There are a few things that made Under The Dome into a television perfect storm. 1) A simple premise: Everyone is trapped under a dome. 2) A stupid premise: Mystery Dome. 3) It is funny to say the word ‘dome’ and make puns with the word ‘dome.’
For 12 weeks this summer, I spent an hour writing idiotic tweets about this show that only five people (at most) understood or found amusing. It was a fun little inside joke about the dumbest, most bonkers show to air this year.
Under The Dome is bad. Tweeting about Under The Dome is good. #dome
This was the first movie of the year that I think The Internet—as much as that can be lumped into a singular entity—rallied around. It’s not really a great movie on its own, but as an experiment of restraint for Michael Bay, it’s truly fascinating. It was also another piece of ammo for The Rock’s defenders, which I am.
Allow me to be long-winded for a second. I didn’t get into this franchise until my senior year of high school, when my English teacher (who also advised the slipshod Movie Club I presided over) said that we had to take a Movie Club field trip to see the fourth installment.
And I replied, “Oh yeah, definitely. I’m so excited,” and then I went home and torrented the first three because I had not seen any of them. So in 2009, I kinda got the appeal of the franchise, which was knowingly clumsy acting mixed with car stunts. But whenever my teacher and I discussed the franchise, I was still kinda forcing the enthusiasm.
And then Fast Five came out in 2011, and holy moly everything clicked. I got it. It was perfect. It was probably the most fun I had at the movies that year. They added The Rock and did that goddamn Looney Tunes-esque vault heist and that was great. (Sidenote: that vault heist was the subject of the first substantial freelance piece I’d ever written and that was also this year. Cool.)
So in 2013, I was losing my mind waiting for Fast 6 to come out. And it was amazing. I saw a press screening and the first thing I did upon leaving was text my English teacher and tell her how much she would love it. The continuation of subplots from two movies prior, the stinger that ties into the canonically-upcoming Tokyo Drift: the series has such a dumb, riveting attention to its continuity. It’s the Marvel universe for meatheads and I love it. I have no idea how they will recover from Paul Walker’s death, but I hope, in the spirit of the series, it will be just as batshit insane as anything else they’ve done.
Monsters University/White House Down/Man of Steel
These three aren’t really tied together except that I saw them all under similar circumstances. I had just graduated from college, and didn’t have a job, and was kinda wallowing in central New Jersey doing absolutely nothing. The few friends who were also home had jobs during the week and were responsible enough to decline going to the movies at 11 on a Tuesday night.
But I had nothing to do, so I went alone. If you want to know actual loneliness, go see Monsters University at 11 on a Tuesday night. That was a real low point of my year.
That’s nothing against Monsters U or White House Down. They were both very fun (Man of Steel: eh). But again, imagine “1 Adult Ticket for Monsters University at 11:15, please.”
My English teacher is also the person who made me binge-watch both The Wire and Friday Night Lights so we were both ready for a critically-acclaimed drama starring Michael B. Jordan. It was very good and very sad. In the parking lot afterwards, I made the joke, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose track of Michael B. Jordan,” which I was really proud of.
This movie was enjoyable and uncomfortable (see: Chekhov’s Flask; Deadbeat Coach Taylor; Sad Bob Odenkirk). Shailene’s gonna be big in 2014, you guys. I’ve read Divergent.
I also think this movie is going to have a very long tail, as teenagers pass around illegal .mp4s on USB sticks in the cafeteria, or however the hell they’re sharing media these days.
I saw this back in September, and it was beautiful. There is a wonderful and sorta heartbreaking wedding scene in it that is one of the best scenes this year. It’s also interesting to see Miyazaki tackle historical fiction, which isn’t usually his thing.
Anyhow, BAM was playing trailers for it over Christmas and they play up how it’s Miyazaki’s last film and I teared up. I normally don’t cry at actual movies and here I was getting sad about a dang trailer. Life’s weird.
The backstory to this one is that at least a decade ago, I read Ender’s Game in my enrichment class and I loved it and told my brother to read it. He also loved it, and then we looked online to see if they were making a movie. We found articles saying that they were, so we got very excited for the movie. And we kept waiting and waiting. Rosie O’Donnell was involved at some point? My brother and I did not know that they’d been trying to make this movie for three decades.
Finally, this year, the Ender’s Game movie came out. It was okay! Not great, but good enough given how long we’d been waiting for this damn movie. They could have showed us a blank wall for three hours and called it Ender’s Game and we’d still have walked out of the theater like, “Yo, Bean fucking rules!”
Spike Jonze is a very talented and inimitable director, and this was charming, but a lot of it is Joaquin Phoenix talking to a disembodied voice and that can get really draining after a while. I do like the attention to detail in addressing why the hell an AI would make breathing sounds; I thought of that and then the film addressed it. That’s smart.
In conclusion, bring back Microsoft Bob, the only god OS. (I meant to type “good OS” but mistyped “god OS” and, to be honest, I like it better that way.)
Oh goodness, this fucking ruled. I mean, I was 99% on board before I had even seen it. The first quarter of this year was dominated by me working exhaustively through Scorsese’s oeuvre for my senior thesis, and I loved him already but now I have Stockholm Syndrome for him. He can do no wrong.
One of the things I learned by watching Goodfellas six times in the span of just a few months is that that movie is funny. Really funny in the way that watching prideful buffoons before the fall is always funny. The Wolf of Wall Street is the comedic counterpart to Goodfellas.
The two form an enthralling, hellish, Janusian demythologization of the American Dream. It is astoundingly funny and easily the best movie I saw all year. I hope classes will be doing shot-by-shot analyses of the Quaalude sequence for decades to come.
Also, I almost interviewed Thelma Schoonmaker for my thesis but she was too busy cutting together this beast of a film. In the email she sent to the middleman trying to connect us, she referred to me as “Ben Feldman.”
Good fucking lord. I used to reflexively roll my eyes at detractors who’d argue that video games are puerile nonsense, but I have no excuse for this. Duke Nukem Forever is toxic trash. That it exists is an embarrassment to anyone who owns a video game console. It is the first mainstream game I have ever played that is, according to the criteria of the Miller test, obscene. Just vile.
Publisher THQ went belly-up at the end of 2012, so I knew I had to snag a copy of this masterpiece before it became a serious collector’s item. You play as 50 Cent, in an unspecified Middle Eastern country, shooting up hordes of enemies in order to get back a diamond-encrusted crystal skull. There is a button just for trash talk. Non-diegetic G-Unit and 50 Cent tracks play the entire time. There is a point where you’re in a Humvee and your chosen sidekick—I was partial to Tony Yayo—yells, “YO FITTY JUMP OVER THAT BIG-ASS RAMP.” It’s nonsense. I loved it.
I think it says something that I just borrowed this from a friend instead of purchasing it. I just wasn’t that excited for it. The thing about BioShock Infinite is that it gives off the appearance of greater cultural knowledge, but doesn’t capitalize on it. It’s a video game that incorporates things like racial inequality, Randian Ojectivism, religious scripture, and pop music, but does nothing with them except tell a clunky time travel story. All of those cultural markers acknowledge a greater whole outside the bounds of the game’s fiction, but that’s all it does: acknowledge, never engage.
In others words, only half credit for that beautiful barbershop quartet rendition of “God Only Knows” and then doing nothing else with that concept.
One of the smartest games I played this year. There aren’t enough cowboy games. Most importantly, it has an ingenious framing device based around an unreliable narrator, allowing levels to transform at will and contextualizing repetition and non-linearity within its narrative. I hope to see this kind of game again.
I feel like this game could not have happened without the three games that came before it. By which I mean, IV would not have as much punch if the original Saints Row hadn’t been so damn mediocre. Part of the thrill has been watching this GTA ripoff grow into its own self-aware franchise with a varied and vibrant cast of characters. I mean, you literally team up with Rowdy Roddy Piper to rescue Keith David in a They Live tribute level.
Saints Row is the Fast & Furious of video games. It knows its strengths, it knows its weaknesses, and it plays to both.
Oh boy. This game is okay. The main problem is that GTA’s style of humor—biting, explicit criticism vaguely couched in parody—just doesn’t hold up anymore. The schtick has always been to make explicit what is in real life implicit, and that just comes across as lazy now. I think that American culture as a whole has become a lot more self-aware than it was in 2008, and GTA just feels ham-fisted now.
The setting is amazing and vibrant, and there’s nothing like that moment of seeing Los Santos come into view over a ridge as Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights” blasts through the radio. I just wish that none of the characters ever talked.
It feels really cool that one of the best games I played this year consists walking around an empty house looking at riot grrrl zines listening to riot grrrl music. The ending relies just a bit too much on deus ex machina, and I agree with Lord Bogost that the narrative on its own feels very teen lit, but in the context of gameplay, it works. And as one of the first bigger-than-indie steps towards a more diverse gaming landscape, it feels revelatory.
People keep talking about the end, which is great, but can we talk about the level where you have to do a bunch of messed-up shit to giant corpses, like cutting off a leg or firing a giant crossbow bolt into a dude’s head? OR COVERING YOURSELF IN BLOOD? That part ruled.
The Middlesteins, Jami Attenberg
This is the first book I read for fun this year and it was really sweet and melancholy. The one part I remember vividly is the two twins performing a hip-hop dance at their B’nai Mitzvah set to “I Gotta Feeling.” I loved it because 1) that is too real, and 2) Attenberg never actually names the song, so the reader feels the additional shame of recognizing it from a vague description.
Very Recent History, Choire Sicha
I think that I bought this the day after I had moved to New York City to start my first Real Life Adult Job, and I think its the first book everyone should read when moving to New York. This city is weird and this book does a good job of explaining how weird it is. It’s critical in a way that still seems hopeful and I like that.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao/Drown/This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz
I’ve been meaning to read Oscar Wao since high school because a girl I had a gigantic crush on was reading it and I thought to myself, because I am an idiot, “I should read that and she’ll be impressed.” I never got around to reading it in time.
Anyhow, I was on Nantucket this summer, and I was like, “I’m finally gonna do it. I’m gonna read this book.” So I bought it. And then I didn’t get around to reading it for another four months.
But then I read it! It’s wonderful! The idea of a geeky, socially incompetent guy from New Brunswick, New Jersey hits close to home. The passage where Oscar throws himself off the train tracks onto Route 18? That’s my train station. I have photographed that spot on many occasions.
Then I plowed through Junot Díaz’s other short story compilations, and they were great too. There’s a part in the final story in This Is How You Lose Her where a character gets hurts on Mass Ave. on the corner in front of The Plough and Stars which made me nostalgic for about nine months ago when my friends and I would walk to the Cantab Lounge in Central and then stumble back.
I like when people write about very specific places I’m intimately familiar with, like that train track or that street corner.
MUSIC
Music criticism is, I think, pretty pointless. I take a holistic approach; it’s a 3-stage scale of ‘like,’ ‘dislike,’ or ‘whatever’ and I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Here are the albums that came out in 2013 that I liked.
The Bones Of What You Believe, CHVRCHES
Random Access Memories, Daft Punk
I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams, Diarrhea Planet
Talon of the Hawk, The Front Bottoms
Same Trailer Different Park, Kacey Musgraves
Wakin on a Pretty Daze, Kurt Vile
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