JLT/JLT

Said you were gonna grow up, then you were gonna come find me

As of now, my favourite TTPD track, "Anthology" or otherwise (list now updated and necessarily expanded). It's arrestingly beautiful and sad, and showcases one of her low-key most distinctive skills: wringing new life and unexpected feeling from tired and/or obvious metaphors, here transmuting the wistful idyll of Neverland into lost futures, broken promises, and horizons that contract a little more each time she sings the chorus, cellphone flashlights the fairies she wishes she could still believe were real. But whatever residual semblance of magic's all bound up in the music, in the moment; more ephemeral even than youth. Or love. Over in under five minutes. (Lucky Swedes!)

We Believe That We Can't Be Wrong (Ten Things)

01. Paul & Linda McCartney, "The Back Seat of My Car" Not in any sense new-news, but I've been listening a lot lately to Ram and this is its exquisite pinnacle. And it would be top five, maybe even top three, among the songs of any post-Revolver Beatles album.

02. Zach Bryan, The Great American Bar Scene Just 28 and his catalogue is already as strong and varied and altogether impressive as stalwart singer-songwriters who've been at it for twice as long. I can't say just yet whether this one is his best yet, but just the fact that it may well be speaks highly of its top-shelf quality.

03. Hit Man Linklater's best Bernie-mode movie since Bernie; just as good-natured, as casually perceptive about human nature(s), and, though also concerned with, less necessarily troubled by the matter of murder. In what is low-key one of the film's best scenes (and very much the sort of scene that would simply be cut from and perhaps turn up as a mostly unseen Blu-ray bonus for a lesser film), the protagonist's ex-wife and still close friend suggests, "Everyone is at least a little fucked-up. You just need to find someone who is fucked-up in a way that you like, or that complements your own fucked-up-ness." One might expect such well-said, off-the-cuff sage advice from a longtime real-life friend, but will rarely find it in movies, and particularly not from supporting characters in rom-coms (which this unashamedly is, more or less), whether good ones or bad ones –– save for Linklater's, which weave in a kind of lived-in wisdom of experience that leaves viewers feeling as if they know a little more about than their own lives and circumstances.

04. In a Violent Nature Most so-called "art-horror" films dial down the more extreme tendencies of both the art-house and the horror so as to make a more congruous merger. Yet Chris Nash does precisely the opposite, instead emphasizing the jarring contrast of beautifully composed, ambiently soundtracked long-held tracking shots through vast, verdant landscapes with abruptly commenced ultra-gory old-school-slasher kills, now being roundly applauded for their "creativity" by horror-connoisseur fansites that probably won't be reviewing, say, the next Albert Serra or Nuri Bilge Ceylan features. That the half-baked premise is deliberately flimsy and silly is implicitly but clearly affirmed when the character doing the expositional explaining gets quickly offed mid-explanation, then passed patiently, repeatedly through a log chopper. The film's final stretch (the last 15 or so minutes, after the Final Girl flees and gets picked up by a truck driven by the actress who once played Vickie in Friday the 13th Part II) is really extraordinary stuff, and the cut to credits and song selected are perfect.

05. Tehran, seasons one and two The espionage series done just about as impeccably as possible: breathless suspense somehow sustained across sixteen episodes (so far), a wealth of fascinating characters and shifting relationships among them, even, at times, provocative insights into the intercultural and geopolitical dynamics of the contemporary Middle East. The first season is nearly flawless. The second is slightly more uneven and strained in places; the addition of Glenn Close is never not at least a little distracting, although her performance itself is predictably superb.

06. The first eight episodes of Beef The first seven episodes are superlative black comedy/social satire (with some highly inspired needle drops!), the eighth swerves precariously yet doesn't quite lose its footing; but then in the penultimate episode Beef goes off the rails as the ante is upped in a way that, in its turbo-charged TV-show extremity, feels more by-the-numbers FUBAR, culminating (because of course it does) in someone bisected by their panic room door. And then the finale is something else again...opaquely philosophical or a glib imitation thereof, very much like The Curse that way. Yet, at their respective bests, both shows capture with laser-like specificity a current ('80s-born-generational? national? socio-cultural? almost-but-not-quite-'post-human'?) mood of futility and despair underlying the curation of "lifestyle" as a glib imitation of –– or substitute for –– the cultivation of a philosophically coherent modus vivendi.

07. The third part of Kinds of Kindness Not just for Emma Stone's (premature) celebration dance...though not-not for said dance, which will undoubtedly outlive the minor mixed-bag triptych that makes its audience wait some two and a half hours for that smartly advertised dash of ebullience. But also for the outfits, for Omi and Aka, and for the truly Lynchian dream-weirdness of the sub-plot involving Margaret Qualley's twin characters.

08. Charli XCX, Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not Like the Tortured Poets "Anthology" edition, not to mention the essentially sui generis case of the "Vault"-enhanced rerecordings-not-reissues, these eighteen tracks that hang together well sans skips beg the question(s) –– or at least they do for those of us old enough to wonder how exactly this sort of thing would've been promoted and packaged as physical discs before the immateriality of streaming was assumed as the default mode of consumption –– of what exactly an album/record/LP is and isn't in 2024, or whether that matters. Probably it doesn't, except to aging, persnickety music nerds who Venn diagram-overlap only negligibly with Charli 100–10+10's target audience, to whom "Club Classics" conjures what...late-period Daft Punk? Early BTS? Swift, though, skews just enough 'Old-Millennial' that she's presumably given the matter of The Album some degree of thought, and not only for banal business reasons. (No need to worry / her accountants handle that.) "Clara Bow," named for a silent-film-era actress, is a full-stop Album Closer par excellence, while the Anthology material concludes with a song called "The Manuscript" that encapsulates the less-finished, sketch-like quality of the addenda released simultaneous to and no less accessibly than the album-proper. Brat etc. etc. ends with "Spring Breakers," referring to Harmony Korine's ironic-salacious Floridian gangster fantasia, which by now might be as pop-canonical as Scarface for the young people ('brats' or not) who were too young to see it in situ way back in 2012.

09. Clipped An octogenarian Al Bundy as Donald Sterling was a masterstroke; Laurence Fishburne makes for an excellent Doc Rivers (even though the voice is not quite Cookie Monster enough); and his recurring sauna chats with LeVar Burton are oddly distinctive highlights that feel borrowed from a deeper, more patient and interesting show than the kind that Clipped is actually, consistently interested in being. As such "content" goes, it's not as good as the terrific first season of Winning Time, but much better than its rushed and ruined second season. Sufficiently engrossing if one follows closely the on- and off-court dramas of the NBA, probably solidly entertaining as the reenactment of an early cancel-era trainwreck if one doesn't, Clipped is decidedly less than the sum of its parts. Ed O'Neill and Fishburne deserve awards recognition; maybe also Jacki Weaver, whose accent work is more on-the-mark than Fishburne's; and *definitely* LeVar Burton, from Roots to Star Trek to Reading Rainbow (forever my first point of association) to ruminating on the nature of rage, the intractable problem of race, and the special utility of micro blades for the artful sculpting of facial hair.

10. The first part of Kinds of Kindness Alas, it is getting harder all the time to see Landry Clarke (and Crucifictorious!) the same way ever again.