A lot of places are putting out their year-end lists for best of this, best of that, whatever, essentially flexing for everyone that they haven't just been watching seasons 2-6 of Friends on a loop every day since about 2019, like they don't need the medicine too.
It's tougher for me because a) a full year-end review would require me to make some kind of survey of the things I bothered to watch, which I was not cataloguing at the time and has become harder and harder as I recess further into the velveteen comfy-chair of Middle Aged Dad Brain,* and b) um, I still haven't finished the one book I was working on last year at this time. I'm afraid all my academic bona fides I'd worked so hard to establish through graduate school 20 years ago have all finally been scattered like fine ashes after a not-particularly-impressive kitchen fire. When I die, I don't want to be cremated, but someone sure as shit better burn my unfinished copy of Ulysses so it doesn't follow me into the afterlife.
I do have a Blogger label that I consistently use, but that shows me the stuff that I bothered to write about, not everything I saw. Not that that's unhelpful. Until three minutes ago when I checked, I would not have reliably been able to tell you that I'd watched the third Ant-Man movie at some point during the past calendar year, but hey, looky there, turns out I did. Huh, apparently the best thing I got out of it was a blog post title. But everyone did their best!
Instead of anything like I definitive list, I'll recap the sort-of recent journey I've been on with popular culture, movies specifically. See, it's been kind of a shit year. My dad died. I had relationship hopes promised and dashed away. I'm kind of just managing financially. My kids are finally developing adult lives of their own. So I have had a lot of free time and a mixture of grief and regular anxiety that needed some distraction. Instead of starting some new series or something or, apparently, reading Ulysses, I decided to start getting myself a little more film-literate by filling in the gaps on some films I had never gotten around to seeing, but was told they were actually good. I'm not going to let a bunch of cineaste tastemakers or wise-guy aesthetes or years of collected cultural conventional wisdom tell me what a "classic" is, by god. Sure, these are films that maybe "display no recognized functional flaws" or "established the language of modern cinema" or "introduced an approach to film acting that has defined every successive generation" or whatever, but has it spent several hours trying not to bore me on a lonely Friday night? Like fuck it has. Let's run them down:
High Noon (1952) Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in a very gimmicky, but effective plot in real-time, meaning about 90 minutes passes for the characters, start to finish, mostly waiting for a train. Sure, it's a western and there's a lawman and cruel outlaws and townsfolk who sure are a-fear'd, and rightly so! The performances are a little clunky here and there, to be honest. Some of the approaches really clash when you get Cooper and Kelly doing what feels like some old-fashioned melodrama acting, contrasted with Lloyd Bridges and Katy Jurado feeling a bit more lived-in and present. For a western about impending danger, it really is a lot of talking, broken up by a pretty great fistfight between Cooper and Bridges, and of course a showdown at the titular time. It really ends up being great filmmaking, pretty tightly controlled, but necessarily so. I don't go for westerns really, but the cliches come from somewhere, usually lesser ones trying to ape the trendsetters. This is one of the latter, I get it.
Breathless/À bout de souffle (1960) Literally picked it at random from a Wikipedia list about French New Wave movies. I knew the movement was a source of inspiration for people like Scorsese and Coppola and other 1970s American filmmakers (some of whom weren't even Italian) as we broke from the Big Studio Picture era. I still know next to nothing about Jean-Luc Godard, so I just took it as it came at me. I found it frustrating at first, but the very loose plot, the long, discursive conversations about very small things, primarily between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, become more and more engrossing until they became the plot. It helped that Seberg played an American speaking American-accented French that I could sort of follow along with. Nothing gets you into a movie like making you feel like some part of your high school experience was worth the effort. A bit enigmatic and of-itself, but I've read enough French philosophy to understand when the point is to not specifically have a point, like those ignorant Americans all seem to need.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) OK, I get all the hype around it. This is an actor's movie, to be sure. Minimal sets, pretty uncomplicated plot, just human interaction at differing levels of tension. Young Pacino and John Cazale, of course, easy. I loved every scene Charles Durning was in, just scrambling and sweating through all of it. The centerpiece, rightly, is a phone conversation between Pacino and Chris Sarandon, never in the same room, but making the whole thing absolutely bloom. Watch more Sidney Lumet films, message received.
Apocalypse Now (1979) This one I don't get as much. Stunningly gorgeous to look at, every frame. Beautiful performances, just raw and human. But the story is so fucking weird, this bolted-on 19th century plot set in Vietnam, OK, the war could stand a few metaphors and some dark poetry to draw some conclusions about madness, personal and geopolitical. I understood it, but it clunked pretty hard trying to make these parts fit in some places. This is the one that felt the most like homework.
On the Waterfront (1954) Just two years after High Noon, you can feel the way acting and filmmaking is changing. The story is there enough to set up the situations, but it's Lee J. Cobb and Eva Marie Saint and especially, goddamn, Karl Malden (fades somewhat from the plot in places, but some of the best work I've ever seen). Marlon Brando is the focus and I get it, bringing The Method forward, fine. I found him a little hammy or intentionally watch-me-do-something-unusual in some of his choices, but when he hits, he hits. The famous scenes are famous for a reason.
The In-Laws (1979) Alan Arkin makes me laugh just by showing up. Peter Falk is an all-timer for lots of reasons. But I think I was oversold on this as one of the funniest movies other people have ever seen? By contrast with On the Waterfront, because the most famous scenes in this one are jokes, some of the humor was lost in anticipating, like "oh yeah, serpentine, right..." Not bad. Appreciate it for what it is. Would watch Ace Ventura: Pet Detective again before rewatching this tough, honestly.
And that's it. Am I better than you because I've watched these now? Well no, not because of this specifically. You have great qualities I know it. I will say the one thing I do know about your reading habits and tastes makes me wonder about some of your choices, honestly.
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*Four out of every five conversations with one of my children: "You know, that guy, from the one with the cars. Jim Diesel I think."
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