Every year, I get more conflicted about pop culture consumption, because there’s a line between thoughtful appreciation and mindless fandom. Lining up pieces of art, ranking them for entry in the canon; that wobbles back and forth over the line. There’s still pleasure for me in a top-10 end-of-year list, or a ranking of every auteur’s film by someone who will never make a film.
That would be me. Hand-wringing out of the way now, I had a very good pop culture year. Extra time helped, including my first real vacation in a while and some free days between jobs. Aging helped, because after turning 40, the hundreds of unread books in my guest room looked less like things I’d get to, more like things I’d die and leave behind to whoever found the body.
Less morbidly, I got engaged, and we wanted to get rid of some stuff. GoodReads will tell you that I read 276 books this year, because that’s what I put into the GoodReads app. But 78 of those were graphic novels, three were travel art books (which I did read cover to cover), and one was a short book of poems, a dying art form that’s fantastic for pumping up your app number.
Still, that’s a bit less than 200 novels and nonfiction books in one year. Some of them I started a while ago and finished with this new mindset, most of them I started fresh. Reading a novel in one sitting, giving it the time you’d give “Avatar” or something, hits different.
Favorite discovery: Junji Ito. Me and every other manga-dabbler, his stuff was in stock at every book store I visited this year. But I fell in the pool by accident, buying Ito’s “Cat Diary” for my now-fiancé, then and now a cat owner. It took me a minute to realize that this was the cartoonist behind “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” a creepy comic I’d read for free on Imgur. From then on I’d pick up an Ito every time a store had a sale, and I finished everything translated into English. If you’re following me, don’t start with “Dissolving Classroom” or “The Liminal Zone.” Start with “Remina,” and if you can swallow it you can swallow anything.
Favorite rediscovery: Philip Roth. I’d read “Goodbye Columbus” after picking up a remaindered copy of the Library of America’s first Roth collection at Politics and Prose. (There’s a whole culture war controversy, which I didn’t know about until this year, surrounding the LOA and its audacity to grow the canon by adding modern authors, Roth and for some reason Shirley Jackson being the ones who angered the most weirdos.) Did I want to have a bunch of Roth books in my house forever? I tested this with “American Pastoral,” instantly one of the best novels I’ve ever read, hard-wiring its details into my memory. To this day I can explain glove-making, the way Roth described it. I’ve alternated between Roth and other novelists since the summer, finding another new favorite (“Sabbath’s Theater”) and one that read like a bad AI construction of that favorite (“The Humbling”).
Favorite memoir: “Who Is Michael Ovitz?” Read this and Phil Knight’s “Shoe Dog” in the same week, briefly interested in how incredibly successful people got that way. (You can’t just leave this topic alone because Andrew Tate’s into it.) Knight created a need, visualizing a world where everyone wore comfortable sneakers outside the gym. Ovitz disrupted (speaking of words you can’t just surrender to annoying people) an industry that could have kept chugging along the old way. I got a tissue-deep understanding of how pop culture gets made.
Favorite nonfiction: Can’t choose between Chris Miller’s “Chip War” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculation.” Miller’s crisp narrative about the semiconductor industry, starting with some great pop-sci about the microchip, was thrilling because I knew so little to start; Tarantino’s voice and choice of films, some I’d seen and some I’d never heard of, was the most fun to spend time with.
…
I listened to plenty of music this year, and had no idea what was popular. Dua Lipa, I think? Halsey? Feels like Billie Eilish fell off? There was lots of passive listening, stuff my fiancé had put on, a mix of Korean R&B and what she classifies as “poolside pop.”
Favorite concerts: Both were in Portland, where I don’t live, but where I had two nights off during reporting trips. On the first one, I was done with a story in southwest Washington and saw a poster for Kraftwerk at the Schnitzer concert hall; on the second my friend Jacob had a spare ticket to Wolf Alice at the Crystal Ballroom. One band I knew everything about and just wanted to see, one I knew almost nothing about (one song on the “Trainspotting 2” soundtrack, of all things) and conquered the room live.
Favorite album: “Chet Baker in Tokyo.” Why did some of the less reliable jazz artists record sublime live music in Japan? My uninformed guess is that it’s difficult to bring dope there. Baker and his band are floating on this one.
…
When I was in the Texas hill country this spring, a reader contacted me on Twitter and asked if I wanted to pay cash for his Playstation 5. The words S-C-A-M appeared in the air, blood red and screaming. But I went ahead and took the deal, and it was not a scam, delivering some next-gen distraction to the fiancé and I.
I played through three A-list games: “Elden Ring,” “Horizon: Forbidden West,” and “God of War Ragnarok,” which looks like it should have a title colon but doesn’t. All were so beautifully drawn and addictive that they should not be legal. “Elden Ring” was the best; the online fraternity around that game makes the time spent dying to gargoyles more worthwhile.
…
My movie-watching habit peaked a few years ago, but I spent most of this year in a place where movie-going was worth it. Films that played almost nowhere played near me, stars showed up at screenings of their work, and revival houses made it fun to sit in a theater.
Add to that a decent amount of time on planes, with movies that wouldn’t have gotten my money the traditional way suddenly free and in my face. I saw 77 new movies, 12 of them documentaries or stand-up specials. I missed a decent amount of movies that made it onto the year-end lists of people I trust, and some of them I probably could have seen; I could walk to a place that’s playing “EO.” But it wasn’t that kind of year. My top ten of the scripted films I saw:
10. The Fabelmans. He invented the blockbuster, just let the man have his “Armarcord.” Done no favors by the goopy trailers, which made it look like another “movies are magic” snooze. It’s much better than that.
9. Nope. One of a few this year that I loved, and kept in my mind for weeks, while losing me for some of the runtime. The bit with the Brandon Perea, as the Geek Squad guy putting their security cameras together? Didn’t work for me at all. Monster itself was inspired.
8. Top Gun: Maverick. A perfect action movie. Never seen one that spent so much time going over the terrain of the final mission, letting the viewer know exactly what he was seeing and what was going right or wrong. This message sponsored by the Department of Defense.
7. The Northman. I felt opinion shift against this movie months after it left theaters, part of a collective second-guessing over some young male directors who’d gotten bigger budgets and struck out. Don’t care about that. “Hamlet” as a violent Viking saga is an S-tier concept, committed too fully. If you see the depiction of the literal tree of ancestors and think “that’s corny” rather than “that’s amazing,” turn it off.
6. Pinocchio. The Del Toro one, obviously. Brings even more pathos to a story that Disney drowned in it - Geppetto’s son dies when bombers dump their payload over a church!
5. RRR. The praise for this one got a little try-hard, a little intense, but it’s healthy to ignore that and ask “is this movie good?” This movie’s good. The commitment to slo-mo is so total that we get a hero shot of a guy sliding under a bush.
4. Decision to Leave. “Hitchcockian” in the way I like: It’s funny, giving you a full entertainment and not just a mystery.
3. Crimes of the Future. I found the plastic-eating cult’s argument to be pretty convincing.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once. This one’s popularity got well out of hand, creating the sort of online cult that everyone, myself included, hates and wants to clown on. There are maybe six minutes in this when I agree with them, and the Daniels get in their own way. That includes some of the Jamie Lee Curtis stuff, which becomes more about how game she is to make fun of herself than anything that serves the plot.) But it was the best time I had at a new movie all year, with a real audience losing its mind at the right parts.
1. Tár. Perfect. I think Dan Kois is right.
I didn’t see much new TV, except for the worthwhile “Irma Vep” miniseries. “Rick and Morty” bounced back after a weak year that permanently shrunk its fanbase. Let’s wrap this up by combining the superlatives for everything that streams.
Guy we’re always happy to see: Lars Eidinger (above), vibrating on a higher frequency as a pill salesman in “White Noise” and a crack-addicted actor in “Irma Vep.” I’d like to see him again. Please put him in movies.'
Best memento from the pandemic: An image from a Zoom meeting for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” appearing in one of the film’s montages that show the many iterations of Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn across the multiverse. Freeze it, and it’s there, the actress taking a Zoom call, in between a shot of Yeoh as a piece of wood and Yeoh as an alien. Cute: Maybe we can do better than this universe.
Worst memento from the pandemic. “The Bubble,” Judd Apatow’s punishingly unfunny romp about a stupid-looking action movie filming during covid. Contains the worst performance by every actor in it, except Daisy Ridley, who’s worse in the Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars movies.
Biggest surprise. “The Munsters,” which looked awful and wasn’t. Rob Zombie’s zealotry about classic horror manifests as a commitment to 60s sitcom schtick, which at this point is refreshing.
Best theater experience. I have to pick three. 1) Seeing “Memoria” during its short playing window in Los Feliz, 2) seeing “EEAAO” with a first-night crowd that nearly rioted over the butt plug scene, 3) a double feature of “The Loved One” and “Cry for Me Billy” at the New Beverly Cinema, with came with a Woody Woodpecker cartoon and four bonkers trailers.