When I was more actively pop culture blogging in my 20s, the end-of-year reports were obviously one of the big highlights.
What was the best music? What were the best movies?
Much of this list-making was performative and ego-based, of course—wanting to appear to have seen and heard the smartest and coolest stuff, to have the “right” opinions on it all, to be unassailably in-the-know, to be safely elevated as some kind of taste-maker even if it was just to my tiny band of followers and friends.
The ego of this wasn’t only to receive praise, to want to, as our dear departed Carrie Fisher once put it, “be the greatest person you ever met…to explode in the night sky of your approval.” There was also the ego-based need to assert some kind of usefulness in the world, to make myself somehow indispensable so that I wouldn’t be so easily cast aside and forgotten.
If you’d asked me at the time about why I wrote about the stuff I wrote about, I probably would have said something to the effect that I just hoped my reviews would be useful to someone, that I hoped they might introduce someone to a piece of art that they would deeply connect with and love, or that I might steer them away from something that would offend, disturb, or disappoint them.
The thing that I never could have admitted, though, was that I also wanted desperately to be given credit, forever, for that service. I wanted to be assured of my worth, to essentially be some kind of helper animal wearing a t-shirt or harness announcing my centrality to the smooth working of the world around me, announcing that I was engaged in doing a very important job, so that I could combat my terrified suspicion that I was, in fact, inconsequential, not only to the wider world but also to those who were kindly but most likely lying about loving me.
Come for the pithy one-liners about George Clooney, stay for the darkly desperate tap-dancing for validation!
Not dissimilarly, as far as searching for my unique place in the cosmos, this year-end list-making always had a touch of the metaphysical or mystical to it. (Perhaps invisibly, but it was folded in there for me at least.) Somehow I thought that the art that I’d consumed over the past twelve months was some sort of oracle that, when regarded as a whole, could teach me about myself, where I’d come from and where I was headed.
I think it’s no coincidence that I eventually ended up in a clairvoyant training program whose whole method entailed teaching students to describe the pictures that they saw in their own minds’ eyes. I think this must be why I took to my psychic abilities so naturally—seeing and reporting on the details and vividness of clairvoyantly received images was, for me, basically exactly like seeing and reporting on the details and vividness of scenes in a movie.
As a film student and amateur critic, I never had a head for plot. Logical contradictions or absurd suspensions of disbelief or internal consistency meant nothing to me. It was all about vibe, emotion, meaningful rhymes with other films in the genre or director’s body of work, subtle betrayals of stated meaning revealed by a carelessly chosen bit of mise en scene or dialogue.
Almost as soon as I recognized this, I shut that blog down.
Partly, yes, it was because I’d been writing there for nearly six years and was simply getting bored with it. Partly it was because my life had become busy in a way that didn’t afford me the time to write there on any kind of regular basis anymore. Partly it was because that busyness also meant that I didn’t have time to see as many movies or go to as many concerts as I used to, hence eliminating the fodder I would have written about anyway. Partly it was because I was finally ensconced in several communities where I had actual, real people to talk to on a regular basis so that I didn’t have to shout into the void of the internet as desperately in order to feel like I had someone, anyone, to communicate with.
But, undeniably, partly it was also because I was getting a purer hit of the drug, so to speak—rather than reading pictures at a remove via a director’s art, I could read the pictures that I was seeing with my own inner vision just by being awake and alive in my own everyday life.
All that being said, it blows my mind a bit that I’ve seen so few films this year. (Or in the past several years, really.) I still get a huge thrill out of going to the movies; I still treasure them as an art form that even well-regarded serial television will never duplicate or replace; their visuals, at their best, still enhance and inform my own inner visions. Even though the stuff I have seen would hardly be considered important or essential or somehow defining of the year just passed, I greedily treasure every moment that I spent dreaming, wide awake, in the dark.
To the best of my record-keeping ability, I’m pretty sure this is everything I saw since January, both first run and revival:
Youth
The Revenant
Chimes at Midnight
Superman vs. Batman
Born to Be Blue
Miles Ahead
Keanu
Captain America: Civil War
High Rise
The Seventh Seal
Love and Friendship
Stranger than Paradise
The Red Shoes
Older than Ireland
Yojimbo
Star Trek Beyond
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
The Magnificent Seven (2016, dir. Antoine Fuqua)
Queen of Katwe
Doctor Strange
Gimme Danger
Arrival
Rogue One
Jackie
I think a lot about an interview that Quentin Tarantino gave a little over a decade ago where he said,
A movie doesn’t have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those well and gives you a cool experience, a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that’s good enough, man. But movies that get it all right are few and far between. It got to a point in the ’80s when you didn’t even hold a bad ending against a movie, because every movie had a cop-out ending. If you were going to hold bad endings against movies you’d never have liked anything.
Maybe I’d always agreed with that assessment without having had the words to say so. Or maybe I just read that quote at the right moment, while my own tastes and filters were still at the outside edge of being moldable. Nevertheless, I deeply agree. And I make it a point to try to identify those couple of things that a movie does well every time I watch something. Both so that I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time and money if I happen to see a movie that didn’t particularly appeal to me, and, more cosmically, so that I feel like I’ve made some small attempt, in my own way, to honor the time, effort, and talent that went into making even a subpar film.
Here, then, are a couple of things that have stuck with me the most, from the small selection of what I’ve listed above.
“No! For sport!”
Werner Herzog, at this point, is not only a complete parody of himself but also one of the few remaining directors whose films I will see without question, regardless of whether I’m inherently interested in the subject matter or not. Lo and Behold was tremendously spotty, thanks to both his own pushy first-person intrusions and a few of the vignettes that devolved into holier-than-thou condescension (the bits featuring the family who professed that the internet was the work of the devil and the kids in the rehab facility for game addiction most especially).
But, as ever, there were beautiful moments of humanity revealed. Ted Nelson’s glee near the beginning when Herzog credits him for the elegance of his conception of how hypertext links should have worked was breathtaking in its innocence. But the moment I find myself replaying in my mind again and again is when notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick is concluding his story about worming his way into a major communications company, basically just by making a series of exceedingly polite telephone calls. Herzog asks him something to the effect of, “why did you do this? For malicious reasons?” And Mitnick instantly shouts back, “No! For sport!” with a passionate purity that totally knocked me out. That, to me, is on a par with Philippe Petit walking between the towers of the World Trade Center on a high wire, just for the useless beauty of it, just because he, alone, could.
The last three minutes of “The Magnificent Seven”
Embarrassing admission time: I’ve never seen The Seven Samurai nor John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven. But, I had an unexpected evening to spare this fall and the 2016 Magnificent Seven remake by Antoine Fuqua happened to be playing at the movie theater around the corner from my apartment and I liked the casting enough that I figured why not catch it. So, though the film student in me is dying a humiliating little death right now that I can’t do a proper compare/contrast with the older versions, I’ll just say that the whole point of this particular movie was its final (approximate) three minutes.
After the savagery of the final gun battle, who remained? Among a town now populated and left to be led solely by women, children, and old or somehow infirm men, one young (white) boy looks up to watch the heroes of the day riding off into the horizon. And who were those heroes? A black man, a Mexican man, and a Native American man. This is what I mean about the power of movies to inspire, enhance, and inform our own inner visions—I want to live in that world. I perceive the necessary inevitability of that world. A world where it is unquestionable that young white children should be able to see and know, at an early and formative age, men of color who are heroic, who are depicted as survivors, as powerful, as worthy of emulation and inspiration.
“I shall remember this hour of peace, the strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk.”
Further embarrassing former film student admissions: I’d somehow never seen The Seventh Seal before this year. But, as I am lucky to live near the Music Box Theatre, where I can easily see classic films, on a big screen, on a regular basis, I was able to catch it at a matinee with some friends over Memorial Day weekend.
No one ever told me how genuinely funny this movie is! Having only seen Persona in a feminist film class at Indiana University, I was in no way prepared for the genuine delight woven throughout what popular wisdom led me to believe would be another Very Serious and Important Art Film. (No one ever told me what a babe young Max von Sydow is either.)
And of course the hinge on which the film rests is the incredibly tender strawberries and milk scene.
In about nine short minutes it manages to hit all of my emotional buttons in the way that it celebrates an ephemeral moment of beauty and intimacy among an improvised group of friends and chosen family.
In that spirit, I thank you for sharing time and sweetness, even for just a few moments, with me here.
Queen of Peaches 