-to-me reading, with a very welcome catching up on Ishiguro, whose work should probably be read by everybody? Bonus "this is very old why am I just now getting to it" shoutout to A.S. Byatt's expansive and heartbreaking The Children's Book. I never really worry about catching books as they come out the way I do with music and movies. Why is that?
There's a lot of theatre and gallery art to be reckoned with on top of these scattered thoughts, but guess what I'm late to get to the gym (madness) so you may never know of it! Stick around for LA videos/rambling as I scramble to keep this blog at least a LITTLE less than a year behind the events I'm recounting! Aroo! Happy 2020!
