Taking Stock 2017

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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