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the albums i listened to the most, 2016.

Most 2016 music passed me by, which is amazing, because I still listened to so much great music this year. Artists are magic.

Writing music lists the years I get around to it, I realize I have much less in the way of language and bonafides when it comes to music than I do for films and books, but I still shared a thought or two about each album.

You should listen to all of this music. And you should share your favorite 2016 music with me so I can fill in all the gaps in my experience this year.

Here is the music I listened to the most this year, in alphabetical order by artist.

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BADBADNOTGOOD – IV

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White jazz quartet from Canada who essentially create Hip Hop beats and songs that feel like samples for Hip Hop beats — and not just obvious pop stuff, the first track on IV could be a Shabazz Palaces song. They came onto the scene as a trio doing covers of Hip Hop tracks before moving into original stuff. They’ve worked with some really great emcees and producers, even releasing an entire album with Ghostface Killah this year.

IV is really good. It’s one of my favorite albums this year to play while getting stuff done around the house.

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Andrew Bird – Are You Serious?

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This album snuck up on me, which is weird with an artist I’ve loved for so long. To be honest, I hadn’t gotten into some of his more recent efforts. Then, I didn’t even realize how much I liked this album for a bit, until I started noticing how regularly I was relistening to it.

I’m not sure why I didn’t catch on right away. In so many ways this is vintage Andrew Bird, it’s sweet, funny, sad, clever, and full of whistling and violin. Not that it’s all blends together, “Capsized” feels like it could be the cover of a Bill Withers song, which I’m totally into.

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Blood Orange – Freetown Sound

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This album continually surprised me more than anything else I listened to in 2016. There’s a throwback quality to it, but it’s also always looking ahead — and sideways, and inward. It’s moving and interesting and it makes me want to resist all the bullshit we keep getting asked to swallow, both artistically and politically.

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Bon Iver – 22, A Million

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I’m pretty sure this is my favorite album of the year.

I didn’t write these in the alphabetical order I’m organizing them now, so below I wrote about the Frank Ocean record and the creation of a sonic landscape for an album — Bon Iver does that as well as anyone. His albums are sustained moods you get to live in for however long you keep the track list on repeat. His concert at Sasquatch Music Festival years ago, where in addition to playing the new album he also rearranged the music from For Emma, Forever Ago to fit the tone of Bon Iver, Bon Iver was still one of my favorite live performances ever, experiencing old favorites anew with fresh colors and shapes.

Also, you can watch one of his live performances from Brooklyn earlier this year HERE. NPR recorded it and the quality doesn’t disappoint.

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David Bowie – Blackstar

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Obviously, the loss of a human being is tragic far beyond the creation of any sort of art. Yet, as a people who will never know Bowie the person and will only experience him through the music he made and the characters he created, we feel the blow more powerfully when we lose a public figure who is still creating amazing things to help us understand the world.

At 69, Bowie was at the top of game with this album. We didn’t know it at the time, but this album and his death set the tone for the rest of 2016.


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Chance the Rapper – Coloring Book

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Who can make a wildly fun drug fueled mixtape called Acid Rap (still one of my favorite albums of the current century) and then follow it up with an earnest gospel album that finds enormous mainstream success? Chano from 79th can. Chance can do anything.

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Childish Gambino – Awake, My Love

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You can’t be good at everything. There are limits of time and attention when it comes to the media we can master.

Obviously, no one told Donald Glover. If we take the popular metaphor of 2016 as dumpster fire or clusterfuck house fire further, and I was forced to grab an armful of ten or fifteen things to run out with, I’m pretty sure Atlanta and Awake, My Love would make the cut.

Some Prince, some George Clinton, plus the influences of a bunch of deep cuts I’m unaware ignorant of, all on the way to a brilliant neo-soul/funk album.

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Mick Jenkins – The Healing Compenent

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I really like this album. It’s layered and complex and is doing uniquely interesting things in a genre where you will already find the most interesting and innovative experimentation in modern music.

There were a large number of albums this year by Black arists, including Kiwanuka and the new Tribe album, that lyrically sound like they are responding post-Drumpf election even though they were released earlier. It’s an indictment on surprised white folks like me who weren’t looking closely enough at how bad things were even before Drumpf won the election, creating the context where that was possible.

Also, this collaboration with BADBADNOTGOOD is one of my favorite songs and favorite music videos of the year.

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Michael Kiwanuka – Love and Hate

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We got a lot of albums in 2016 that we’re going to need for the next 4+ years. This is one of them. If you’ve never listened to Kiwanuka, you should remedy that as soon as possible. And don’t stop here, Home Again is even better!

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Lapsley – Long Way Home

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Like BADBADNOTGOOD I discovered Låpsley because of Vinyl Me, Please, so I’ll let them do the writing:

“There’s a dark, roiling hue to the pop sensibilities of Holly Låpsley Fletcher that hooked us in when we first heard her debut album Long Way Home. While her vocal & melodic prowess have the right ingredients for the next big pop star, the minimalist electronic underpinnings push her left of center in just the right way, keeping the listener from ever being able to completely pin her down. At 19, Låpsley has produced an album far beyond her years & one we’ll be quick to spin again and again.”

Also, I highly recommend Vinyl Me, Please. If you are going to sign up let me know first because it can get me $10 off my subscription.

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Mitski – Puberty 2

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With Puberty 2, Mitski made a deeply personal album that resonated with me, even though for most of the year we didn’t share any common demographic info whatsoever (now at least we both live in Brooklyn). Her album about struggling to find identity and happiness in the midst of profound anxiety, angst and depression obviously means very different things for her than it does for me, and yet she created this perfect sonic expression of that struggle that feels true to me.

I knew before 2016 that to create something universal you need to be more particular, but I seemed to experience that reality with more frequency than ever this year.

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Frank Ocean – Blonde

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The death of the album was much heralded, as a result of mp3’s and whatnot — as always, this was wildly overstated because hyperbole is easier than nuance, and it gets more clicks, too. I’m glad it isn’t actually dead, and that we keep getting albums that aren’t just a series of singles, but that create a sonic landscape to live in for the duration of the playtime. Many of the albums that have done this recently are directly influenced by Kanye and his friends and collaborators, like Bon Iver earlier on this list, and Frank Ocean here.

I’m ok if we have to keep waiting extended periods between Frank Ocean’s albums so long as we are rewarded like we were with this one.

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Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool

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One week this year, when I was feeling really depressed (the clinical sort not the situational or general mood sort), “Daydreaming” on repeat was genuinely my only solace. I don’t know how it worked, feeling comforted by the melancholy song inspired by Yorke’s breakup from the woman he’d been with for 23 years (the strange vocals played at the end of the song are the words “half my life” played backwards over and over). I just know that, in spite of it being a very specific artifact about someone else’s heartache, it’s one of those songs that feels like it isn’t coming from the headphones, but from a deep place inside myself. Again, in being particular we find broader connections.

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Isaiah Rashad – The Sun’s Tirade

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Even more than Tribe’s album, this album captures so much of what made me fall in love with Hip Hop as a kid. The production, the energy, the humor, the wit, the overall feeling — it’s looking backward and forward at once.

Watching the video for “4r Da Squaw” for the first time is the closest I’ve felt to watching the deeper cuts, like the Pharcyde, they’d play on BET when I was a kid. It’s fun and honest, which were qualities in short supply in 2016.

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A Tribe Called Quest – We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service

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When word came out immediately after Phife’s death that Tribe had a new album on the way, I was worried. It seemed too conveniently timed, and I was concerned we would get a subpar release of unused vocal cuts repackaged into a new album.

Instead, we got the real deal. It’s not Midnight Marauders or The Low End Theory, but it’s still pretty damn good.

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Kanye West – The Life of Pablo

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Those of us who love Kanye understand how crazy he is. The line between his performance art and his downright immaturity and mental illness is often blurry, but there are clear examples in both those categories.

What those of us who love him don’t understand is how people can’t hear what we hear musically. If we are going to argue about whether or not you can love the art but hate the artist, we can at least hear you enough to talk about it. But to argue that he isn’t a genius just doesn’t register for us, I have trouble even understanding how to start that conversation.

For me, The Life of Pablo doesn’t reach the sustained brilliance of his last few albums, but I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that the production on Ultralight Beam has moved me to tears more than once.

Anyway, here is a video Estelle Caswell put together earlier this year for Vox explaining a bit about the genius of ‘Ye.

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Wye Oak – Tween

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By all rights, this should be a throwaway album. They won’t even call it a fifth album. It’s songs from the unreleased material that came after Civilian but didn’t make it onto Shriek.* Thus: Tween. Yet, I still liked it enough to listen to it over and over all year long.

Long live Wye Oak!

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Also, the honorable mentions that almost made the cut or that I really liked but haven’t listened to enough yet: Kendrick Lamar untitled unmastered, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Skeleton Tree, Leonard Cohen You Want it Darker, James Blake The Colour in Anything, Kishi Bashi Sonderlust, Car Seat Headrest Teens of Denial, Solange A Seat at the Table… if I gave myself more time to work on this list would get longer and some of this would make it the list. Alas, I waited to long to think about lists last year.

*I updated the Wye Oak blurb because originally I had incorrect info about the timeline for the recordings.

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my year in shows, 2016.

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Here are all the shows I finished for the first time in 2016. If a show doesn’t have a list of seasons or specials next to it then I watched the whole thing this year.

Even though my show watching was way down for the year, I watched some stuff I really loved.

Atlanta was my favorite.

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Mr. Robot – Season 1
X-Files – Season 10 (Bonus, I rewatched season 1-4 with my wife, her first time!)

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Last Week Tonight – Season 2
Frisky Dingo
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee – Season 7 and 8
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – Season 11
Brooklyn Nine-Nine – Season 3
Daredevil – Season 2
Bob’s Burgers – Season 6

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Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – Season 2
Luther – Season 4
Archer – Season 7
Game of Thrones – Season 6
Silicon Valley – Season 3
Stranger Things – Season 1 (three times)
BoJack Horseman – Season 3

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Preacher – Season 1
Atlanta – Season 1
Westworld – Season 1 (twice)

Bonus: Here are shows I rewatch regularly, every year: 

30 Rock, Archer, Sunny, Parks and Rec, Arrested Development, Bob’s Burgers, Seinfeld

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my year in movies, 2016.

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My year in film. For a year in which nearly two full months were swallowed by a farewell tour/road trip/cross-country move, I’m pretty happy with getting up to 125. 

The key is mostly the same as always:
(#) Movie I saw in the theater.
[#] Movie I saw for the first time.
E# Movies I watched with Emily.
Favorites (These underlined films cannot be movies I saw this year for the first time, or movies I have only seen once, they have to be movies that have been able to stand up after more than one viewing, and still keep me coming back for more.)
*Best movies I’d never seen before. (It doesn’t matter when these movies came out, I saw them for the first time this year, and they were awesome. I was probably too liberal with my asterisks, I just couldn’t help myself.)
Halloween Movie Fest.

1. Four Rooms
*2. The Hateful Eight [1] (1)
3. Mad Max: Fury Road – E1
4. Cinderella (2015) [2] E2
5. Queen of Earth [3]
*6. Meet the Patels [4] E3
7. While We’re Young [5] E4
8. Super [6]
*9. Memories of Murder [7] E5

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10. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
11. The Final Girls [8]
12. Lethal Weapon – E6
*13. Boy [9]
14. The Station Agent – E7
*15. Turbo Kid [10]
16. Angel Heart [11]
17. Velvet Goldmine [12]
18. Ip Man
19. Amy [13] E8
20. Sicario [14] E9
21. Sleeping With Other People [15] E10
22. The Bourne Identity – E11
*23. Stray Dog [15]

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24. The Bourne Supremacy – E12
*25. The Conformist [16]
*26. Deadpool [17] (2)
27. The Maltese Falcon (3) E13
28. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
29. Dope
30. In Bruges
31. The Good Dinosaur [18] E14
32. American Ultra [19]
*33. Steve Jobs [20] E15
*34. The Big Short [21] E16
35. In The Mood For Love – E17

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36. Black Mass [22]
37. Trainspotting
*38. Midnight Special [23] (4)
39. Lucy [24]
40. Listen Up, Philip [25]
*41. Creed [26] E18
42. Zootopia [27] (5) E19
43. The Jungle Book (2016) [28] (6) E20
*44. Keanu [29] (7) E21
45. The Overnight [30]
46. The Dark Knight Returns: Part One
47. Captain America: Civil War [31] (8) E22
*48. Straight Outta Compton [32] E23
49. The Grandmaster [33] E24
*50. The Nice Guys [34] (9) E25
*51. Upstream Color [35]

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52. Less Than Zero [36]
53. Macbeth (2015) [37] E26
54. X-Men: Apocalypse [38] (10)
*55. Meek’s Cutoff [39]
*56. Deadpool – E27
*57. Nikita [40]
58. The Big Sleep – E28
59. The Sweet Smell of Success

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60. Mikey and Nicky [41]
61. His Girl Friday
62. Mud – E29
*63. Hail, Caesar [42] E30
*64. 10 Cloverfield Lane [43]
65. Eddie the Eagle [44] E31
66. Finding Dory [45] (11) E32
67. Man Up [46] E33
*68. Anomalisa [47] E34
*69. Don’t Look Now [48]
70. Reservoir Dogs
71. Moon – E35
72. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – E36
*73. Blow Out [49]

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*74. The Lobster [50] E37
75. Ghostbusters (2016) [51] (12) E38
76. Mr. Right [52] E39
77. Swingers
*78. Tell No One [53]
79. Suicide Squad [54] (13) E40
*80. Kubo and the Two Strings [55] (14) E41
*81. Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall [56] E42
82. Elvis & Nixon [57]
83. Kung Fury [58]
84. Moonrise Kingdom
85. The Family Fang [59] E43
86. Near Dark [60]
87. Cronos
88. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night – E44
89. What We Do In the Shadows – E45
90. Martin [61]
91. The Lost Boys [62]
92. Kill List [63]

05
93. Pontypool – E46
94. Slither
95. Attack the Block – E47
96. Dracula [aka, the Horror of Dracula] (1958) [64]
*97. Trouble Every Day [65]
*98. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht [66]
99. Stake Land [67]
*100. They Look Like People [68]
101. We Are Still Here [69]
*102. The Invitation [70]
103. The Hallow [71]
*104. The Witch [72]
105. Mascots
106. Doctor Strange [73] (15) E48
*107. Hunt for the Wilderpeople [74] E49

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108. Star Trek Beyond [75] E50
109. Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice [76]
110. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them [77] (16) E51
*111. Arrival [78] (17) E52
112. Hot Fuzz
113. Hannibal Takes Edinburgh [79]
114. Rumble Fish [80]
115. Ocean’s 11
116. The Boy and the Beast [81]
*117. De Palma [82]
*118. La La Land [83] (18) E53

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119. Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg Commentary)
120. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – E54
121. Rushmore
122. Fantastic Mr. Fox
*123. Swiss Army Man [84]
124. Rogue One [85] (19) E55
125. Sing Street [86] E56

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my favorite films released in 2016.

This year, I’m so far behind on my movie watching that I probably still haven’t seen most of my favorite 2016 films.

For example: I still haven’t seen Moonlight (fortunately I have a ticket to finally see it on Wednesday), WeinerHigh-Rise, Things to Come, Elle, Always Shine, Manchester by the Sea, Silence, American Honey, Toni Erdmann, The Handmaiden, The Love Witch, O.J.: Made in America, Jackie, 13th, Green Room, Hell or High Water, Paterson, Certain Women, The Fits and a massive, seemingly unending list of other movies. Fortunately, January is always a shitty month for new releases, so I have some time to get to work.  

Still, with all those films I missed, that’s not to say I haven’t seen quite a few gems released this year. Here are my favorites so far.

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La La Land

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If you ever need an example of a film that can be both grandiose and small, or both nostalgic and inventive, or both uplifting and heartbreaking, then look no further than La La Land.

Any one of the elements that worked in this movie would have been enough to make it better than most. Since everything in it worked, it snuck its way in as my favorite 2016 film [note: I haven’t seen Moonlight yet].

Sometimes, I see a movie and feel a little sad that I can never see it again for the first time. This was one of those movies.

Watching La La Land, an ode to love and movies and Los Angeles and music and musicals and life, I just kept thinking, “This is why people make movies.” I’m not sure exactly what my brain is getting at with that thought — I think there are all sorts of reasons why people make movies, many of them beautiful — but it still feels partly true. At the very least, La La Land captures the essence of why I personally fell in love with movies: the wonder of it, being surprised by a filmmaker, and when that plays out on a big screen while I’m surrounded by other people being taken on the same journey — that is what continues to make the cinema so special to me. I laughed often, I cried, I smiled both from joy and awe — in short, I fell in love. What else can you hope for from a love story?

I also really enjoyed the effect of having leads in a song and dance musical who aren’t great singers or dancers, who are imperfect. It illustrated a vulnerability that fit the story so well, a beautiful ordinariness that really worked.

**Side note: As I was writing this, I just found a quote about La La Land from Siddhant Adlakha’s list of his favorite 2016 films that I really loved, related to both my love of this film and film in general: “We may be the sum of all our experiences, but we can build our future on the very best parts of them, and the movies will always be there to guide us along. They still make them like they used to.”

The last bit is quite spoilery. 

That scene, where she accidentally walks into his jazz bar all those years later, the one he named after her idea, and he sees her in the audience; the wistful smile as he says, “Welcome to Seb’s,” and then sits down and plays a song for her that is everything he wishes had been different, a dream of how it might have been instead. If that’s not a classic movie moment then there’s no such thing.

All love stories end in loss, the real question is whether or not our love made us better while it lasted.

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The Invitation

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As I wrote during Halloween Movie Fest this year:  Don’t learn anything about this movie, just watch it.

This is a tense, slow burn that is interesting and unique. It’s evidence that the right people can make a wildly good film for very little money.

I can’t wait to see what Karyn Kusama does next; also, thus far in his career Logan Marhsall-Green has been seriously underutilized.

I won’t say more so I don’t spoil anything.

This was my favorite new movie from HMF16. Watch it! I’ll watch it with you if you need a creepy movie buddy.

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Arrival

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The closest challenger La La Land has for my favorite of the 2016 films I’ve seen so far is Arrival. 

Denis Villeneuve’s first foray into sci-fi is pretty fucking beautiful. I’m glad it won’t be his last sci-fi story, as his next film is Blade Runner 2049 and there have been talks for him to adapt Dune in some form, which is apparently a dream project of his. That could be amazing!

Please don’t sleep on this movie because you think of yourself as a person who doesn’t like sci-fi. Two primary reasons: One, because it’s not true that you just flat out “don’t like sci-fi” (I can prove that to you if you let me, but it would take actual conversations with you because it would be a unique set of proofs for each person). And two, because this movie is too great to let slip because of your blanket dismissal of a genre.

Arrival is a great film, and it shows the range of what a good sci-fi story can do. It’s a story about humanity in the big sense, but more than that, it is the small story of a particular woman told in a really big frame of reference. It’s the perfect example of how accessible sci-fi can be because it isn’t sci-fi-lite; meaning it’s not sci-fi that everyone might like because it tastes like water, this is complex sci-fi flavor executed so well that everyone might appreciate it. I mean, this is the story of a fucking linguist decoding an alien language: nerd stuff. Yet, I can’t imagine any open-minded viewer being turned off by the sci-fi aspects, because the heart that beats at the center of the film is so vital, the texture is so rich.

Also, can we just give Amy Adams the earliest lifetime achievement award ever bestowed? She’s already in the hall of fame, let’s just make it official. And for all his blockbuster appearances, Jeremy Renner is still a really underrated actor; he can do an awful lot with very little.

Now, it gets spoilery from here

I’m enamored with one of the central questions I come away with at the end of this movie, which is: if you knew a choice to love was going to end in tragedy, would you still go through with it? If you knew in advance that your marriage would be happy at times but end in divorce, would you still choose to love? And if you knew your child would die of a rare disease as a teenager, would the joyful moments be worth that immeasurable heartache? I know most parents would say “Yes,” but that’s still a huge question that pulls at the nature of what it means to love. I know, part of the question in Arrival is whether or not she had a choice at all, but if you did have a choice, what would you choose?

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Hunt for the Wilderpeople

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Here I am, the president of the Taiki Waititi fan club, at it again.

I don’t really know what else to say to get my friends to watch Waititi’s movies. I don’t know how anyone could not love his work. Don’t you like being happy?!

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is stuffed with joy, charm, and Waititi’s trademark lovable weirdos who become a family. There’s so much sweetness, but it never gets cloying.

Recently, when I recommended Hunt for the Wilderpeople on this blog, I joked that I’ll probably be disappointed if I ever go to New Zealand because people won’t talk like Taiki Waititi characters. The more I think about it, I realize it’s actually just disappointing that the people of the world in general don’t act more like Taiki Waititi characters.

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The Nice Guys

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Shane Black at the height of his powers. That’s really all anyone would need to say to me and I would buy a ticket sight unseen. I fell in love with Black without knowing it when I was 14 and saw The Long Kiss Goodnight at least five times, and years later Kiss Kiss Bang Bang forever solidified my devotion.

I really hope that every decade or so — at least — Black keeps making noirish comedies about violent men and dangerous women, or the other way around, doesn’t matter who, it works either way. No one does buddy film banter and reluctant chemistry better than Shane Black.

Ahem, exhibit A, from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: “Look up the word idiot in the dictionary, you know what you’ll find?”

“A picture of me?”

“No, the definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!”

Anyway, there’s no reason for me to write anything else about it, because Nerdwriter1 already did this great piece on how Shane Black does movie violence the right way, which prominently features The Nice Guys.

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Kubo and the Two Strings

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First, I can’t praise this movie without pointing out the disappointing degree of whitewashing at work. This is a story told with asian characters in an asian setting, and yet almost all of the lead voice actors are white. That sucks.

This makes my love for the film complicated, and I would understand anyone who dismissed the film outright as a result.

I really do wish there was nothing complicating my love for Kubo, because there is so much here to love. It’s a genuinely great film in every other respect. The mere fact that I can have such qualms about it and still include it amongst my few favorite films of the year has to say something.

Visually the film is a remarkable achievement. What Laika is able to do with stop motion animation is astounding. It’s amazing that they continue to make films that are so good that you have to call them great movies, period, not great movies “for stop motion.”

The folks at Laika are always great storytellers, but even by those standards, Kubo and the Two Strings is significantly more moving and inspiring than I’d anticipated.

This is a dark, beautiful telling of the sort of story the world needs right now. I just wish they’d told it without making such disappointing and insensitive casting decisions.

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Swiss Army Man

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Most weird movie characters aren’t actually weird. Much like the way “ugly” or “uncool” people in movies are actually hot people wearing ill-fitting frames for their glasses and an unfortunate hairstyle, the supposed weirdness is cast off with an ease that reveals it was never really there to begin with. Surprise, these outcasts are actually fairly well-adjusted socially and come to a satisfying denouement that finds them healthy members of a family or friend group!

Swiss Army Man is not that sort of movie. It’s as weird as the story of a suicidal castaway who befriends a corpse ought to be, and that weirdness is embraced throughout — and by embraced I actually mean ratcheted up consistently.

The fact that the weirdness isn’t merely a trapping used while convenient and then dropped later on to serve the cloying “message” of the story means Swiss Army Man is a film that can actually mean something to real weirdos. It also means the film has to work harder to earn its charm and emotional depth, which makes it so much more satisfying when it works. And it really, really works.

Early on, it took me a bit to warm up to Swiss Army Man, but in the end I loved the time spent with these disturbed and beautiful characters, and that early uncertainty on my part made the payoff so much sweeter.

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The Lobster

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Speaking of weird, The Lobster. 

Yorgos Lanthimos’ film is odd and idiosyncratic in the best possible ways.

As I look back over my list of favorite films of the year, I see the common thread of filmmakers skillfully using interesting metaphors to get at something deeply true. In this case, it’s a look at modern love in all of its many horrors and glories… although mostly horrors.

Everyone is great in this movie, and it’s further proof that Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz would be massive movie stars if the economy of film were a meritocracy (which reminds me, the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them franchise trading Colin Farrell for mid 2010’s Johnny Depp is mind-blowingly stupid).

The Lobster reminds me of Charlie Kauffman, one of my favorites, but more understated and direct.

This is certainly not a feel-good option — for example, it includes a scene of non-chalant and heartbreaking human on dog (who used to be a human) violence — but with its dark humor and sharp insight, it stayed with me well after finishing it. It’s the sort of film you’ll be talking about with your friends immediately.

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Honorable mention/movies that I enjoyed and might realize should have been on the list tomorrow: 10 Cloverfield Lane, De Palma, Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to ‘Off the Wall,’ The Witch, Hail, Caesar, and Midnight Special.   

Movies!!

The end