Things That I Have Loved In 2016

-This is in no hierarchical order. Spoilers for many things are incoming.

Things I Have Enjoyed In 2016:

1. Hail Caesar!, directed by The Coen Bros.

Hail Caesar isn’t the Coens’ most emotionally incisive work or their funniest, but it is worthwhile for the pure joy they take in indulging in retro tropes. When they have Channing Tatum do a musical number, there’s a joke in how unknowingly homoerotic it is, yes, but that’s not the entirety of the scene. It’s a very well done musical number, intricate and lively, and they find their joy in that. The film as a whole is more about finding some semblance of truth in an absurd world than the pure joy of musicals, but the closest it comes is that beautiful musical number.

2. The Scumbag! episode 7 and Chapo Trap House episode 12

There’s a lot to love about the Chapo Trap House, but my favorite aspect is Felix Biederman’s love for weirdos on line. These two episodes of his podcasts, the episode of Scumbag! focusing on internet goofuses Rich Piana(a bodybuilder intent on proving an unclear point by becoming unnecessarily big), DemoniusX(a gamer who hates women, but has ditched the racism shit), and Dan Quinn(the football player, meth addict, and mixed marital artist who discovered PureH20 and the spinning effect of stevia and weed) and the episode of Chapo Trap House where he, alongside fellow Cafe writer Virgil Texas, focuses on the political pundits who formed the core of Carl Diggler, America’s $1 Pundit. One of my most cherished loves in life is people explaining their passions. It’s why I love the wine manga The Drops Of God, and it’s why I love these episodes of these podcasts more than the other excellent episodes they have to offer.

3. Woodland Secrets, hosted by Merritt Kopas

Most interview shows are guided by what the person being interviewed has to say about themselves or what they have to sell, but Woodland Secrets isn’t. It’s much more languid, taking the guest as a whole person and exploring their interests, what they’ve been interested in lately, sometimes connecting to their work, sometimes not. Whatever approach, it still comes off as a pure conversation, unaffected by the interests of commerce and solely interested in how this person, as a person, navigates their life. This podcast isn’t perfect for every occasion, but it works very well when you’re exhausted and just want to lay around while two people have a chat about inconsequential things, the details of everyday life, or just what they get a chuckle from.

4. The Video Essays of Harris Bomberguy

2016 was a phenomenal year for Mr. Bomberguy, as he expanded his repertoire from videos goofing on alt right morons to videos about video games to longer videos about video games to whatever the fuck this is, tackling each new topic with the same breathless enthusiasm, incisive analytical eye, and devastating wit.

5. Morgan, directed by Luke Scott

Morgan has been compared to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, with the fact both films feature a central character who is both female and not entirely human being subjected to the scrutiny of an audience identification character, their essential humanity in the hands of the slightly characterized main character but mostly given to the viewer. The difference is that the viewpoint character in Ex Machina is given an illusion of objectivity that the viewpoint character in Morgan isn’t. From her first scene, Lee Weathers (played by Kate Mara) is a tool of corporate interests, and these corporate interests are played against a familiar setting, as the entire staff of the secret base where Morgan(Anya Taylor-Joy) has been raised to be a government assassin have a familial closeness that belies their real purpose. For the first two thirds of Morgan, there’s a friction between the more corporate-minded members of the staff who want Morgan to be a useful weapon and the members who value her as a person, recognizing that she’s not just capable of intense violence but has an emotional life of her own. The film doesn’t entirely stick the landing, with the final third kind of shitting the bed, but it plays its variation of “humanoid machine interacting with human society that doesn’t quite see it as equal” in a unique and interesting way.

6. Kentucky Route Zero Act IV by Cardboard Computer

Kentucky Route Zero Act 4 was released with literally no fanfare in July, and that’s very fitting. After two years of waiting for the next chunk of the game, it just appeared, and that sort of anticlimax is what the game thrives on. This is not a game with big build-ups to climactic sequences, but a series of little moments that are tangential to everything else, like the clips you capture on Ezra’s tape recorder. It’s reminiscent of one of my favorite movies, Two-Lane Blacktop, in that it chronicles a trip by focusing on the unimportant elements, disregarding the destination to explore the experience of waiting on a vehicle, being in motion while remaining still.

7. The Hateful Eight, directed by Quentin Tarantino/Tarantino Goes West by Sean Witzke

Quentin Tarantino is one of the more obsessive film fans in recent memory, famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of film and the ways he puts that knowledge to use, creating stories that feel like new things created out of old parts, the way George Lucas mixed Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa, and John Ford into something that feels unique and nostalgic all at once, and The Hateful Eight is very similar. As Sean Witzke shows in his still-ongoing video essay series Tarantino Goes West, Hateful Eight draws from across the entire history of Western film to create a Western that is explicitly in dialogue with its entire history, casting a skeptical eye on Hollywood’s conception of the West.

8. Suicide Squad, directed by David Ayer

Suicide Squad is weird, because while it isn’t a great movie, or even a good one, it’s not as bad as the cultural consensus paints it to be. I’ve already written about my take on its politics, but those politics are only part of a tone that I appreciated. Suicide Squad is the only DC film in at least a decade to really attempt to be pulp, to indulge in its own sort of grimy neon style instead of trying to imitate the dry, respectable seriousness of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies or the flat, wholesome, and chipper MCU movies. It’s been compared to Guardians Of The Galaxy, and those comparisons do hold, but taking that similarity as the entire story does a disservice to both. Suicide Squad’s pulp aesthetic is more accurately compared to something in the vein of Hobo With A Shotgun. They use their formula action structures as jumping off points for stylish vignettes, character comedy(more prominent in the extended cut), and half-baked political consciousness, and superhero film as a whole indulging in that instead of cramming in sequel hooks to the movies planned five or seven years down the line is something I’d like to see more often.

9. Nashville, Short Cuts, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, directed by Robert Altman (Not from 2016, everything under this is probably also not from 2016 unless otherwise stated)

This year, I started getting into Robert Altman, and guess what, he’s good at making movies. Nashville and Short Cuts in particular had an element that’s hard to explain, but that I love. This is going to sound pretentious, but here’s W. H. Auden’s Musee Des Beaux Arts, a poem about a painting:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Here’s the painting:

What Auden is basically saying is that all the disparate elements in this painting, all the things that are happening in the vicinity of that tiny pair of legs in the bottom right, the Icarus the painting is named after, are completely apart from it. Nobody else in that painting gives a solitary shit that a boy has just fallen into the ocean, and Altman’s movies are the same way. When three men discover a body in the river while going on a fishing trip, the rest of the film, all the other stories happening in LA, are entirely unaffected, even if those three men are completely shaken by it. That’s not to say these stories are completely unconnected, there are moments where these threads bump against each other, but those threads never tie together the way they would in movies with similar structures that are really fucking bad but still managed to win Best Picture in 2005 because the Academy Awards are completely worthless.

10. A bunch of books I’m gonna put in one entry, some of which weren’t from 2016

I read a lot of Vonnegut this year, but my favorite was Breakfast Of Champions. It’s maximalist but also super intimate, and it delves into self-hatred and depression in a way that’s both super cutting but also very funny.(Other good Vonneguts: God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Galapagos, Slaughterhouse-5, but you already knew that one) Nevada by Imogen Binnie is something that’s been talked about a lot already but it’s really really good, go read it, I’m not gonna try to influence your expectations any more than I already have. Woman On The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy is a book from the 70s I started reading last year but only got around to finishing this year, and its vision of a future that’s not exactly utopian but has made some really important strides is something that strikes me as important at a time when the immediate future looks to be that everything is fucked and everybody sucks. Close Range by Annie Proulx has a lot of good stories in it, not just “Brokeback Mountain”, but “People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water” and “The Bunchgrass Edge Of The World” stand out. Gina Wynbrandt’s Someone Please Have Sex With Me is maybe the funniest thing I’ve read this entire year. Kelly: The Cartoonist America Turns To is a close second, but might not be as funny if you haven’t destroyed your mind with political cartoons. Torrey Peters is one of the best authors I’ve discovered this year, and her novellas The Masker and Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones are phenomenal, merging strong character writing with sharp observations on how online and offline subcultures fracture within themselves. I also finished Gravity’s Rainbow, which is basically a novelization of Pizzagate.

Here are just lists with no explanations because I’ve already written a lot in this article, just, I don’t know, tweet at me if you want me to talk more about them.

Movies

Top Ten New Releases Of 2016

1. Edge Of Seventeen
2. Nice Guys
3. Moonlight (these top 3 are essentially tied)
4. Hell Or High Water
5. La La Land
6. Hail, Caesar!
7. Arrival
8. War Dogs
9. Everybody Wants Some!!
10. Suicide Squad/Morgan (The Interesting Ideas That Weren’t Pulled Off As Well As They Could Have Been Award)

Top 12 New To Me Of 2016

January: Nashville (HM: Phantom Of The Paradise, Lady Snowblood)

February: Persona (HM: Blade, Whiplash)

March: The Seventh Seal (HM: Get Carter)

April: Carol (HM: Under The Skin and Tango And Cash)

May: Safe (HM: It’s Such A Beautiful Day, Angels In America, North By Northwest, The Rules Of The Game, The Wild Bunch)

June: Tongues Untied (HM: The Face Of Another)

July: Playtime (HM: Drive, Near Dark, Miracle Mile)

August: Smokin’ Aces (HM: Evil Dead 2)

September: Tangerine

October: McCabe and Mrs. Miller (HM: The Innocents, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, Make Way For Tomorrow, Return Of The Living Dead, Slaughterhouse-5)

November: Short Cuts (HM: Bob Roberts, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Butch and Sundance)

December: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (HM: Cosmopolis)

Worst, New Or Old, Of 2016:

1. Breakfast Of Champions (I’m probably gonna write about this movie eventually, please pester me about that, I hate it so fucking much)
2. Immortal Ad Vitam
3. Mascots
4. Beginners
5. True Memoirs Of An International Assassin

Music:

Ten Albums From 2016 I Enjoyed In 2016, In No Order

1. The Life Of Pablo, Kanye West
2. Untitled Unmastered, Kendrick Lamar
3. Shape Shift With Me, Against Me!
4. Emotion Side B, Carly Rae Jepsen
5. 24K Magic, Bruno Mars
6. Blood Bitch, Jenny Hval
7. Love You To Death, Tegan And Sarah
8. Blackstar, David Bowie
9. My Woman, Angel Olsen
10. Cashmere, Swet Shop Boys

Videogames:

Ten Games I Played In 2016 That Were Good Despite Being Video Games, Because Video Games Are Bad

1. Ladykiller In A Bind
2. XCOM 2
3. idiots.win/damn.dog
4. Fire Pro Wrestling Returns
5. Fallout New Vegas
6. Civ 5
7. Shadowrun Returns
8. The Beginner’s Guide
9. Pony Island
10. Ghost Trick

Podcasts:

Podcasts More People Should Listen To:

1. Extra Credit
2. Comic Books Are Burning In Hell/Travis Bickle On The Riviera
3. Fireside Friends
4. The Nostalgia Trap
5. One From The Vaults