23 Things from 2023
Yet another list of media that was important to me in 2023- films, television, novels, short stories, comics, and music.
Films, New
The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki
Both the best movie of the year (in a good year for movies) and one of the best films Miyazaki has ever made. A masterpiece, deranged and elusive and personal and timeless, completely unafraid to challenge the audience to stare into the weirdest and most unsettling aspects of being a human. The kind of film you are excited to watch again while you are watching it.
The Holdovers, Alexander Payne
Either a deeply cynical film hiding a warm sentimental heart, or a sappy Christmas film that masks a bitter and biting worldview.
Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers
Everything about this film should be completely exhausting and exhausted-- self-aware superhero myth re-arraganging, multiverse shenanigans, Spider-Man as a lens for a coming-of-age story-- and yet somehow it managed to do something original, remain interesting, and push a completely tired genre into places nobody asked for. In the year that superhero filmmaking died, this film managed to not only be survive, but feel completely essential.
May December, Todd Haynes
Unsettling, hilarious, bizarre, deeply biting satire. A situational comedy populated by freaks and perverts.
The Killer, David Fincher
It's worth watching this film multiple times. On the first viewing, it feels thin, slight, simplistic. But re-watching, the craftsmanship that Fincher achieves is a part of the text itself, just as important as the bare-bones plot and characterization. The Killer is Fincher becoming more and more himself, descending into his own mania and obsessivness.
Everything from The Creator that worked, Gareth Edwards.
While several films came out this year were "better" than The Creator- the aspects of this film were successful represent some of the most imaginative filmmaking of the year.
Does the films ideas concerning AI hold water? No, but then neither does Star Wars or Blade Runner or 95% of the films that have come out in the past fifty years that attempt to address aritificial intelligence in any way.
Do the central relationships of the film work in keeping us invested in the story? (Sorta) Does the story hang together to form a satisfying, well-structured whole? (Almost) Does the film attempt to address a set of themes in a hamfisted way that feels like the writers were just a couple of months behind where the discourse around AI would end up when the movie came out? (Yup). Am I an easy mark for a film that uses a Radiohead song to score a scene that is a direct reference to Apocalypse Now? (Definitely)
And yet, I kind of still feel like it's a great film. Maybe flawed, maybe uneven, yet still containing moments that are simply sublime, a combination of the practical and CGI that achieves what a dozen other franchise films failed to do: it feels both real and vast and original and exciting. It wasn't the best film of the year by any stretch of the imagination, but it still deserved better.
Honorable mentions in 2023 film:
Poor Things (funniest movie of the year?) Killers of the Flower Moon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem How to Blow Up a Pipeline Beau is Afraid When Evil Lurks (most frightening movie of the year?) Theater Camp
Films, Old (But New to Me)
The Apartment, Billy Wilder (1960)
This film is much stranger and darker than you would expect going into it. It somehow straddles multiple eras; the stagey, bright, artificiality of classic old Hollywood, but with a haunted, mournful soul that anticipates that darkness and cynicism of the late 60s and new Hollywood.
A New Leaf, Elaine May (1971)
Elaine May both directed this film and casted herself as a loveable dope that Walter Mathau is trying to murder. It's funny and sweet and overlooked.
The films of Park Chan Wook, in particular Decision to Leave (2022)
I watched most of Park Chan-Wook's films, and among a lot of standouts (Lady Vengeance and The Handmaiden in particular), his most recent film stuck with me. It's a good summation of some of the psychological acrobatics his films can achieve, a murder mystery that is also a love story.
Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich (1973)
It's kind of funny that Ryan O'Neal essentially plays the same character as the role he would play in Barry Lyndon, a scoundrel con-man that uses his charm to finance a nomadic lifestyle, perpetually fleeing problems created by his own stupidity. He's a loveable himbo liar in both, but in Paper Moon, he gets to act next to his real-life daughter. The depth that this pairing creates makes for something genuinely unique and special.
Honorable Mentions in Old Film:
The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen (1991) Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg (1988) PlayTime, Jacques Tati (1967) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Milos Forman (1975) Prisoners, Denis Villenueve (2013) The Innocents, Jack Clayton (1961)
Television, New
Scavenger's Reign (HBO)
The title of this show might be dumb, but I don't care. It's the best television show of the year, or at least my favorite. Admittedly, I'm kind of out on television in general; I don't think a lot of what is getting produced is justifying its runtime as much as its stalling for time. But then a show like Scavengers Reign comes along, an exploration of what an alien biosphere might be like that is as specifically rendered and wildly innovative as any science fiction in recent memory. It's a rare instance of television being used to accomplish something that could only be created in television-- a set of visual ideas developed over an extended series of episodes that builds to something both bizarre and somehow also moving.
Succession, Season 4
Succession is a show about how the levers of power and influence are manipulated at the highest levels of the capitalist plutocracy we live in by broken bufoons unable to recognize their own flaws and shortcomings. It's also simply very funny, and very sad, and very human. It's one of the best shows ever made, and its ending (along with the next entry's ending) feels like we've closed the chapter on Peak TV.
Barry, Season 4
Smaller in scope but just as much of an achievment than Succession, Barry developed from something grimly funny but fairly straightforward into something sad and twisted and uncompromisingly complex. In the final season, it took its influences-- the films of the Coen brothers, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Tarantino, sketch comedy-- and turned them inside out, making something entirely different, less digestible, and perfectly bleak.
Honorable Mentions in 2023 Television
Beef Poker Face
Music
The Talking Heads, 1973-1991, in particular the music in the film Stop Making Sense (1984).
Really didn't listen to much music this last year, which is something I'd like to change this year. The one artist I really explored this year that I haven't in the past is the Talking Heads. If you can see Stop Making Sense in theaters, do it-- it lives up to its reputation as one of the greatest concert films of all time.
Books, Old and New
Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk (2009)
The narrator of this novel is a bat-shit crazy woman obsessed with astrology and the poetry of William Blake; she's funny and interesting and insightful even as the full degree of her insanity slowly develops. It's also a murder mystery with a genuinely surprising twist (don't look it up on Wikipedia, the first line of the description spoils it).
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (1962)
The final novel written by the author of "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House. Careens between psychological thriller and comedy and outright horror. The kind of book that more people should read.
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr (1959)
An "important" science fiction novel I've been putting off your years. It's both funnier and less dated than I expected it would be, and while some of the societal concerns it addresses may have shifted, it remains prescient in a way that truly great science fiction can even decades after being published.
The Troop, Nick Cutter (2014)
It's rare that a novel genuinely scares me, but this one did. Coming-of-age body horror that evokes Alien and Lord of the Flies and Cronenberg and Stand By Me.
Short Stories
I read a lot of short stories this year; the following are a few that stood out. All of them were in collections that are equally worth checking out.
Murder Mysteries, Neil Gaiman (1992)
Not the kind of murder mystery you'd expect. From Trigger Warning, 2015.
Nine Lives, Ursula K. LeGuin (1968)
Doesn't involve cats at all. (Also very good.) From The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975.
"Pearls Are A Nuisance", Raymond Chandler (1953)
One of Chandler's short mysteries; it plays with tone and voice in a way that sets it apart from his other short mysteries (which are also great.) From The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.
Comics, Old and New
The Nice House on the Lake, James Tynion IV (Author) and Alvaro Martinez Bueno (Illustrator)- DC Comics (2021-2023)
Comics usually don't have the depth or focus of a novel; as often as not they feel like a weekly serial meant to extend forever without really going anywhere. But The Nice House on the Lake felt purposeful and sharp in a way that comics rarely do. Like alot of the comics I like the most, it exists in a middle space between genres-- it's equal parts post-apocalyptic sci-fi and puzzle-box mystery and a tale of a sprawling friend group muddling their way through their mid-twenties. Honorable Mentions, Comics Eight Billion Genies, Charles Soule and Ryan Browne (2022-23) Gotham City: Year One, Tom King and Phil Hester (2022-23)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Hayao Miyazaki (1982-1994)
I guess it was a year of Miyazaki for me. After watching Nausicaa last year, I decided to check out the manga that Miyazaki wrote both before, during, and after the 1984 film . It's the first full manga series I've ever finished. The manga expands the narrative way beyond the 1984 film; it's more vast and epic and complex and nuanced, sci-fi/fantasy that has as much in common with Lord of the Rings and the French illustrator Moebius as any contemporary anime. You could view the rest of Miyazaki's career as an exploration of the themes and imagery that began with in Nausicaä, and it's really worth going back to, even as the end of Miyazaki's career looms.