2024: A look back in laughter

Things I enjoyed, things I tolerated.

(Photo by me, Los Angeles 12/27/24)

I looked ahead at the Hyundai’s license plate cover. “Everybody’s Unhappy.” A little dramatic, I thought. We are spending the New Year holiday in a very liberal part of California, and liberals say lots of doomy things like this, so I assumed that this driver had slapped a depressing slogan onto the back of their sedan.

Then I looked up. “If Mommy’s Unhappy…” Ah, got it! Not depressed or depressing, just a very kitschy joke. That fit in, too. We were avoiding politics while I was off, not out of fear to discuss it — happy to, if a friend asked — but because we had 10 rare days to hyper-focus elsewhere.

We hung out with friends, we watched “A Complete Unknown” at the Chinese theater, we saw the original DeMille “Ten Commandments” tablets (also at the Chinese theater), we drank responsibility on New Year’s Eve with new friends, including the leader of the city’s most successful doo-wop band. (Lil’ Moe and the Dynaflos, look ‘em up.) We drove to the Madonna Inn, where I’m writing the end of this entry in a Matterhorn-themed room with stained glass mountain windows.

Every year I run down what I enjoyed, relying on whatever self-tracking I did during the previous 12 months. There was less of that in 2024 — you noticed, you weren’t getting any weekly updates — and it made the final analysis a little tougher. And I kept reading great works of art that reminded me to get up and stop consuming content. Here’s Goethe in “Faust”:

Man is too apt to sink into mere satisfaction,
A total standstill is his constant wish

Correct. Here’s Virginia Woolf in “To The Lighthouse”:

He would argue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it.

I am not trying to recreate Brainyquote here; I just kept encountering good advice from untrustworthy characters. My health improved significantly this year, after I forked over money to a personal trainer and cut even more out of my diet. But it didn’t reach the level of someone who can have incredible physical adventures — and those are more interesting than some thoughts on movies. The goal next year is to do more of this in tandem. I’ve never found an activity that freezes my mind and makes me correct my behavior like reading. I’ve noticed how much worse I make my conditions, internal and external, if instead I’m just playing some Civilization V scenario or blasting through a Resident Evil 6 level.

Books

Two goals this year: Shrinking my collection by reading potential give-aways, and spending more time on the canon. Charged ahead on both, especially when I was traveling, and couldn’t be pulled into a game. I’m wrapping this up after 309 finished books — 116 comics, five travel books, all the rest legit.

Comix: “Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy,” by Bill Griffith. In his 70s, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead has been on a remarkable run of serious biographical comics, blending his cartoony style — and here, his ability to ape Bushmiller — with masterful, realistic characters and backgrounds. “Three Rocks” tells Bushmiller’s obscure life story inside a narrative about Griffith discovering him, with Nancy and Sluggo as living characters.

Novel: “Mezzanine” by Nicholson Baker. Modernist novel about everything, told through the digressions of a man taking his office lunch break.

Memoir: “Uncanny,” by Junji Ito. No-frills autobiography by an incredibly normal man who switched careers once he won a manga contest. Terrific first half that introduces old Japanese stories that were brand new to me, very good second half about Ito’s stable of monsters and how he built it.

History: “The Year the Clock Broke” by John Ganz. Talked to him about this for the day job, but can’t say enough good things about what he did, telling the story of the 1992 election from the sidecar next to right-wing politicians who the old media had the power to sideline. It doesn’t have that power anymore; perfect timing for this book.

Obsession: Sci-fi by John Wyndham, best known for “The Day of the Triffids” (movies of the same title) and “The Midwich Cuckoos” (usually adapted as “Village of the Damned” — the ones with scary blonde kids, you know them). I read “Midwich” last year and attacked every other Wyndham novel as soon as it went on Kindle sale. “The Kraken Wakes” is the sleeper, a beginning-of-the-end story about mankind losing a battle to some invincible under-water nemesis.

Movies

Do happy people go to a movie theater in the middle of the day and catch two or three shows? This was my preferred cool-down for two decades, on and off. I picked up the habit in college, closing the paper and hitting my final class of the week, then walking to bombard my eyes with movies and my guts with popcorn.

When my wife and I started dating, I lost the instinct for that, and don’t really miss it. It’s so easy to suck down movies right now that I can afford to be selective. Old movies or documentaries on the iPad; comedies in the house; new stuff in theaters with wife and/or friends. (She couldn’t be talked into “Megalopolis,” so I went with three other urban planning-obsessed guys who turned the planning text into an ongoing group text. ) The experience that big theaters try to give you now, to come back, is almost pallative. I remember the feeling of lying back on a mattress store king bed that my family wasn’t going to buy; comfort plus victory, like I was breaking a law against how much to lounge in public. That’s the feeling of slamming the button on an Alamo or AMC recliner, lying near-flat, getting some abdominal exercise when you bend up to drink or eat something.

So I saw 36 new, scripted movies this year, 20 of them in theaters. Ten were sequels or franchise installments — a diverse group, ranging from”Madame Web” (complete failure, very funny) to “Furiosa” (rambling post-civilization revenge tragedy, very good). Four were biopics. Congratulations to Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Maria Callas, and Bob Dylan — you’re famous now! Two were anthologies that, like the Tale of Tales, were willing to pull apart their characters to teach you a lesson: “Kinds of Kindness” and “V/H/S/Beyond.”

Best time (audience category): Madame Web. Our theater started rolling as soon as poor Tahar Rahim showed up, delivering his painful ADR dialogue. It didn’t stop for two hours — not when Cassie spent three scenes carrying around an unopened Pepsi can, not when she killed the mood at a baby shower by talking about how her mother died giving birth to her, not when she discovered a cache of photos and muttered “Hope the spiders were worth it, mom.” Just wonderful.

Best sad sack: Ed Norton as Pete Seeger in “A Complete Unknown.” From the moment we see him entertaining Woody Guthrie in an empty hospital, to the last shot of him looking thoughtfully as Timothee Chalomet’s stunt double rides away on his motorcycle, Norton gives us a kind man who is destined to be disappointed when Bob Dylan becomes a rock star instead of overthrowing capitalism. It’s the old Mozart/Salieri relationship, but with more pathos, because Dylan is more selfish than Mozart — and, obviously, not doomed. If anything, the very good script downplays Seeger’s saintliness, and how his views got him banned from TV during Dylan’s rise.

Best SNL tribute: “The People’s Joker” and its nightmare version of the stand-up to Lorne Michaels pipeline. Not even the point of the movie — far from it! — but really elevated the rest.

Worst SNL tribute: “Saturday Night,” Jason Reitman’s bloodless docu-fantasy about the first episode of SNL. Hard to pick the worst single moment; right now I’ll say it’s the invented scene at the 30 Rock skating rink where John Belushi and Gilda Radner imagine the rest of their lives. We are supposed to react by wiping away a tear, knowing that they died young. But SNL already mined those tear ducts — and before Belushi died!

Best sequel: “Furiosa,” which didn’t try to recreate the momentum of “Fury Road.” Instead, it gave us 10-15 years of world-building, and the kind of story that often works in novels but not onscreen — the rise of an incompetent warlord.

Best nostalgia trip: “Yacht Rock,” the HBO study of how a few ironic LA comedians back-filled a genre without the consent of 70s and 80s rock stars. I’m biased — I watched the “Yacht Rock” sketches when they were new, and started to appreciate the music through them — but this is a rich study of fandom and who controls our pop culture memory. I’ve even enjoyed the takedowns from critics who hated it.

And these were my favorite movies. I want to see “The Brutalist,” but am not in a hurry to burn those four hours until vacation’s over; I may miss the rest of the stuff critics are gaga over.

1. The Substance. Seen at a FLIX Brewhouse in Madison where my only regret was that more people weren’t there to watch the last 20 minutes with me and my friend Tim.

2. Anora. Another Sean Baker banger about hard-working losers. As good as you’ve heard — probably funnier.

3. Furiosa.

4. The People’s Joker.

5. Smile 2.

Music. My decade-plus of appreciation for Charli XCX paid off this year. Good for her. In middle age, I was a hooting fan for a breakout pop star, who’d always written strong pop songs and rebooted her look and sound with each album. (Producer AG Cook had ridden along for half a dozen of these changes.) This time it was party girl and electroclash,

But I didn’t listen to that much new pop music. For the second time, I didn’t really bother putting together an end-of-year comp for my friends, a tradition I started in the CD-burning era and kept going long after. My music time was usually spent on making playlists to understand some artist, songwriter or period; or, on listening to symphonies and chamber music, like this.

And I arrived very late to “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.” Heard about it — heard great things about it — but until my friend Mickey took me for a drive and gushed about the Velvet Underground episode, I’d guessed that my previous reading/listening would make the show redundant. (Bob Stanley’s two pop music histories, “Let’s Do It” and “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah” really can catch you up fast.) Incorrect: Podcasting, with its ability to blend in primary sources after the narrator describes them, is perfect for Andrew Hickey’s project. I’ve been listening to almost nothing else while driving this week and recommend it with no reservations.