Recent viewing

I haven't yet watched a 2021 film, unless late 2020 releases unavailable in Canada until this year or 2020 festival entries with 2021 distribution count. 

But I have watched some good-to-great horror, or horror-adjacent, movies on Shudder (the best: Hagazussa, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, Don't Leave Home, The Love Witch) and also the profound and beautiful Ryuchi Sakamoto: Coda; re-watched The Lady Eve, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, An American Werewolf in London, The New World, A Hidden Life, A Hard Day's Night, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Manhunter; and finally got around to Fleabag, which is as good as any of those movies save for the two Malicks. 

 Remains of the Day

                 

It will be a real shame if The Father is largely remembered as a kind of footnote or trivia answer, inextricably associated with the oddly anticlimactic ending of an unconventional Oscars ceremony. Conversely, if its last-minute Oscar upset provokes more people to actually seek out and see Florian Zeller's brilliant, haunting (and genuinely terrifying) film, then perhaps it's for the best? And better still if they know as little as possible going in, or else expect something like a typical, histrionic "Oscar drama." 

I'll say no more for now (I plan to watch it again very soon...), except that Anthony Hopkins' lead turn is not only the year's best performance, but, without any hyperbole, one of the most powerful and indelible performances I've ever seen.  

Live in '95

LIVE from New York


Wow! Phoebe Bridgers just killed it on SNL!

Take My Breath Away

Augustinus redivivus

[Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), pictured in a sixth-century fresco, composing speeches for The Young Pope and Joe Biden.]

For purposes of comparison:

 Reading, Watching, Listening

–Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
–Barack Obama, A Promised Land
–Jason Lutes, Berlin
–Jessica Maier, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps

–Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

–Small Axe (Steve McQueen) 

–Terrified (Demián Rugna)

–The Queen's Gambit (Scott Frank) 

–Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki)

–Beau Travail (Claire Denis) 

–Sinéad O'Connor, The Lion and the Cobra + I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got

–The Cranberries, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? + No Need to Argue

–Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher

–Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B

–My "Best of Gillian Welch" playlist on Tidal

But I've got no time / to live this love


Cinema, television, however we might classify it –– in any event, the soundtrack for (by far) the most indelible scene on any screen-based platform this past year.

 Excellence 


It should not escape our attention or appreciation that CRJ's B-side-album toss-offs are better than most artists' lead-off singles, and this has been the case for nearly a decade. This is consistent excellence like Prince in the '80s, PJ Harvey in the '90s, Timbaland in the 2000s. Or maybe, for a more categorically apt comparison, Kyle Minogue's stellar run between Impossible Princess and Body Language.

Best of 2020

FILMS

01. Moving On (Yoon)
02. There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)
03. Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)

04. First Cow (Reichardt) 

05. Da 5 Bloods (Lee) 

06. Soul (Docter) 

07. Servants (Ostrochovsky)

08. Emma (De Wilde) 

09. My Rembrandt (Hoogendijk)

10. Days (Tsai)

PERFORMANCES

01. Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods

02. Pierfrancesco Favino, The Traitor

03. Paula Beer, Undine

04. Imogen Kogge, Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis

05. Pierfrancesco Favino, Hammamet 

06. Amanda Seyfried, Charles Dance, and Gary Oldman, Mank

07. Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

08. Choi Jung-woon, Moving On

09. Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Rylance, The Trial of the Chicago 7

10. Lee Kang-sheng, Days

ALBUMS
01. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
02. Morrissey, I am Not a Dog on a Chain
03. The Microphones in 2020

04. Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher

05. Chloe x Halle, Ungodly Hour

06. Kathleen Edwards, Total Freedom

07. Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B

08. Jessie Ware, What's Your Pleasure? 

09. Soccer Mommy, Color Theory

10. Selena Gomez, Rare

SINGLES 

01. Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion, "WAP"
02. Dua Lipa, "Levitating" 

03. Morrissey feat. Thelma Houston, "Bobby, Don't You Think They Know?"
04. Megan Thee Stallion, "Girls in the Hood"

05. Chloe x Halle, "Forgive Me" 

06. Dua Lipa, "Love Again" 

07. Phoebe Bridgers, "Kyoto"

08. Megan Thee Stallion feat. Beyoncé, "Savage Remix"

09. Stephen Malkmus, "Xian man" 

10. Dua Lipa, "Don't Start Now" 

We just watched this –– a perennial childhood favourite of mine –– and, I'm not gonna lie, it legitimately gave me goosebumps at times. 

Grace Jones! k.d. lang! Magic Johnson! Little Richard! Oprah! Charo! The Marine choir! 

(Thank god, he didn't invite a certain Manhattan real-estate developer...) 

Where the music don't stop for life

She was terrific on SNL last weekend, but this is better still. I also prefer these versions of Future Nostalgia's four best songs to their album forms. 

 A rebel without a clue

I am completely and totally enamoured of this song. 

You must got me fucked up


We saw Chloe x Halle open for Beyoncé and Jay-Z a few years ago. They were good. But I more or less forgot about them. Now, I can't stop listening to their album, Ungodly Hour. In certain respects, it reminds me of Destiny's Child crossed with En Vogue, but the production and some of the unusual melodies are really quite different from both. "Forgive Me," the first track after the intro, for instance, is the closest Chloe x Halle come to a "Don't Let Go," yet it ultimately sounds unlike anything I've heard before – somehow portentous and funereal and sleekly sexy at the same time. The closer, "ROYL," evokes FKA twigs, but with Southern gospel inflections, evincing their Atlanta roots. This dynamic of familiarity and strangeness is one they totally sustain across the ten tracks in between. And they sing the shit out of all of it.

    Home viewing

Having recently revisited some old favourites for the first time in many years, I decided to revise my 100 movies list. 

Nothing would please me better

"Youth" is served

There are some terrific Obama quotes in the new Atlantic interview, among them:

“You’re in high school and you see all the cliques and bullying and unfairness and superficiality, and you think, ‘Once I’m grown up I won’t have to deal with that anymore.'" 

“And then you get to the state legislature and you see all the nonsense and stupidity and pettiness. And then you get to Congress and then you get to the G20, and at each level you have this expectation that things are going to be more refined, more sophisticated, more thoughtful, rigorous, selfless, and it turns out it’s all still like high school. Human dynamics are surprisingly constant.”

I kind of love that the former president (by far the best one in my lifetime, and probably since FDR) is now essentially saying, "Most people are fucking stupid and puerile jerks, and this is a really big part of why we're so screwed – because adults with enormous responsibilities are shockingly incapable of consistently acting like adults and just doing their damn jobs." For a guy who famously campaigned on "HOPE," and still ostensibly adheres to that optimistic vision in his more official speeches, this is a very archly pessimistic vision of human nature! 

He's right –– and he's only getting sharper and more acutely perceptive with age. 

 2020 isn't all bad...

...I mean, this happened--like it, really, actually happened; objectively, in reality! And this did, too! Oh, and there have been some really good movies and music.