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2020 – Stick a fork in it!

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.22″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.25″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.6.6″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″]This was the year of realizing all politics is local. Wash your hands, wear a mask, call off trips to see family and friends—here I am engaging in very global issues at a tiny, in-my-own-house level. (Of course navigating life in a pandemic shouldn’t be political, but here we are.)

A lot of my favorite things this year reflected that attitude. Fiction sort of failed everyone this year. The Queen’s Gambit was about as entertaining as flipping through an old JC Penny catalog on a Sunday (which is to say, somewhat fun, nice fashion), but nowhere near as entertaining as playing actual chess. Playing chess with strangers around the world on the Chess.com app was the most entertaining video game I played this year—and this was the year I cracked open Skyrim again and let is suck away my stuck-at-home time.

Actually that’s not quite true. The best video game I played this year was Super Mario Odyssey, which was just pure art and fun. This year was also the Year of Video Games for me and nothing I played was more clever, entertaining, and creatively admirable than Odyssey. (Praising Mario and chess—didn’t expect to be doing this at the start of this year!)

Continuing my veering away from fiction, I’ve mostly been reading Karl Ove Knausgård. A Death In The Family, the first volume in his My Struggle series, is my favorite book of the year and I’m about halfway through the next volume now. I started reading him cautiously, then obsessively once the book’s strange hold took over me.

Everything that’s been said about Knausgård is true: his books can read sometimes like blog posts, he’s very self-indulgent and esoteric, and there’s a real guy-in-your-MFA-class connotation with his books that had put me off reading him for so long. But all that’s just the zeitgeist. When you read him, his book’s strange spell builds slowly. This is, after all, just this guy’s life, cut open and dissected, but then you start to realise that, no, seriously, this is this guy’s life. When he writes about his childhood, his own children, his failings, his desires, he does so without any varnish and I’ve never read anything like it before. He presents his life with so much intimated detail that I found myself remembering moments from my own childhood while reading, feeling intense nostalgia, and I think that’s evidence alone that he’s doing something really extraordinary.

More non-fiction… my favorite movies of the year are Boys State and Collective. Both are fly-on-the-wall documentaries, presented with hardly any narrative interference. Boys State follows high schoolers at a mock-government summer camp where they campaign and debate to create a representative government. It’s heartbreaking and hilarious watching the kids succumb to the ills of populism and cosmetic politics. But there’s also quiet triumphs as you see their political conscience start to form in real time. It makes you hopeful for the future. Also scared.

Collective follows a team of Romanian journalists as they uncover the criminal negligence in the aftermath of a 2015 nightclub fire. 27 people died in the actual fire, but 37 more died in the following days due to a corrupt healthcare system. It’s difficult to watch, particularly a seconds-long clip shot undercover by a doctor exposing the level of deprivation in a hospital. Whole arms of government collapse and rebuild during the filming and there’s glimmers of hope there. Just barely.

So that was my 2020. I can already tell you that 2021 is going to be a whole lot better. 🥰[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

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How I spent my summer lockdown

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.22″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.25″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.6.6″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″]It’s been about six months of quar. Are we still calling it quar? The terminology seems to change as fast as the pandemic spreads. Now it doesn’t feel quite as esoteric to call it COVID as it once did. Saying coronavirus is a mouthful. Saying “the coron” (I think I’m the only one saying that) sounds more and more immature. But at the same time – why does it matter? Why are we obsessed with eulogising things before we’ve reached a safe enough distance to turn around and look at things? Hey and also, while I’m at it, why are all the world leaders who’ve failed in the most catastrophic ways the ones given the most media attention? 

(Gosh blogging really did die off once everyone decided to sound like a UN observer on the internet and I can’t say I’m not guilty of it.)

So lockdown. I went through all the normal phases as everyone else. The bouts of self-censorship: saying first “I know there’s people suffering in much worse ways than me but I’m mad that my Norwegian cruise got cancelled.” Then throwing all cordialities to the wind and straight up complaining about my cancelled Norwegian cruise and my cancelled Tenerife trip and the concerts and lectures I had booked throughout 2020. Lectures! I became gross like everyone else. Grouchy hibernation. 

I bought a Nintendo. I baked bread once. I jogged and jump roped. I bought plants. Sometimes it’s better to just do these things and tune everybody else out. I spent more time at the park than at home to the point where I’ve now memorized different dogs and their schedules — not their owners, just the dogs. And also birds — promptly at seven o’clock every night, swarms of green parakeets fly down my street. 

Other things I’ve been reading/watching/listening/doing:

Here’s a slice of the freewheeling, carefree, brain-numbing playlist I’ve been relying on lately. Very baseline pop, very disco, very gay. Lots of 4-count beats, synths, and also Lana Del Rey (still on my Lana kick). Also sidenote: disco revival seems to be the popular thing to call the new Gaga/Dua/whatever but I’m not so sure. But also I’d be interested to see how much of that chatter drives people to queen Donna Summer as it rightfully should! Anyway, it’s all the kind of music that makes me thing “Global unrest? What global unrest?” 

More coronavirus-specific things: Animal Crossing, Fiona Apple’s new album, and Florence Pugh’s Instagram cooking stories. But those have all gone untouched for months now and already feel like relics from some bygone era. Time passing feels bizarre, etc. 

More recently: 

  • Watching old clips of Regis Phillbin on Letterman 
  • Enjoying the kind of Netflix fodder I never thought I would: Dark, Into the Night, Masterchef, Floor Is Lava, and of course Terrace House
  • Did a rewatch of Please Like Me and I think I have to say it’s one of the best shows ever made? It’s really just a sweet and perfect little thing. 
  • Finding new favorite Alice Munro short stories like “Apples and Oranges” but specifically the part where she describes sitting out in a backyard on a summer night and listening to the noises of the neighborhood.
  • Also reading The Vanishing Half, LaRose, Kafka on the Shore (reread), and Middlemarch on and off. Enjoying all of them! 
  • Replaying Skyrim and just overall becoming the do-nothing video game slug I was born to be. 
  • Watching buses drive by with old sun-stained adverts for The Invisible Man and Trolls World Tour and The Quiet Place Part II and wondering if these are just going to be the only movies that ever existed in the history of the human race.
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A diet rich in rich

The whole world seems to be having second thoughts about capitalism’s current amalgamation and we’re getting itchy. The art that’s coming out of that errr, conversation, is really great and I’ve been overindulging in all of the eat-the-rich narratives on offer, the first and most obvious one being Parasite of course, which I loved. The fact that a movie like it has reached the level of pop culture woo-hooing that it has is a mighty testament to everyone’s overall fed-upness with grrrr, just not having enough money! basically. (I mean, that’s the shallow, easy emotion the movie exploits of course, but the larger conversation surrounds whom are the parasites; or are we all parasites; or is capitalism the a parasite; etc.). Outside of that lens, the movie was still the most properly, straightforwardly entertaining movie I’ve seen in ages.

Treading in darker territory is the film Atlantics, which I saw… maybe just a few days before Parasite? Making for a strong double-bill. Atlantics is about a woman in Senegal whose boyfriend joins a migrant ship bound for Spain just days before she is to enter into an arranged marriage with a wealthy property developer. I knew nothing about the plot other than that initial premise and I think that’s really the ideal situation to be in before seeing the film—but needless to say, surprising events occur! The film tackles the issue of blame and consequence at its most basic, human-to-human level, and does so in a way that is so literal but still inventive and unpredictable. 

I think one of the main furies we experience out here in capitalist 2020 is to whom do we funnel our rage. Yes, we want to stop factory farming, fast fashion, plastic waste, etc. but who do we need to yell at to make it all go away? There’s a crushing sense of helplessness that settles in, once you blast through the rage embedded within all the Made In China existential blame shifting—because ultimately there is no one single person. You could track down the highest-up of the higher-ups and they’d still tell you to check with reception because that’s not his department. What Atlantics does so perfectly and fearlessly is it creates a physical manifestation of that rage. In the conclusion of the film, a single individual is forced to reconcile with and take responsibility for abstract global turmoil, and it’s a profound visual moment. Parasite has its own visceral, almost slap-happy opening of that valve, where that rage is let loose, but Atlantics does do in a much more mournful, worldwide wave. There’s more gravity to it. 

Then on the theater route (and also on that same slap-happy route as Parasite), is the new (adapted) play The Visit, which I saw this past weekend at the National Theatre.

Eh.

It was good! It was actually really good, not as best as it could be, but good. Leslie Manville was an absolute stunner, superstar, diva, amazing of course as she should be. The staging was phenomenal (HOW that stage is so massive always boggles my mind). She plays a billionaire who comes to a dying town, promising its residents wealth if they do one thing for her. And yes that one thing is morally compromising and yes the play spends the next three hours figuring out what decision to make, of course. (First half is perfect, then progressively bad, almost boring unfortunately, but I suppose there’s something about sticking to the source material that can be restricting for an adaptation.)

It’s another story of that same capitalist struggle. (And also a cautionary tale about listening to billionaire saviors, hmm…) The ending left me unsatisfied because it didn’t address the very obvious theme at hand: consequence and compensation. Just like Parasite, there’s a simmering rage that runs throughout it, and the audience, just like the townspeople in the play, get stuck with a jittery urge to find a place for their blame. Who is to blame? Who needs to take responsibility? Only Atlantics is bold enough to not only give physical representation to that feeling, but give an actual answer.

There’s violent death throughout Parasite, Atlantics, and The Visit, of course. The weight of the deaths feels different in each. In Parasite, its cathartic, alleviating, grim; filled with rage, but with a hint of the silly. In The Visit, it’s inevitable, logical, premeditated, procedural. But in Atlantics, it’s etched into every character. The consequences of not just the global, abstract problem are made manifest, but also we are given a resolution to those consequences, and there is and assigned weight to every action. The degree of accountability to which actual human individuals will some day, in one way or another, be held to, is precisely, mathematically demonstrated. There are sequences and images in Atlantics that I’ll never get out of my head solely because of that power they have and that’s why, gosh, I think it’s better than Parasite I guess!

Anyway, bye.

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My Not-the-Oscars Oscars

And the not-the-Oscars Oscars go to… (winners in bold)

Best Supporting Actor:
Steven Yeun, Burning 
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Jake Johnson, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Best Supporting Actress:
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite
Tilda Swinton, Suspiria
Christine Baranski, Mama Mia! Here We Go Again
Jennifer Garner, Love Simon

Best Cat:
Jersey the cat, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Boil the cat, Burning

Best performance by an actress who already won an Oscar for La La Land but shouldn’t have and so they’ve finally earned their Oscar now:
Emma Stone, The Favourite 

Best Actor:
Ben Foster, Leave No Trace
Yoo Ah-in, Burning
Ethan Hawk, First Reformed 

Best Actress:
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Toni Collette, Hereditary
Dakota Johnson, Suspiria
Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me

Best performance by an actress doing exactly what she’s supposed to be doing so expertly it’s more akin to watching an operatic drag performance:
Bryce Dallas Howard, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Best Picture:
Mama Mia! Here We Go Again
Suspiria
The Favourite
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Movies really kicked into gear last year and did what they were supposed to do, namely confront or comfort. Some of my favorite films of 2018 were the most confrontational (Suspiria and Burning). They demanded something from me as a viewer and were shocking with what they did with it once they had it, though some were less successful than others (Roma and First Reformed). But more importantly, movies were really MOVIES this year. They entertained with with a zest and a joy as if they knew it was 2018 and thus, for as truly grim as parts of the year were, their distractions needed to be tenfold.

Surprisingly, the year’s big requisite Star Panther Wars Super Mary Poppins Avengers bonanzas were empty calories, and the popcorn flicks no one really expected to swoop in really swooped with mathematically perfected pizzazz. I walked out of Mama Mia 2 on a cloud, plain and simple. That was a movie just as calculated and honed as Suspiria and The Favourite in being exactly what it wanted to be, completely assured. That was a movie that was almost confrontationally absurd in the way it yanked me out of 2018’s dastard headlines for two hours of unselfconscious, snark-free singing and dancing and NOTHING ELSE. The bravery of NOTHING ELSE. Bravo.

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Guadagnino vs. Kusama, or not

I went and saw Suspiria at 9:45 in the morning at an empty movie theatre on a cold, sunless Friday, which proved to be optimal viewing conditions for the film. Luckily three more people (all of them on their own, like me) trickled into the theatre by the time the movie started so I wasn’t completely alone while being terrorized for the next two and a half hours.

Suspiria is about a lot of things. Small town girl comes to divided Berlin to join a modern dance troupe led by sinister, bloody witches. The original, whose plot it loosely follows, is more concerned with keeping an electric tone and gonzo style, while this homage, directed by Luca Guadagnino, feels more concerned with where and how those elements fit in the world today, or if they fit at all. It’s not a horror film in the traditional sense, where gray and dread harbor thrilling menace, instead, it’s a quieter, growing sense of permanent doom. The classic thrills are there, but they’re less high voltage and more so a worsening, neverending mania.

It gives you a lot to chew on—and any moment of reflection is sharply interrupted by a new horrific turn of the plot, leaving you permanently unsettled. It made me think about ritual and rebirth; reinvention and how it, for all its bloody tax and strain, can sometimes be a setback rather than a step forward. Madame Le Blanc, played by Tilda Swinton, is expertly precise and a commander of the occult for nearly the entire film, until a single lingering doubt brings about her demise. No one can be so completely sure of their self, we’re told.

After the movie, I wandered around London, which looks like the actual end of the world in November, and ended up at the Victoria Miro gallery in Shoreditch. I went inside and stumbled into a Yayoi Kusama exhibit—which, the more I think about it, the more I realize I think I accidentally snuck into? Checking the gallery’s website now I see that they were issuing timed entry tickets, which I definitely did not have, and I kind of ended up entering the building via a backdoor because I couldn’t figure out where the front door was?

Anyway, that’s besides the point. The point is that I had unwittingly wandered into a veritable Instagram hive. I saw the dot paintings and saw the pumpkins and thought the same “I could have made that” thoughts that everyone else thinks while looking at them and tried to break past that into the greater messaging Kusama’s trying to say about proliferation, narcissism, and commerce and whether she’s tearing them down or merely perpetuating them—but I couldn’t.

Suddenly these giant pumpkins were monoliths of dread—something I wanted to shun out of defiance, but knew I wouldn’t be able to get away from or justify my own theory against them. I felt like Susie in Suspria—in over my head against a powerful authority figure, but also completely absorbed by it.

I went to the exit (which was actually the entrance because I had done the whole show in reverse!) but not before I made one last stop at one of Kusama’s signature infinity rooms they had jerry-rigged (and I mean jerry-rigged) upstairs in an attic space above the main floor.

This was the pièce de résistance of the exhibit and of my own personal experience with the show, even though I never actually went in the infinity room. I went up the creaky stairs to the dim attic and was met with a line of about a hundred people—most of them around my age, the Shoreditch-set, slightly vampiric in energy—and I turned right back around. On my way out of the gallery I bumped into a mildly D-list YouTube celebrity and the mark the whole experience had made on my was solidified. Like a polka dot.

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Summer Movies in Winter

I saw Lady Bird and Black Panther this weekend and what a bad pairing that was! (Never thought about the very similar titles though, which has me too intrigued than necessary.) They were both great movies—a solid B+ to both (B+ being solidly above average) if I had any sense of cinema scorekeeping—but also, I haven’t thought about either one since. I would like to think about them still. I would like to have a scene or an image pop in my head and remind me of how great the show was, but there’s nothing there.

Black Panther suffers from the usual Disney/Marvel toothpaste packaging. The fact that it can rise above that inevitable flaw of corporate overlordship is a testament to how it’s the best Marvel movie to date—but it’s still a flaw that adds to its forgetability. The message of the movie, the performances, the directing, all of it was top notch and especially good for a superhero movie, but then there’s all that other fluff (the particularly well-framed Lexus, the detour to South Korea that felt like it was decided upon by a committee) that doesn’t contribute anything besides what fluff contributes, which is a strangely hollow bloating. So the actual movie is fantastic, it’s what Marvel/Disney insist on injecting into it that brings it down like all the others.

Then again, that’s just what a BLOCKBUSTER is I guess. But should it be? What would be so bad if Misney just handed the filmmaker a sack of cash without any strings attached, no sponsorships, product placements, ratings guidelines, test audiences to appease, even their incessantly Christian need to canonized everything together into a Universe™. Who cares if you need to show so-and-so doing something-or-other in this movie in order to build up to their upcoming appearance in this other movie when all it does is hamper everything else. I say, let those movies actually play with all the toys in the toy box, make a mess.

But anyway, Black Panther was good for all the reasons a movie is good and bad for all the reasons Misney has extraneously introduced into their movie-making.

But then here’s where I contradict myself because Lady Bird was practically the exact opposite from a BLOCKBUSTER and I found it equally unmemorable but for the exact opposite reasons: it was too real, too quiet, too meandering.

Can a movie be too real? Lady Bird was one of those fly-on-the-wall, slice-of-life movies like Boyhood where it commits to absolute realism and accuracy. Boyhood though, had the advent of a “gimmick” of sorts in terms of how it was filmed over the course of the main actor’s life, which made it stand apart. Lady Bird doesn’t have that, it just has its expert portrayal of reality, which makes for an all right movie—I saw myself and my family in more than one instance of the film—but still feels, again, hollow.

It reminded me of The Descendants, which is another movie committed to absolute realism and showing you exactly what this specific family goes through in exacting detail, where you walk away from the movie being impressed with everything, but eager to get away, as if you’ve been spying on someone’s life. These kinds of movies lure you in with their intimacy, but when they’re over you feel as miffed as if a stranger stopped you on the street and told you their live store, then disappeared without explanation.

Anyway. I’ve thought for a few minutes about writing a good closer that wraps all these ideas up nicely (something about how I need a movie that’s a perfect mix of Black Panther’s politics and fantasia with Lady Bird’s documentary eye) but then I remembered that uhhh, this is a blog and I can do whatever I want!

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Fav Moves o’ 17

When Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582 (*wikipedia-exhale of exhaustion*), did he envision all the BEST OF lists that would be churned out as early as November? I can’t think of anything more arbitrary (in every sense of the word) than the word BEST and using it almost like an expiration date. BEST MOVIES OF 2017. TO BE CONSUMED WITHIN 365 DAYS. Yum.

That being said, and in direct contradiction of the above paragraph’s stuck-up nose, here are my FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2017. I would say TOP 10 or TOP 5 or whatever, but I don’t know how many there will be yet, so I’ll let you know at the bottom.

(*begins*)

1: God’s Own Country

This was the best movie of the year, all the others can go home. Bye!

Kidding. But really, it’s the only movie I’ve seen this year that has stayed with me. When I was thinking about all the movies I saw this year, this was the first one that came to mind, and for a good few minutes, the only one I could think of. Every once in a while I’ll remember something from the movie – a specific scene, an image, one of its many subtle messages – and feel a little squeeze of how much I loved it. It’s the kind of movie that instantly claims an authority out of the space between knowing exactly what it wants to be and knowing exactly what you expect it to be, and commanding your attention, pulling you through images that each have their own gravity and, as far as I’m concerned, images that I’ve never seen before in my life (let alone on film), but ones I’ll remember forever. It helps that the directing is effortless, the scenery is gorgeous, the acting is without ego, and where there is little there is more and where there is more there is little, if that makes any sense.

And in context of this year’s gay cinema round-robin, what with Call Me By Your Name (which, in my opinion [see: blog, domain name] is a far inferior movie), God’s Own Country feels more accomplished, subversive, and politically relevant than anything else released this year. Right now, it can be viewed through a lens tinted (tainted?) with Brexit, Trump, and the nullifying of the self those two comet craters created this year, but I hope that years from now, I’ll be able to watch God’s Own Country again and feel it propel me through a whole new series of lessons and emotions, and with just as much dramatic intelligence as it does now.

2: The Party

Another movie that was just made good and lets you trust it all the way through – until the end, though, which is devastating only because it ends too soon. I could have done with one hour more, two hours more, three, just give me more, and I’ve never ever wanted a movie to be longer. It’s addictive. It helps that it’s one of those real-time, kitchen-table-dramas that I love, and could be just as good performed live on stage, but it’s not, and you get to be up close with Patricia Clarkson’s face and let it pinch and scold you all the way to the end. She has her own orbit.

There were other comedies I saw this year that I wish were more like The Party. Baby Driver comes to mind, maybe even Guardians of the Galaxy 2, but I don’t know how they could begin to fix themselves. Have more fun? Be more bonkers? The Party outdoes it all.

3: mother! and The Killing of a Sacred Deer

It’s a tie for these two. In both of them: Allegories galore. Gore galore. Madness teetering on drivel, flirting with pretension, but coming out on top in the end. If I had to choose one to see again, it would be mother!, and that’s mainly for Jennifer Lawrence, not for the riddle it’s trying too loudly to get you to guess. I like what both of these are trying to say with their darkness, but after The Killing of a Sacred Deer, or more specifically, when said allegorical sacred deer is quite literally killed at the end of the movie, I left the theatre wondering just how much you can justify using extreme violence to get your point across. On the other hand, I left mother! almost… admiring? the violence. Don’t quote me on that, no I did not admire the violence, but I admired the daftness (note: not the deftness) of it. Both of these movies are shouting into the wind and maybe, hopefully, there will be an expiration on the need to do that. But for now, let ‘er rip.

Other stuff:

Lots of disappointments this year. I’ve wanted to see the original Blade Runner since high school and I finally did the deed and rented it, then saw Blade Runner 2049 probably too soon after and it was all sort of an epic deflating. I spent the whole time wishing Robin Wright had been given Ryan Gosling’s part and wishing the story would zoom out better. It zooms out enough and does the right amount of world building, but just not in the right way. Whatever artistry was there (“Stick your hand in this beehive for a while, Ryan!”), was corrupted and muddy from the false-start.

The Beguiled was the second best thing I saw Nicole Kidman in this year, right after Big Little Lies, and before The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Top of the Lake.

Call Me By Your Name wasted a lot of space in my head but I’ll happily give Sufjan Stevens some coins whenever I can.

Everyone should have been fired from Murder on the Orient Express except for Judi Dench and Olivia Colman.

Crispy M&Ms mixed with popcorn are OK.