Sometimes
when you look back on a year like 2017, you don’t pay as much attention to your
experiences with popular culture. Politics takes center stage, and you perhaps
realize that you might have neglected, say, to read as many books as you would
have liked because you were preoccupied with seemingly weightier matters. For
the record, I managed to read twenty-three books last year, not even an average
of one every two weeks. I hope to do better in 2018, particularly since I went
on a purchasing spree of used books during the final months of 2017.
I
fared somewhat better with my movie-going. I saw thirty films in movie theaters,
not a bad number, but when you add the additional 109 that I watched on
television and eight more on DVD or Blu-Ray, the total of 147 sounds rather
impressive. That’s an average of almost three per week. I haven’t in the past
kept track of short films, but I made a concerted effort this year to make a
list, and the final tally was an impressive 172! I guess they are easier to
watch because they don’t take as much time.
And,
now, on to the superlatives for 2017:
Favorite
Non-Fiction Books: Anatomy of a Song:
The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits that Changed Rock, R&B and Pop by
Marc Myers and Just Mercy: A Story of
Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. Myers is a music columnist for
the Wall Street Journal who selected
forty-five hit songs to discuss, everything from “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd
Price to “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. He interviews the songwriters, the
performers, producers, a host of other people involved in the creation of these
records. It’s illuminating and entertaining, and I want to read it again, this
time listening to each individual song before and after reading the chapter about
it. Stevenson is an attorney whose Equal Justice Initiative works with death
row prisoners who were wrongly convicted, and his book primarily recounts his efforts
to get one of those men, Walter McMillian, freed. Filled with statistics and
stories that demonstrate just how thoroughly unbalanced our justice system is
for those who are poor and/or non-white, the book makes occasional digressions
to discuss the way women and children are poorly treated. It’s enough to make
you angry and perhaps take action. It also makes you realize just how unlikely it
is that we will address these kinds of disparities in the current political
climate.
Favorite
Fiction Book:
Spence + Lila by Bobbie Ann Mason. I
was a huge fan of Mason’s work when I was in graduate school in Mississippi,
and I think I might have even read this book before, but when you reach my age
(54), sometimes it’s like reading something for the first time (echoes of
Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond…). This
short novel recounts how the family of the title characters, a rural couple in
Kentucky, deals with the breast cancer diagnosis and treatment of the family
matriarch, Lila. So many moments resonated with me, both from time spent in
hospitals with family members waiting for good news and from having grown up in
an environment much like the one so vividly detailed here. It’s a slim but
powerful story, and Mason’s attention to the emotional life of the couple’s
children further enriches the narrative.
Favorite Performances
by Female Actors: Aubrey Plaza in Ingrid
Goes West, Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman,
and Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde. Plaza walks a fine line between dark comedy and
horrifying drama as the title character in Ingrid
Goes West. Her Ingrid is obsessed with social media who forcibly befriends
a California woman who’s an Instagram sensation. I saw the film with a friend
who was so repulsed by Ingrid’s behavior that he started divesting himself of
some of his accounts. I, however, just found her fascinating and unnerving at
the same time. In Wonder Woman, Gadot
takes one of the most iconic superheroes of all time and invests her with such heart
and humor and action and dignity. I found it to be one of the best films of the
genre ever made, and Gadot is primarily responsible for its success since so
much of the film rests upon her shoulders. And how could I forget Theron’s
performance as Lorraine Broughton in Atomic
Blonde? The entire film is like getting a shot of adrenaline, and I loved
watching Theron as a kick-ass (literally kicking ass) action hero. Putting this
performance with the one she gave in Mad Max:
Fury Road makes me excited for this phase of her career.
Favorite
Performances by Male Actors: Timothee Chalamet in Call
Me by Your Name and Armie Hammer in Call
Me by Your Name. For me, it’s almost impossible to determine who gives the
stronger performance in this lovely film about a summertime romance between
Chalamet’s Elio and Hammer’s Oliver. Their interactions build in intensity
throughout the film, and their pairing is perfect for demonstrating the joys
and difficulties that come with first love. Chalamet is quite a find, and this
film should catapult him to the top of everyone’s list of potential young
leading men. Hammer, of course, has been a star since at least The Social Network, but here he brings a
new depth to his characterization. Both are lead performances, but I’m certain
that the somewhat larger amount of screen time for Chalamet is what makes
people consider Hammer’s to be a supporting performance.
Favorite Films: Call Me by Your Name and Get Out. I’ve already spoke above about
the high-quality acting in Call Me by Your
Name, but it’s also one of the most beautifully photographed films in
recent years and it manages to give almost every supporting role a significant
amount of character description so that they seem more realistic than the kinds
of stereotypes or sketchily drawn characters we sometimes get in films. Get Out was released earlier in the
year, but it still makes me think about the important questions it raises about
race relations in the United States. Far from being polemical, though, this
film mixes horror with comedy very delicately, and Jordan Peele’s screenplay
and direction, both remarkably self-assured, gives us a satire for our times.
Favorite
Theatrical Experience: The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night Time at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. I read
the book upon which this play is based years ago; in fact, at the time it was
our college’s book selection for the entire campus. As familiar as I was with
the book’s plot about an autistic teenager’s attempts to discover the murderer
of a neighbor’s dog—and this show does follow the novel’s events very
faithfully—I could not have imagined how the staging would be so revelatory. In
its attempts to recreate for the audience the interior of the lead character’s
mind, the show dazzles. Lights, sounds, choreography (even though this is not a
musical) all blend into a quite magical several hours of theater.
Favorite Musical
Performances:
Howard Jones at the Greek Theatre and Gladys Knight at the Cerritos Center for
the Performing Arts. I bought tickets for me, The Boyfriend, and two of our
friends to attend the Retro Futuro show at the Greek this summer; it featured a
series of acts that gained prominence during the 1980s (a.k.a., my college
years): the English Beat (“I Confess”), Modern English (“Melt with You”), Paul
Young (“Every Time You Go Away”), Men without Hats (“The Safety Dance”), and
Katrina of Katrina and the Waves (“Walking on Sunshine”). However, the
highlight was the final performance of the night. Jones played most of the
songs that people were familiar with (“What Is Love?” and “No One Is to Blame,”
to name just a couple) and a few newer songs. He also put on quite a show with
lights and video and electronic music, and it was a spectacular end to a fun
day. I never got to see him or the others during their heyday on the music charts,
but he perhaps more than the rest truly demonstrated that talent does not
necessarily diminish with time. Similarly, I have loved the music of Gladys
Knight, with and without the Pips, since I was a child and first heard “Midnight
Train to Georgia.” At the age of 73, she has lost none of the vocal power she
had in the 1960s and 1970s. The entire evening was a bit of a lovefest between
Knight and the audience as she sang hit after hit. She told stories about the
backgrounds of some of her biggest hits, and she did some revelatory interpretations
of newer songs like “I Hope You Dance” and “Stay with Me.” She and her male
backup singer performed a duet of “When I Was Your Man/If I Were Your Woman,”
and Knight showed the younger singer how it’s done. It only took me 54 years to
get to see her perform live—and I had to go by myself because of The Boyfriend’s
work schedule and because of a party most of my friends were attending—but I regret
absolutely nothing. A week or so later, I was talking to our head of campus
security at work, and I asked him if he hadn’t also been at the show. (I
thought I had seen him as everyone was exiting the theater.) He got just as
excited as I had been, saying that it was one of the best shows he’d ever
attended. High praise indeed, and I readily concurred.
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