To do lists. To watch lists. Lists of places I want to visit. Grocery lists. Lists of my favorite actors from SCHINDLER’S LIST. I love lists.
I am obsessed with keeping lists because of one simple fact - I don’t have a good memory. This is why I have such a love/hate relationship with year-end lists. I love making a list of the things I loved throughout the year but, by the time I get to December, it’s sometimes hard for me to remember everything I saw, read, or listened to and loved since the beginning of the year. That’s why this year I’m going to start making end-of-month lists. So, without further hemming and hawing, here are the best things I watched, read, or listened to in January 2022:
MOVIES
THE SPINE OF THE NIGHT (2021)
Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King’s animated epic uses rotoscope as a tribute to Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazatta’s FIRE AND ICE. To be honest, though, THE SPINE OF THE NIGHT is better than FIRE AND ICE. The film follows the rise of an evil sorcerer and the various heroes who try - and frequently fail - to stop his reign of evil magic. Beautifully animated and blissfully violent, THE SPINE OF THE NIGHT is pure, uncut cool. Praise be the movie gods who, in their divine wisdom, bestow upon us animated fantasy epics chock-full of exploding entrails.
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971)
I couldn't have asked for a better way to see this movie for the first time than on the big screen while visiting West Texas. Peter Bogdanovich's film about two teenage boys learning how to be grown-ups in a dusty and dying Texas town is, of course, quite good. I loved how goshdarn Texas the film is. Everything - the emotional highs and lows of figuring your shit out on adulthood's cusp- is drenched in chicken fried batter and Dr. Pepper. A wonderfully bleak wind-swept portrait of the loneliness found while living in the Lone Star State.
C’MON C’MON (2021)
Mike Mills black-and-white film is a devastatingly touching reminder of how shitty of an uncle I am. At least, compared to Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix plays Johnny, a radio journalist who finds himself having to care for his young nephew after his sister is pulled away on personal business. He takes his young ward on a trip across America - learning how to connect with the child and, perhaps, connect with the part of himself that’s been missing for too long. Funny, sad, beautifully shot, and impeccably acted. What a wonderful movie.
WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995)
When I was in elementary school, there was a kid who used to bully me on the bus. He'd make me get on the floor and, until the bus stopped at his house, he'd keep his feet on my back like I was his personal footstool. I hated it, of course. I hated having to lay on my belly on the dirty floor, I hated the kid for singling me out for this indignity, I hated how it would hurt when the bus hit a bump in the road and my back was jammed into the kid's Doc Martins. But then the kid was sick for a week and didn't come to school. As I rode the bus without being bullied, I realized something - without the bully, there was nobody else on the bus who wanted anything to do with me. As much as I hated being bullied, I hated being ignored more. So, when the kid showed up on the bus again after a week, I lit up. Without being asked, I got down on the floor and assumed the position. The kid - taken back - took one look at me and shook his head. "Nah," he said. "You just made it weird."
Anyway, WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE.
Todd Solondz's films can be threatening in how familiar they feel, despite being portraits of awful people engaging in awful behaviors. Perhaps it's because Solondz treats every character - despite their actions - with utmost empathy and understanding. In WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, Heather Matarazzo plays a painfully awkward pre-teen girl who struggles with her budding sexuality and the fact that her family is plainly indifferent towards her existence.
Watching a Todd Solondz film is like looking into one of those giant magnifying mirrors hotel rooms have - you can see every pore, every blemish, every imperfection on your face but goddammit if it isn't impossible to look away because, quite frankly, it's the closest you'll get to see your own soul.
DUAL (2022)
Riley Stearns makes damn good movies. They won't be for everyone but goddangit, they are most assuredly for me. In his latest, Karen Gillan stars as a woman who, after learning she is dying, orders a clone to carry on her life after her death. But, when the terminal prognosis is discovered to be a mistake, Gillan must battle her clone to the death to see which one will be allowed to live. DUAL carries through the tone that I loved so much in Stearns’ THE ART OF SELF DEFENSE and builds it around an engaging, smart sci-fi parable about depression and self-loathing.
TELEVISION
YELLOWJACKETS
Holy shit, this is good television. From creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, YELLOWJACKETS follows a group of teenage girls who crashland in the Canadian wilderness in the late ‘90s. The show bounces back and forth between the girls’ struggle to survive and the present-day struggles of the survivors as they attempt to keep buried the secrets surrounding what they had to do to make it out of the wilderness. An outstanding cast of both young and seasoned actors, some great cliffhangers and mysteries, a truly outstanding soundtrack, and smart writing made this one of the best first seasons of television in a long, long time. I cannot wait until the second season hits my eyeballs.
PEN15
I’m sure PEN15 is a tremendous exercise of emotional exorcism for creators/stars Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle. The fact that it’s also so flipping entertaining for everybody else is the real magic act. Erskine and Konkle star as fictionalized versions of their teenage selves - as they struggle through those painfully harsh years between childhood and adulthood. It’s funny, it’s frequently very, very uncomfortable, and - when it hits that sweet spot between funny and uncomfortable it achieves perfection. The final season was full of great episodes and I cannot wait to see what these two creators do next.
COMICS
KILL THEM ALL by Kyle Starks
This graphic novel written and illustrated by Kyle Starks follows an alcoholic cop who has just been fired from the force, his unwilling partner who’s trying desperately to help him get his job back, and a betrayed assassin. Together the three converge on a high-rise to kill their way through fifteen floors of criminals, murderers, and evil accountants as they attempt to kill the crime boss who has made their lives a living hell. Oh, and it’s a comedy. Full of wonderful puns, pitch-perfect parodies of action film cliches, and a surprisingly honest humanist streak that runs through the book’s violent core, KILL THEM ALL is super fun in the vein of MACGRUBER.
MUSIC
I happened across Daniele Luppi and Parquet Courts’ 2017 album MILANO this past month. The album, a concept album centered around the Italian city Milan in the ‘80s is good but I particularly loved the song “Pretty Prizes.”