Narrative Nausea: My 2020 in Art.

Welcome to my first annual deconstruction, unpacking, rambling on about, and, I hope, thoughtful and nuanced observational critique of my favorite pieces of culture that I listened to, watched, read, or experienced live (erm, pre-pandemic) this year.

Throughout the tumultuous 2020, or, the pandemic year, or the big huge one, or however this oft-labeled “moment” is going to go down in history books, I took great comfort in arts and culture. Distanced from my loved ones and peers I found myself more connected to the arts due to what was no doubt the solitude of a maddening lifetime lived out each day, forcing me to go within and to watch all the movies I’m always saying I have no time to watch.

I sourced these works from a diverse array of creators, locations and time periods so don’t feel like there’s any pre-ordained preferences beyond my own aesthetic sensibilities and a piece of culture’s ability to move me or to connect with me in some meaningful way. So let’s dive right in to my year of enjoyment and obsessive thought put toward a cavalcade of wildly diverse stories crafted with self-awareness, postmodernist stylings, run-amok reflexivity, and aspirations towards poetic justice that, when the dust has settled (if it ever does), could maybe bring us some sort of peace, or dare I use the word ‘hope’ in a scourged world that somehow manages to, from time-to-time, rear what can only be described as magic.

A Strange Loop

A playwright writing a play about being a playwright is, well, not necessarily a revolutionary work to put out into the world, but, Michael R. Jackson’s zeitgeisty musical that won him the Pulitzer Prize makes the smart and subversive move of going inward, to the dark, despairing, humorously self-flagellating depths of painful honesty in “A Strange Loop”, a musical cast recording that creatively renders a narrative of self-pity and turns it into questionable self-triumph, as a broke, black, gay playwright struggles to make ends meet in the shark tank that is Broadway. Jackson’s specificity (his audience insert character ghostwrites Tyler Perry movies for chrissakes), inside humor, narrative toolbox, and overall wonderful talent easily seals this as the most notable and refreshing bouquet of songs to be streamed into your earholes this year.

The Moors

“Do you want to hear about how I wasn’t loved enough as a child? Because I wasn’t.” So mewls on the self-obsessed protagonist of Jen Silverman’s The Moors. Is the character Silverman herself, or is she her id? Ego? Super-ego? She’s fragmented her own psyche into several alternate selves playing opposite each-other in what could be described as an existential screwball farce, written with excerpts ripped from the diary of an artist mid-breakdown. Her socratically-in-dialogue characters include queer, gender-inverted caricatures of the key players of “Wuthering Heights”, a depressed dog, and a doomed moor-hen. It’s hard to categorize what Silverman is trying to accomplish with this, other than bleak, existential nihilism, but whatever it is, it injects life into the medium.

Dry Land

Claustrophobic, violent, and perhaps highest among (but not quite at the top) of the list of hard-to-watch theater I saw this year was my bone-chilling, hair-raisingly uncomfortable sit-through of Ruby Rae Spiegel’s play, “Dry Land”. Though some artists’ approach to the sensitive topic of teenage abortion may flinch from the imagery associated with this topic, Spiegel’s play does not such thing. In addition, the setting of a high school swim team locker room brings back evocative memories of a time when innocent youthful athleticism was paired with a cacophony of goosebump-riddled flesh — now for the first time seen as sexual in the eyes of these characters and an audience brought along to experience something that feels more personal than we were at first granted permission to behold.

More theater that I saw this year: MOB, Catherine Ann-Toupin, Stick Fly, Lydia Diamond, Drylands, Ruby Rae Spiegel, Top Girls, Caryl Churchill, Pass Over, Nwandu Antoinette, What the Constitution Means to Me (2020 Film Version), Heidi Shreck, The Boys in the Band ( 1970 Film Version), Mart Crowley.

The Souvenir

Joanna Hogg went through a dark time in film school. That much is clear from her marvelous film, “The Souvenir”, the autobiographical story of an upper-class British film student. She will one-day grow to be a successful director, but at this juncture in her life, she has simply lost her way. She loses her grip on life and (spoiler) triumphantly regains it, but what ends up happening doesn’t really matter as much as how it’s remembered, this film being of digressions and not of destinations. Her time in film school is remembered un-nostalgically, in a gauzy haze of melancholic matter-of-fact-ness, her shots surgically precise, the tone dry in that very British way. And it works as a meditation on privilege, on who gets to tell stories, on confronting past traumas, but also as a lush vacation spent in a stunning representation of the past. Actress Honor Swinton Byrne stands out, and an excellent companion piece is the episode of the A24 podcast where Hogg talks about her artistic process with a gushing Martin Scorsese. Let’s hope the upcoming sequel proves a worthy successor to an otherwise diaristic entry into this year’s film canon.

The Young New Mexicans Trilogy

One of the roughest and most scattershot entries in this list — “The Young New Mexicans Trilogy” is nonetheless brilliant and the ramshackle nature of it is completely understandable given that it comprises three feature films made by a guy and his friends all in their early twenties. Though they vary greatly — quality and production value is all over the place — writer/director/producer/editor/actor Matthew Stannasolovich’s film trilogy of Gen-Z nihilistic angst coalesces three works that were clearly made at different points in his life into a a portrait of the artists as a (rather disturbed) young man. All three films are recommendable, enjoyable, and brilliant for the efforts of any creator regardless of age and experience. Especially personal in their own right; “The General Specific” encapsulates college burnout mid-film school, “Shantytown” feels like an apocalyptic post-Trump-election time capsule from an alternate universe, and “Dukeland” demonstrates Stannasolovich’s evolved mastery over mood and tone as it is his bleakest, film exploring the sadness of family and growing up with the internet. This three-hour trilogy was pumped out in three years and even more films are rushing down the well-oiled production pipeline of a postmodern artist striving to represent a lost generation, or perhaps just his own life experiences. Regardless, nothing was held back here.

Dog Day Afternoon

There’s never a bad time to re-visit the classics. There’s never an excuse not to watch “Dog Day Afternoon”. Sidney Lumet, the definitive “director” and an immortal descendant of the theater tradition transforms the claustrophobic inside of a bank under siege into his emotional, sprawling epic magnum opus, a tale of seedy 1970s New York’s miscreants with themes that holds up exceptionally in 2020. There’s class disparity, outward antipathy towards police-state authority, and star-crossed taboo romance that sing in a taught thrill ride built around Lumet’s uncanny, classically-trained direction of star Al Pacino, who, as one can tell minutes into Sonny’s sweaty unfoldment into madness, has been waiting to play a role this dimensional and alive his whole career. The rest is history.

Middleditch and Schwartz

Usually, it’s standup comedy that gets the Netflix treatment, but this year comedians Thomas Middleditch and Benjamin Schwartz brought a revelation to the form with their hour-long, fully improvised series. Story nerds such as myself will geek out watching two seasoned pros construct sophisticated, hour-long sketch comedy skits in front of huge crowds, thinking up storylines, wrangling setups and payoffs, all while in the midst of high-energy performances. Though improv is nothing new, everything felt fresh and inventive, and the two make a case for their staying power if you didn’t already find them charming in their sitcom and rom-com careers that I’m sure provided sufficient training towards their uncanny ability to summon narrative out of thin air.

The Midnight Gospel

The strongest TV this year might have been an animated series. No, I’m not talking about “Avatar the Last Airbender” or “Over The Garden Wall”, both of which I revisited in all their glory this endless summer. Pendelton Ward, one of the biggest names in what I’d be comfortable calling a new wave of animation: featuring “Steven Universe”, “Gravity Falls”, and, you know, all of those shows for children and emotionally stunted adults, took a step in a new direction and wound up creating an entirely new form. A fully animated podcast series expanding upon the “Duncan Trussell Family Hour”, featuring Trussel’s signature gentle stoner banter with some truly extraordinary guests (including Anne Lamott, of all people). The multimedia possibilities here are endless and explored in a most cosmic sense imaginable in one of the trippiest things to make it to the screen this year. Maybe it is to be watched on your substance of choice, maybe fully sober. Else you might miss out on — for example — one episode’s adaption of the Tibetan book of the dead, set in alien dimension, narrated by a Trussell griping on about the mundanity of everyday life. Other episodes explore meditation, mindfulness, and death — all recurring thematically throughout the series, culminating in an episode in which Trussell confronts the death of his mother. Trussell and his fictional counterpart’s journey across the universe is indeed beautiful to behold.

Paris, Texas

German director Wim Wenders’ quiet, lonesome opus is at its best when it is the most understated, and in effect most difficult to ignore. In a tale of an everyday stoic striving for redemption, “Paris, Texas” opens and closes on pastel-colored, grainy, images of the masculine and individualist American West, complimented by a softness and gentle feel throughout that asks the viewer to go within while they are in the vast world drawn by Wenders. Shot in precise, mythic landscapes, it features Dean Stockwell and Harry Dean Stanton at their all-time bests — excluding Stockwell’s sadistic android priest on “Battlestar Galactica,” that is.

Dead Pilots Society

Scripted podcasts are an exciting new medium, yet podcasts about scripts are hit-or-miss depending on how annoying you find talkative screenwriters. A happy medium can be found with “Dead Pilots Society," a monthly live-reading of un-produced TV pilots that just barely didn’t make the final hurdle of getting made at TV networks. Some scripts are better than others, but a highlight episode included “Revival”, a TV pilot about a TV pilot being scrabbled together in an effort to revive a “Full House” like nineties sitcom. In the second act of the podcast’s usual live table read, actors Will Forte and Kelly Marie Tran play actors doing a live table read, and it’s quite the metafictional odyssey. “Revival” was written by “Will and Grace” writer Sally Bradford McKenna, and is perfect for fans of ambient sitcom viewing.

The Player

American director Robert Altman’s “The Player” starts off with a famously prolonged shot that castigates yet lovingly depicts the Hollywood studio system in a way that every attempt to satirize or comment on “The Business” has either failed to or desperately wanted to do as good as this movie. Following the criminal exploits of a Hollywood studio executive “The Player” is almost a gleeful, nihilistic laugh in the face of the precious artist — highlighting Hollywood’s indifference to the personal and the specific in the face of the hierarchical and focus-grouped. Ironically, it’s a masterful artistic accomplishment on the merits of own its writing and directing. The film knows this and its mean-spirited braggadocio takes its audience along for a guilt-ridden, manipulative ride through a dreamer’s own personal hell and a heartless company man’s victory over the tragically ill-fated storyteller.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” opens on a hoarsely-recited poem against a bleak landscape, initiating the emotional siphon and slow death spiral of writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s most melancholic film to date, which is saying something, given that he has been trying to make something as hideously, piteously human as this for decades. Literary, theatrical, and decidedly unlike a film, Kaufman seems to express some sort of disdain for the medium he’s working in and its insufficient capacity to convey emotions he feels are lacking in the movies these days. But it’s not just movies, it’s really any and all sort of art or human culture that feels futile in the eyes of a lonely god. Kaufman inserts himself as narrator and creator in this story about being trapped in a gaudy, meaningless prison of one’s own imagining. Starring the pouting, shambling Jessie Plemmons, Jesse Buckley, Toni Collette and David Thewlis, the film’s contents are dire and dour, but in the most compelling way it could possibly be for a watcher looking for something deeper than even Kaufman’s previous, endlessly introspective offerings.

StraightioLab

Let’s get one thing straight: “StraightioLab” is not a good podcast. Hosts George Civeris and Sam Taggart awkwardly straddle the line between sincerity and irony each episode of this mean-spirited “comedy” podcast, frequently tumbling into the latter and onto the inward-facing sword of their own self-evisceration. Indeed, this is not yet another self-promotional grab but rather a more honest, laid-bare character study of two self-professed gay unrealized creative types whose guests uncomfortably squirm at their insincere attitudes towards what they do: namely, comedy. Some guests are absolute duds, not “getting it”, and attempting to drop credits, floundering about within the obliquely outlined format of the show, while other, more well-adjusted ones such as Ayo Edibri and Matt Rogers glide through and throw jokes left and right. Whether or not a guest can get a joke in is dependent on if they realize that the joke has been on them the whole time.

Trick Mirror

Writing about Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror” prompts my fingers to shatter with each keyboard press. Such is the weight that Tolentino carries herself with, writing about the most relatable things as per her background as blogger, such as: the internet, diet culture, literature, religion, fraudulence. But it’s the form here that goes beyond, dazzles, and it’s the form that warranted her the universal acclaim that followed this debut book. I’ve yet to read a writer so precise in her language, at least not since I went on a David Foster Wallace binge last year. May she never fizzle out after this remarkable debut and may the weight that she had on me this summer, reading her book, offset the need for criticism and backlash against her, which doesn’t even trouble a glance. The draw here is, as another writer put it: “She writes like a dream.” That’s enough for me.

The New Yorker Book Review of “The Death of the Artist”

In the September 14th issue of “The New Yorker”, critic Hua Hsu reviewed “The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz, painting a portrait of the scathingly ominous perspective held by Deresiewicz on the state of the modern world’s capacity to finance artists. In bluntly critical terms, Hsu assesses these claims, and while he was perhaps a little overly focused on the negative, the two minds navigated the impasse that we seemed to have reached as a society over how any one could possibly live day-to-day as an artist in the reality of this global economy. Your dearest art student that writes this did not shy away from reading this dialogue. I instead found it fascinating. This conversation was well worth having, even if it was between two intellectuals who have no stake in the future of the arts whatsoever. Except, that is, the stake that we all share: what is owed to our souls.

Ur-Fascism

“The Name of the Rose” was one of the best mysteries I got to see on the big screen this year. The film, featuring the late Sean Connery up to some rather ridiculous, medieval, Sherlock Holmes-lite antics, was written by Umberto Eco, the author who also penned a 1995 essay where he hypothesizes what he put forth as a singular codex for contemplating fascism as a cultural phenomena. He calls it: “Ur-Fascism.” Eco ties inward self-reflection of his background as a youth in fascist Italy into a bold attempt to define what makes the ideology of fascism tick. He synthesizes the legacy of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler into his argument, concluding with a list of the core tenets of fascism that rings, to no one’s surprise, ever-prescient in 2020. It’s a stark reminder of what knowledge a post-war thinker might have had to offer a republic at war over its most fundamental values a quarter of a century later.

Exhalation

Does Ted Chiang consider himself a scientist of words? Each chapter of “Exhalation”, his acclaimed book of short science fiction, is poised as a question. He then expertly runs the simulation on the science-fiction world he’s created, whether it be virtual, alien, victorian, or surreal. But there is so much being said on the page, most certainly in story but also in the extent he has grappled with the scientific forces in our world, even going so far as to directly tackle the science-versus-religion argument by way of his fiction. Though clinical, his prose is emotional, too, often reaching the heights that his story “The Story of Your Life” did, (later adapted into “Arrival” in 2016). Equally cinematic, “Exhalation” reminded me of a laser age I once dreamed of, before everything got so complicated. In their elegance, Chiang’s stories remind me to dream again.

Watchmen

Damon Lindelof’s HBO series certainly hasn’t been left off of any popular end-of-year TV lists, especially now that TV is the dominant medium that stories are told on, and superheroes are the dominant proxies by which we project the human condition onto. Unfortunately. A testament to how good it is might just be it landing on this list, despite of its monolithic zeitgeistiness. Indeed, “Watchmen”, is that good, that interesting, that meta-textual, that revolutionary, but above all else, perhaps its draw was that it hit close to home in 2020, as an interrogation of what masked vigilantism means in a country haunted by the legacy of the KKK and freely roamed by armed and armored gunners that cross state lines to murder people. While Alan Moore’s original “Watchmen” warned of hero worship on and off of the comic book page, Lindelof’s “Watchmen” challenges how we presume to ethically prop up cultural heroes , whether they be behind the cape or the badge, using the previously unexplored character of the Hooded Justice to capture centuries-old racial rage. He uses the arc of Angela Abar (Regina King’s) character to explore how it is we can, and why the hell we still are, so hung up on fascist, spandex-clad, beef-caked jocks who beat up poor criminals as our modern day olympians. There’s also a lot of other nerdy content, but who am I kidding, you’ve heard of the show already, go watch it.

Sauvage

I first caught “Sauvage”, Camille Vidal-Naquet’s story of french prostitute brought to his lowest points in theaters at an LGBT film festival back in 2019 and I didn’t know what to make of its graphic contents. I found it to drag on and thought other parts of it were rote. Revisiting it as research in 2020, it swiftly became to me one of my favorite films of the decade. While not entirely original in its story of pathos-ridden prostitution and desperation, it was so undeniably emotional, formally rooted deep in the French tradition and illustrative of modern-day Parisian lives of the disenfranchised in their most honest form. More than that, our Draga (meaning sweetheart), embodied by Félix Maritaud, pushes his body to its furthest physical places as his soul itself is wittled away by the work he does. Sure, we have “Midnight Cowboy”, “My Own Private Idaho”, and “Mysterious Skin”; but it’s as Boy George says: “It’s not who does it first, but who does it best.”

Welcome to Chechnya

David France’s prescient “Welcome to Chechnya” exposes fascism, group-think, and the ever-powerful force of institutional homophobia in the international community via the case study of Chechnya’s “purge” of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. The film documents work done by ground-level activists: everyday heroes dedicated to extracting LGBT people from Chechnya in order to save them from execution, suicide, and corrective rape. What’s shocking is how out in the open this human rights crisis plays out, and how firmly and casually lives are discarded by a country where humanity is so quickly stripped away from a person by way of their unchosen sexual orientation. Though I enjoyed “Boys State”, this is this year’s more urgent treatise on right-wing authoritarianism.

Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series was first assigned to me as a script analysis assignment. Upon opening the PDF link I scanned a TV pilot unlike any I’d ever read before, with comic timing mapped out perfectly on the page and rapid-fire jokes spit from the mouth of a highly distinctive creator. Indeed, the most unique thing about “Fleabag” is not just “good performances”, or “good writing”. It’s really all up to the unusual fact that unlike any TV series I’ve ever seen, every shot of every episode is trained on Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. There’s no B-plots. No cutaways. Just pure, undivided attention to one of TV’s most interesting characters, ever. Though, I wouldn’t call it cinematic either. It’s intimate and moves along in such fits and starts that I’d almost categorize it as a stream-of-consciousness writing project. Perhaps Waller-Bridge’s previous playwriting experiences took heed from Beckett or Joyce. She can confidently regard these two seasons, which were lauded in their own right, as their own, sour, bottomlessly dark and comedic sort of human spectacle.

Brett Gelman’s Dinner In America

I’ve had someone who was involved in the theater bring to my attention that movies, always, always seem to pick one strictly-enforced tone, whereas plays are into doing the whole “very comedic and then very serious” thing. “Parasite” wasn’t like this, but that started off as a play, after all. But Brett Gelman most definitely went to theater school. He wants you to know this fact in his TV comedy special on race and racism: “Brett Gelman’s Dinner in America”, which incorporates all kinds of elements: juvenile “Adult Swim” experimental filmmaking, pitch-black “Borat”-esque satire, and his own personal quest to right racial wrongs in America via his comedy, which, ironically… well, just watch if you dare.

Paradise Lost

A year and a half later, I have finished John Milton’s 400-year-old, 12-book poem “Paradise Lost”. It’s not that long. Rather, the issue with getting through with it was that it was dense, and jam-packed indeed was the best piece of writing I read this year and perhaps in my entire life. A morality play of Satan, God, and Man’s faults and virtues, the poem’s language does things that no other book I’ve read could. It was also the most thrilling fantasy escapism I’ve read all year. I love epic, apocalyptic stories, yet, “Paradise Lost” is conversely the ultimate creation epic. Setting the story at the beginning of time rather than in the future of humanity was — well, we’ve already established that book is timeless in what it accomplishes. It was the most important thing I could have read this year as I contemplated justice, law, order, good, evil, right, and wrong. Only in the pandemic did I have the time for it.

The New York Review of Books’ Review of “Normal People”

Writer Lorrie Moore’s scathing, unhinged review of “Normal People” (both the book and the BBC series) by Sally Rooney had much mockery leveled at it — but — I loved it as a piece of literature both skewering millennials (whatever that even means anymore), and modern prestige TV. It’s funny, I appreciate Moore’s caustic perspective, and her writing tops that of some of the most premier pieces of written criticism, whether they be books or journalistic efforts, in terms of needless bitchery and need to prop herself up as superior writer to who it is she’s reviewing. Truth be told, I love it when critics do that.

After Class

A movie in which a cis, straight, white, humanities professor (played by Justin Long) takes on campus PC culture. Are you shielding your eyes yet? Maybe you shouldn’t! Though it would be impossible for a film like this to go without generating some controversy, Daniel Schechter’s “After Class” is a painfully honest drama that has some fairly serious modern-day commentary on political correctness, all the while telling a story of a very emotionally wrought family of hyper-verbose, intellectual Jewish New Yorkers. The controversy surrounding it might have been what got the name changed from “Safe Spaces”, but also, there’s just so much here that shouldn’t have been buried, including standout performances by Fran Drescher, Richard Schiff, and Kate Berlant. It may be my subjective taste that is bent toward stories of dysfunctional Jewish families, however. I am among one of the six people who actually watched “Transparent” through to the end.

Threads

“Threads” may be considered, above all post-atomic bomb art; among all movies, TV shows, books, and real world documents that have pushed for peace in the nuclear age, to be the single-most hard-argued case for nuclear disarmament ever made. The BBC-produced propaganda piece is the most gruesome two hours of movie I’ve ever seen, and there wasn’t a better time for me to watch than when I was reconciling with the notions of the apocalypse. In a procedurally realistic real-time format, director Mick Jackson and writer Barry Hines break down every moment of what nuclear fallout would look and feel like if it was incurred upon the lives of everyday, working-class British citizens. The film’s transition from intimately personal family drama, to revoltingly realistic depictions of a city after a nuclear strike cements this as the most jarring, violent case that has ever been made for world peace.

Fit Model

The only short film on this list holds its own among the epics and cultural juggernauts. Myna Joseph’s scant “Fit Model” is slight, nonverbal, and subversive; chronicling the day of a New York gig economy worker; her trials, tribulations, and small triumphs. It’s not much to write home about in terms of plot or things that happen, and that’s what makes it so lovely, its intimacy and specificity. It’s carried on our attachment to the strong-yet-vulnerable star Lucy Owen, and that’s all it takes to make the time spent with a seemingly real-world, ordinary woman working in a supposedly “glamorous” industry’s grueling and dehumanizing workplace transcendent. The appropriate companion piece to this? Kitty Green’s “The Assistant”.

Genesis

A teenage brother and sister fall in love with their respective objects of affection. Hearts are broken, innocence dies. It’s no new concept. Phillip Lesage’s “Genesis” follows a thoroughly trodden movie premise. Yet, that’s what makes its French-New-wave-inspired, quebecois-specific style so special to me. The execution is essentially perfect, with the recurring pop song “Outside” by TOPS, interloping and recurring inbetween scenes that jump forward in time at the rate that a young lover’s heartbeat skips. Don’t approach if you’re cautious to violence, the film contains multitudes. After all, love burns, cuts, bleeds. The film that could be considered (spiritually) the older, hotter brother to this one is the slightly more toothless love story “And Then We Danced.”

Straight Up!

James Sweeney’s candy-coated, dart-tounged “Straight Up!” is a diversion to the annals of discourse that a contemporary LGBT film might be soaked in — a highly stylized, yet personal story that feels like a cross between the Gilmore Girls and an adderall-infused “Will and Grace” plotline. Dialogue and wit sparkle in Sweeney’s tale of a gay man and straight woman’s ill-fated love. If that sounds too romantic-comedy premise-y for you — know that Sweeney is a Swiss Army Knife of talent. He writes, directs, produces, and stars — the man feels like a new voice but he has been working on a variety of projects as a crew member, such as Charlie Kaufman’s films, throughout the decade. It’s not just his quirky dialogue that wows. His stunning incorporate a sense of design and aesthetic that draws a casual viewer into a story with far deeper insights on the gay condition than one may intuit from a casual first glance.

Tokyo Olympiad

Tokyo Olympiad’s three-hour runtime doesn’t need to explain or justify itself. Director Kon Ichikawa made his epic documentary for the same reason that the Athenians lit the Olympic brazier for the first time two millennia ago; the competition is itself a testament to the human mind, body, and spirit. Paired with the fact that this was the first Olympics in Japan since the bomb was dropped, this capturing of the 1964 event on breathtaking celluloid is a humanist, pride-inducing ode to mankind’s good and exceptionalism. A much-needed watch in a 2020 when Japan’s Olympics were taken away by a common enemy. It’s a shame; this year could have used some glory.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

Cinema as a medium should have room for all perspectives. But I don’t think anyone was ready to make room for Ivan Dixon’s “The Spook Who Sat by the Door.” They weren’t in 1973, and time will tell if they will be ready in the 21st Century. This film isn’t about the history of the real Black Panther Party, nor does it condemn or laud the efforts of Democratic Black Socialists. Rather, this is a movie about a race war. Written and co-produced by the author of its source material, Sam Greenlee; it involves a fantasy CIA coup to take down the US government, and it envisions an America that riots and burns in its penance for centuries of injustice. It’s supposed to be satire, blaxploitation, camp. It doesn’t feel that way in 2020, but it was unreal and awe-inspiring to see that something this transgressive, and entertaining could even exist.

The Landlord

Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord” — written by black cinema icon Bill Gunn, opens with the question “How do we live?” posed to a community of privileged, virulently racist WASPS. One overgrown man-child in particular, played by Beaux Bridges, we watch attempt to evict, and then fall in love with, an inner-city New York black woman he’s bound to gentrify. Every scene of Gunn’s fiery screenplay is brought to life by a younger Hal Ashby, who had everything to prove before he became a legend for “Harold and Maude” and “Being There.” Both of these canonical filmmakers, operating at their best (and messiest) explore race, class, and the social and political strife of the seventies in what is, against all odds, a love story that goes so many layers deeper.

Harmony Korine: Collected Screenplays

The most politically incorrect entry on this list, Harmony Korine’s 2001 book of screenplays written both at his time in the dramatic writing program at NYU, and throughout the beginning days of his caustic filmmaking career, reads like a manifesto that’s unquenched in its thirst to break every social and cinematic convention. Korine’s screenplays are poetic, ironic, yet deathly serious in their aspirations to be the most shocking, profane, profound stories out there. He succeeds and his scripts are unforgettable. “Jokes”, as well as “Julien Donkey-Boy” and “Gummo” read as pure literature on the page.

So Pretty

“So Pretty” is a frustrating movie. Its speech, vowels, and phrases in the cinematic language are outright broken; shot on gorgeous 16 millimeter film for no reason other than to be very hipster, alt-Brooklyn, cool. The script is a shambling mess, the characters thinly drawn. Jessica Dunn Rovenelli amateurishly stars and directs. It refuses, seemingly, to be about anything but its characters’ own desire to be countercultural. But it’s unlike any film I’ve ever seen, and as a filmmaker, this micro-budget passion project by a community of queer and trans individuals is commendably bold in its patience and lack of fear to be boring: depicting everyday life from a outsider’s perspective. It’s quiet, aesthetically pleasing, a little bit inaccessible, yet it’s an exciting watch for anyone who’s out there, looking, endlessly, for those new voices and what they’re coming up with. I don’t ever want to feel like I’m outside of this wave of new ideas, new movements, new art. So long as the troublemakers never keep quiet, let’s hope that I’ll never have to.

That’s it for this year. If you need me…

…I’ll be in my isolation.