As we continue our year-end coverage, we come to the annual questions that asks staff and readers about pop culture from years past:
What non-2018 pop culture did you finally get around to this year?
Caitlin PenzeyMoog
I’m really, really slow to absorb new music, but when I find an album or song I like, I tend to listen to it on repeat for weeks, sometimes months. Thus it was that I got really into Fleetwood Mac this year, mostly Rumors but some Tusk as well. I know there is nothing revelatory about discovering that Fleetwood Mac is one of the greatest bands of all time, and that Rumors fucking rocks. The way I see it is my sluggish listening habits allow me to spread out hearing the world’s best music for the first time for much longer than the person who went through all the greats in high school and their early 20s. Spotify Wrapped, where Spotify tells you what you listened to the most over the past year, tells me it doesn’t have enough information about me to give me the data—I guess that goes to show how little music I listen to overall—but I’m guessing I’ve listened to Rumors straight through more than a hundred times, specifically the “Super Deluxe” version, because “Silver Springs” is an incredible song. Listening to this album—really listening—ties into last year’s pop culture resolution, which was to just sit and listen to music, giving it my full attention instead of half-listening while scrolling through Twitter. What I’ve taken away from really paying attention to Rumors is that sometimes the drums are really good, and sometimes they act like a voice in the songs. Music! It’s good.
Alex McLevy
My own personal pop-culture blind spot that I finally rectified this year (foreshadowing!) was to correct an oversight in my own TV knowledge, and watch a critically acclaimed show that had nonetheless fallen through the cracks of the oversaturated television landscape: The Sundance channel’s indelible drama Rectify. I had been assured by no less an authority than my TV editor Erik Adams that it was indeed one of the finest programs in recent years, and I needed to get on it post-haste. When at last I did, earlier this spring, I was rewarded with a complex and deeply meditative series about the value we assign to human life and how we create meaning for ourselves. The story—a man is released from death row for a wrongful murder conviction after nearly two decades behind bars, only to find that almost no one is ready or willing to let him move on, including himself—is deceptively simple, and as the layers of his fractured family begin to peel back and reveal themselves, the cast and crew deliver a powerfully felt narrative of uncertainty and regret, reminding the viewer that we’re all constantly a hair’s breadth away from our lives being upended completely, and whether that should even matter in terms of how we live. I’m holding off on the final season, in part because I want to take my time and savor it; but also, if I’m being honest, because I don’t want it to end.
Clayton Purdom
I’m probably going to lose my rap-critic license for this, but I have in the past month or so finally cracked the Boosie Badazz catalog, and it is glorious. He’s long had a reputation as a god-level emcee, Tupac from Baton Rouge, with a decades-long career sprawled across loose singles, remixes, unofficial mixtapes, compilations, muddled but occasionally brilliant comeback and crossover moments, and so on; equally compelling is the rapper’s story, a Job-like series of ordeals including endless legal trouble, overlapping imprisonments, a scary bout with cancer, a name change, and near-constant record-label shuffling. There are as many suggestions for possible entry points as there are, well, possible entry points; I just had the 2006 record Bad Azz on recently, and was overcome with gratitude not just for his emphatic, indomitable delivery, but the knowledge that I have approximately one billion other Boosie Badazz records to sift through.
Sam Barsanti
Daredevil is one of my all-time favorite fictional characters and Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One is my favorite comic book, but until this year I had never gotten around to reading anything from Frank Miller’s legendary run on Daredevil. Unfortunately, at the risk of being overly critical of a classic, I think I would’ve been fine if I had never bothered. A lot of Miller’s work has aged dreadfully, but his Daredevil comics in particular just try so hard to be “edgy” that it sucks all of the swashbuckling fun out of Ol’ Hornhead. I get that the stories are from a different era and that it was important for comics to be granted a bit more maturity, but was it really necessary to have Karen Page become a desperate junkie just so she could expose Daredevil’s secret identity? It’s all too bitter and mean-spirited for me, and it’s a shame that the next few decades of Daredevil comics were spent reeling from the fallout of the ridiculously grim shit that Miller pulled.
Erik Adams
I spent a lot of my year at the world’s greatest movie house, Chicago’s own Music Box Theater, taking care of some of the more egregious blindspots in my personal filmgoing history: Classics I only knew via reputation and references like Sunset Boulevard; epics like Lawrence Of Arabia and The Sound Of Music (both in 70mm!). But with all due apologies to Billy Wilder, Peter O’Toole, and Julie Andrews, the inaugural viewing from 2018 that’ll stick with me the longest is a Sunday-morning Music Box matinee of Joe Dante’s 1989 horror-comedy The ’Burbs. The nosy-neighbor caper shares of whiff of old Hollywood with those more reputable repertory screenings: Its cast is stacked with marquee names like Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, and Bruce Dern, and the whole thing takes place on a cul-de-sac that’s a permanent fixture of the Universal backlot. But it’s driven by an energy more typical of the cartoons that would’ve run before those features, Dante’s signature anarchy turning a seemingly quiet subdivision on its head as Hanks—urged on by Dern’s loopy military vet, Rick Ducommun as the ideal late-’80s sidekick, and Corey Feldman in the Corey Feldman role—mounts suspicions about the late-night activities of the folks next door. The satirical sting has dulled across the past three decades, but Dante’s Looney Tunes sensibility hasn’t; The ’Burbs would make a fantastic first half of a double feature with the faux-Fincher intensity of this year’s Game Night. It should also convince some filmmaker or other to allow Tom Hanks to be this unabashedly goofy on-screen again.
Nick Wanserski
I try to be judicious with my recommendations. Everyone’s tastes are different and nobody has the time to consume all the good pop culture out there. That said, it’s been impossible for me to not be a loud-mouthed evangelist to everyone about the astonishing graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. The site has already covered it extensively and rightfully so. It’s more confidently told and massive in scale than works made by long-established creators, which makes it all the more amazing for being illustrator Emil Ferris’ publishing debut. The story revolves around Karen, a 10-year-old obsessed with monsters, and how she uncovers the strange history of her murdered upstairs neighbor. Set primarily in the early ’60s, Karen’s story strongly evokes Lynda Barry in presenting a layered, unsentimental account of how hard it can be just to be a kid. But the scale gets bigger and more surreal as Karen delves deeper into the recorded account of her neighbor’s life. For as engaging as the story is, the art work is singular and exceptional. Done entirely as ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, Ferris shifts between photorealism to sketchy, cartoonish caricature on a single page, and produces delicate shading that seems impossible with such a simple tool. This book is already a classic.
Danette Chavez
Everyone, including our own Katie Rife, was right about Mitski. Be The Cowboy is one of the best albums of 2018, both incredibly self-composed and revealing. I’m not (too) embarrassed to admit that I listened to “Me And My Husband” for hours a week at certain points in the year, until I realized there were other Mitski albums I could consume. That led me to 2016’s Puberty 2, an intense and sprawling album that makes me wish I’d allowed myself to have a messier adolescence. Now it’s “My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars”—every bit as jagged and burning as the heavenly bodies in its title—that plays on a loop.
William Hughes
2018 was the year when I finally let my lurking love of body horror and Lovecraft-inspired unease draw me into the works of Japanese manga master Junji Ito. Ito’s work has been passed along online for years now, pretty much any time someone wanted to give their friends a feeling of disgust that went deeper than mere shock images could provoke. Like Lovecraft, he has an ongoing fascination and distaste for the things that lurk, unseen and alien, beneath the seas. (See, for instance, the titular Thing That Drifted Ashore.) But his most awful stories derive their horror from our own compulsive behaviors, whether it’s the irresistible, ugly attraction of spirals in Uzumaki, or the human-shaped holes that draw doomed souls in in his short story The Enigma Of Amigara Fault. In Ito’s monstrous worlds, there’s no beating the ugly things your brain might make you do, but at least it’s nice to have a new bit of vocabulary for the language of my nightmares, right?
Katie Rife
I scratched a few titles off of my “you’ve never seen that?!” list in 2018, but the most delightful of them was Tampopo, which I was inspired to finally sit down and watch (RIP FilmStruck) after asking “what is this?” no less than twice when it was on in the background at a party I went to back in April. It’s not often that you get to see a new favorite movie, but Juzo Itami’s playful comedy about food, sex, and movies (in that order) through the medium of a run-down noodle shop is such a warm, wise, whimsical treat for the senses that it instantly, easily cracked my top 10 of all time.
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Black PantherWait, that was THIS YEAR?
The two which stand out for my are Masaaki Yuasa and Kôji Morimoto’s Mind Game, it’s a stunning, completely bizarre piece of anime which I loved an enormous amount, and Lemonade Joe, a crazy western made in Czechoslovakia in the sixties which is also a musical, it’s a huge amount of fun and has a joyously daft ending. I’m not even much of a fan of westerns but I adored this, and it’s up on youtube in full:
i finally binged watched parks & rec and the office on netflix. P&R i had never watched before, but it was fantastic. i had actually watched a lot of the office when it was on (during my college years) but i think i just stopped watching after season 5 or 6. i decided to go rewatch it from the start. currently starting S8 right now so i’m hoping i can finish it all by 2018.
Parks & Rec – a relatively unacknowledged classic. It’s like the Simpsons with real people, if Lisa grew up. Well, sort of.
Yeah, I think if you look at hourly blocks of television, the Community/Parks and Recreation hour on NBC may have been the most consistently funny comedy hours at least since Frasier or Seinfeld was on, if not ever. It was a damned shame that neither show ever got the ratings or the awards to match the caliber of the writing or performances.
100%. Community, 30 Rock, and Parks and Rec was by far the best programming lineup I’ve ever watched.
You can’t analyze it without mentioning the classic TWO hour block it was apart of. I will always remember the Community/Parks and Recreation/The Office/30 Rock lineup as appointment viewing in my high school years.
really? i kind of feel it gets its dues particularly from fans. every now and then some P&R post on reddit makes it up to the front page.
I should hope that its fans give it its due… 😉 But I get what you’re saying.I was meaning more like its ratings should have been higher when it it was on, and that the general public should consider it on par with other classic sitcoms.
I’ve thought that same thing – it wouldn’t take too many tweaks to make it a live-action Simpsons spin-off about a grown-up Lisa.
Ooh, I did that too!
Oh, yeah, I watched Parks & Rec this year, too. This has been a really long year. Doesn’t help that I moved in the summer, so the first half feels like another life almost.
After two years of nagging by friends, I finally watched season one of Stranger Things. And I’m kicking myself for listening to the one person in 2016 who told me it was ‘meh,’ because the mix of the Stephen King and X-Files filtered through an 80’s prism was lab created exactly for my tastes. Also, all the memes I saw in fall two years ago make sense now.
I guess that would be mine as well. My daughter started watching it from the beginning and I happened to be in the room at the time. Now I can’t wait for the next season.
but did you go and watch rabid, the brood, firestarter, the fury, all the things it was putting into a blender and making a pastiche out of?
Dude, I watched all those in the 80s multiple times.
Then that put you way ahead of 99% of the people who watched it and never went back to the source material. I found it to be an uninspired blender pastiche with a few highlights (and I think the duffer brothers are creepy), but to each their own. The second season was at least only 80% derivative (ET/IT/ET/IT). But it mainly annoyed me because the people wearing the t-shirts didn’t then go back and watch those movies. I once saw someone wearing a Che Guevara t that said “I have no idea who this is.”
I’m half on your side and half wanting to roll my eyes until they bleed at how obviously you’re being a hipster gatekeeper. Like… Yeah, it would be *nice* if people used Stranger Things as a gateway drug to its influences. And sure, the show is pretty shallow and obvious about those influences. But that doesn’t inherently make it bad. And there’s enough originality in it to appeal to the non-jaded. Or non-affected, if I’m being slightly saltier.In general I find a lot of criticism of the show to come with a heaping helping of unnecessarily cranky dismissal.
a) not a lot of incentive to adopt un-hyperbolic and reasonable positions on the internets!b) it isn’t being a gatekeeper…I didn’t like it (and I’m allowed to not like it) but if you did that’s fine as long as you THEN watch the older things, not just buying all sorts of posters and clothes ripping off 80s Stephen King trade paperbacks without ever reading them.c) also hard to give anyone a pass who likes Stranger Things but doesn’t like American Horror Story…they’re just different pastiche blends…I prefer the Tanzanian Peabody Winner
Okay, c) is just goddam nonsense. For all its faults *at least* Stranger Things tells a cogent story. AHS isn’t *even* pastiche. It’s pastiche loaf. Pastiche head cheese. It’s the dollar store ripoff of pastiche.
What’s your stance on 5 year olds that watch Looney Tunes, but have no intention of watching It Happened One Night?
Do you mean before puberty or before they die? If the second just push them into the quicksand part of the sandbox now and spare me their IMDB soft-curve.
Sounds like a plan. I know some first grade kids that damn well knew to move on from Goodfeathers to Goodfellas right away, so they’re probably up for the task of sending the necessary message.
Now I just want to hear them singing, “Why can’t we perch on Scorsese’s head!?” and telling Robert Goulet jokes.
If you liked Stranger Things, try its predecessor, Perfect Strangers.
And then Perfect Strangers’ predecessor, Seeing Things..NOTE: you’ve just been Canconned!
My favorite/favourite(1) episode of Seeing Things(2) was the one where Louis Del Grande’s head exploded.1. Translation provided by the Canadian Department of Translation Canada/Département Canadien de la Traduction Canada
2. “Les Scannaires”, S1E7, 1981
I was about to apologize for possibly being that person, but I don’t think I saw it until 2017. Also, I don’t want to apologize, because the show contributes to the trend of lazily pandering toward nostalgia.
I wondered what all the fuss about it was, since every prick on reddit and facebook et al would not shut up about it.I could see the appeal for it, sure, on the subject matter, I guess. Fuckit, I have a Netflix account, I’ll give it a go-Bam. Opening scene is a bunch of children, in a dark basement, playing Dungeons and Dragons.Ah. That’s why the neckbeards won’t shut up.
So in preparation for my upcoming Year of Queer (where I’m watching/reading/listening primarily to LGBTQ-themed and -authored movies/books/music (after 29 years of consuming heteronormative media, I need a good paradigm shift)), I started listening to Pansy Division, an all-gay male pop-punk band from 1993. The basic instrumentation and simplistic lyrics are a great stylistic choice to emphasize how basic and innate these sorts of gay themes are for a good number of people. The songs themselves run the gamut from (on the earlier albums) dealing with straight assumptions about who has the women’s role in a relationship to classic tired-of-the-scene-and-want-a-boyfriend song to cutting negative queens out of your life to (on the later albums) feelings of personal dread and shame and more internalized lyrics. (That shift mirrors a similar change in the “maturity” of songs that blink-182 and Green Day had over the course of their career.)
I haven’t had the chance to dig into their later stuff (last album released was in 2016!), but their early stuff is sadly underknown and would make for pretty good drag king or drag queens songs (sure, they might not be well known, but the lyrics are easy to follow along to the first time listening and have some funny witticisms that would work well for a gay audience).
One of my favorites (that’s also SFW; a lot of the songs are explicit):
(they also have a Christmas song called, what else, “Homo Christmas” that I recommend but, again, the music video is NSFW so check it out on youtube yourself)
One of the first concerts I ever attended was the Pansy Division opening for Green Day in a small venue (less than a 1000 people) when I was 14 or 15. This was right around when Longview was starting to blow up. It was probably the first time I saw people not only openly gay, but making jokes about it for 35 minutes straight. It was really surprising as a high school student. I am pretty sure Green Day took them out again on their first larger venue tour as well. I think that crowd was less than receptive.
Their humor has been a good part of my enjoyment. They’re jokes driven from their gay experiences and gay life in the early 90s, and not jokes at the expense of being gay. There’s no homophobia. Hell, they were pushing back against fem-shaming on their second song from their first album! “He’s a fem in a black leather jacket/ He’s a gem in a black leather jacket”
I was so confused when I found out that “The Queers” were another band on Lookout!. I honestly thought people were talking about Pansy Division for the longest time. They were so open about their homosexuality. I had never experienced something like it. And then I found out that the Queers weren’t gay. And all of their songs were about girls.
They were so open about their homosexuality. I had never experienced something like it.Exactly! Even in 2018 and being an out gay man myself, hearing how candid and open and forthright and unabashed they are about their homosexuality was a jolt. It wasn’t just songs talking about their gay lives or general gay love songs; it was about concepts and groups within gay male homosexual spaces and experiences. I felt like Pansy Division was having a dialogue with the culture as well as making sex jokes. I additionally felt closer almost psychically (not in the ESP sense, but in a sort of empathic way) with what gay life was like in the early 90s than I ever have with watching gay movies taking place then. Like I could picture myself right now at nearly 30 listening to these albums back in the early-to-mid 90s, using my memories as a slight San Junipero-y way. (I’m also slightly stoned soooo I might be reading into it too much.)
Oof, just read the Wikipedia article about them, and the lead singer Joe Queer (eyeroll) said: “Black Lives Matter doesn’t care about black people, they just want to cause trouble and hate white people. If they truly cared they’d be in the ghettos of America trying to help there instead of screaming about white America. That’s where the murders of black people are happening, but according to BLM it’s all white cops who are doing it! It’s insane thinking and not getting to the root of the problem at all. All lives matter.”
Yea. A lot of the guys from the punk scene who were angry young teenagers 25 years ago are now old angry white men.
“Groovy Underwear” is, no joke, my favorite song ever.
And a great suggestion! They have some really good almost PSA songs. I enjoyed “Crabby Day” where they teach the listener how to treat their crabs as well as tell as touching “want to have sex” story.
Kopek…is that a slavic name?
Hans. A fine Christian name. Hans Christian Andersen!
“A lot of Miller’s work has aged dreadfully, but his Daredevil comics in particular just try so hard to be “edgy” that it sucks all of the swashbuckling fun out of Ol’ Hornhead. I get that the stories are from a different era and that it was important for comics to be granted a bit more maturity, but was it really necessary to have Karen Page become a desperate junkie just so she could expose Daredevil’s secret identity? It’s all too bitter and mean-spirited for me, and it’s a shame that the next few decades of Daredevil comics were spent reeling from the fallout of the ridiculously grim shit that Miller pulled.”Can we please please please PLEASE not view every single piece of pop culture that has come before 2016 through the “indignation filter” on the lens that is 2018? Please?
It should also be noted Miller’s run had the single most fun issue of Daredevil: issue 185, ‘Guts’. Foggy Nelson pretending to be an underground criminal badass while Turk Daredevil has to secretly run constant interference, complete with a classic Turk humiliation. Daredevil did go dark during his run but there was a levity and a consistent theme of people overcoming their darkness (Heather gets majorly screwed though).
I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the anti-fridge movement, but I do wish that at some point, the people who get angry about such things would release a list of what’s acceptable to have happen to a female character in a comic book. The answer can’t be just “anything, so long as the character is written as a real person and not a plot device”, because Miller wrote Karen Page as a very real person with very real strengths and weaknesses, who was not just a victim but a person whose choices and motivations were integral to the plot, and that’s apparently still not good enough for Sam Barsanti.Jesus Christ. We’re at the point where these people got me defending FRANK MILLER. What a world.
Yeah Mr. Miller does not rank among my favorite writers anymore, but that story ranks among the best superhero comic story lines ever, I think. To dismiss it because Karen has to suffer is not that different from dismissing The Last Jedi cause all the heroes are female.
I know, right? Talk about the darkest timeline. Sheesh.
This has nothing to do with fridging, though. Fridging specifically refers to killing a female character for the sake of a male character’s story arc (that would eventually happen to Karen, but years after Miller stopped writing the comic.)
It sounds to me more like Sam is bothered by the general gridark tone of Miller’s run, which feels very “of its time” now. Karen becoming a drug addict is just one example of it.
He specifically calls out using Karen Page as a plot device to make life miserable for Matt Murdock, which is exactly what fridging is all about. The female character doesn’t have to die to fall under the umbrella. There are many, many articles available which explain the concept.
Can we please please please PLEASE allow people to dislike Frank Miller without turning it into a whole thing about politics and correctness and “indignation”? Because most of his stories are basically trash without needing to get into any of those things. They’re just pretty shitty comics on their own merits, with a lot of violence and not much story to speak of.So can we just read what critics wrote in the light of shitty story, grotesque depictions of human bodies, and dreary tone, rather than trying to recast a reasonable comment about character development into some sort of PC statement that you need to be outraged at? Please?
I would think boiling down Frank Miller’s work into “pretty shitty comics on their own merits, with a lot of violence and not much story to speak of” is probably selling him just a liiiitttttlllleeee short, but hey man, you do you. As for my supposed “outrage” up there…I do not think that means what you think it means. “Can we please please please PLEASE not view every single piece of pop culture that has come before 2016 through the “indignation filter” on the lens that is 2018? Please?” is almost as far from outrage as humanly possible.
I think by the time you’ve hit your fifth “please” you sound a little outraged.
No, you sound pretty outraged. Like you can’t handle someone with a different take than yours, especially if it carries a whiff of *gasp* politics!It’s fine if you disagree but it’s childish to try to summarily shut down someone else’s opinion and then pull the “lol u mad” when someone points out that you haven’t contributed at all.
My question, why does every take on pop culture need to carry a “whiff” of politics now? Yes, if we examine content from 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago, there are elements that don’t align with our values today. I’m currently rereading “The Big Sleep” (1939) and are there some passages, scenes, words and scenarios which don’t align with our current values? Yes. Does that make Raymond Chandler a hack? Hardly.
Exasperated, is more like it.
“Not much story to speak of”? Spoken like someone who’s never read them, or has trouble reading in general. Sorry the pictures weren’t pretty enough for you.
Yeah, all I want to do is watch Triumph of the Will without all these PC SJWs giving me shit for it!
I remember reading Miller’s Daredevil run when I was a kid, and taken in the context of the times, it was invigorating and revolutionary. The month in between issues seemed interminable, because you never knew what was going to happen next.
I think the 35+ years of Miller influenced comics has made the original stuff look worse, because it strips it of its individuality and uniqueness…I mean, SO much since then has looked and felt like those comics that if you go back to them, all of the elements that have been recycled ad nauseum fade, and you end up just looking at what is left over, picking apart the stories and social issues without seeing the big picture…
This was an excellent addition to the conversation; thank you!
Guys, please please stop having opinions I disagree with!!!
Where in there did I ask him not to have “opinions” I don’t agree with? I’m sure there is pop culture he really enjoys that leaves me cold, and that’s okay, that’s what makes for an interesting discussion. What has become endlessly tiring (in my opinion), is the constant (as another commenter put it) “whiff of politics” in any critique of pop culture, ESPECIALLY those movies, TV shows, books, etc that have come out prior to 2018.
I finally saw Godfather I and II. I now fully appreciate where pretty much every single gangster spoof/stereotype comes from. I didn’t even realize Brando wasn’t in the second one. Man that scene in the second one where Vito stalks Fanucci is incredible!-d
And it’s not just movies – those films had a huge impact on how actual mafioso dress and behave.
Hey, not EVERY mafia stereotype! Some of them come from Goodfellas.
I swear I have a vivid memory of seeing the last scene (where Sonny and Fredo are alive again and Michael says he’s joining the Army) and at the end everyone else goes into the other room and the camera stays on Michael as he sits at the dining room table, and you can hear them all singing Happy Birthday to the Don, and I distinctly remember hearing Marlon Brando’s voice calling out “WHERE’S MICHAEL?” I even remember Brando getting a “special thanks” credit at the end. But I’ve never been able to find that version of this scene since.
That is because it is real. If memory serves, it is in (sadly not-available-on-disc) The Godfather Saga, a re-edited version Copolla did, rearranging the first two films into time sequential order.
That scene you reference was an outtake (if I recall) that, for this presentation, was brought back in.
Had to post: you are not crazy, this isn’t a Mandella effect thing.ETA:
https://cinapse.co/the-godfather-saga-45th-anniversary-blu-ray-release-4db4feba6ee8
Except I don’t seem to find it on Amazon. Personally, even after having the original releases on VHS (as well as the late, lamented Saga, which was loaned to a friend, and his home burned down, so I am glad he and his family were unharmed and it was merely a possession), and the restored versions on disc, I would cough up the $ for a nice, restored blu-ray of this.
Now you need to watch the SCTV parody of The Godfather…
omg, i watched them both for the first time this past year, too. now all the references have a context i was missing, even though i got the gist of them before watching them.
I binge watched Babylon 5 on Amazon Prime. It started out slow but by Season 2 I was hooked. By far my favorite episode was Comes the Inquisitor. Though I thought the final season was a bit underwhelming. SPOILERS FOR SEASONS 4 AND 5….Apparently the plan for the Season 4 finale was originally supposed to end with Sheridan being tortured by Earth Corps as part of a cliffhanger that would have been resolved in Season 5. But then the show got cancelled and so JMS pushed the two parter into the middle of Season 4 and rushed in the finale planned for Season 5. But then the show got renewed for a 5th Season on USA so JMS had to create a whole new storyline for it.
damn, this is one i need to do on my list. i used to watch bits and pieces when it was on air, but never consistently like i did with star trek.
Zod enforces Peace to You All.
It’s nice to have a nice, concise reason to disregard the opinion of a blog writer in a variety blog such as the AV Club. Take Sam Barsanti, for instance. Now I know to watch for his name and, once I see it, to quit reading as I know that his written opinion will have no further depths than one could find in your average oil-sludged, dog-shitted-in puddle in some alleyway that you really shouldn’t have gone into in the first place.
Great entry. Thanks!
I’ve never really made the plunge into graphic novels/comics, so I just ordered MFTIM and two Junji Ito collections. I’ve heard about Ito before, and had him on my list to check out a few years ago, but just never got around to it.I’m a big fan of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and anime so I’m pretty excited. Merry Christmas to me!
Dear Katie Rife, kudos for getting around to Tampopo. Kudos I say. That and Cinema Paradiso are great films-about-life that I watch regularly; always catching something new whenever I watch them.
I’ve been thinking about Tampopo a lot lately. San Diego has been experiencing a boom in ramen houses for the last few years, and the people I’m around have never heard about the movie. I remember Siskel & Ebert trumpeting it in the ‘80s, and I watched it a few times on VHS with friends in the ‘90s. But that movie seems to have disappeared from the cultural consciousness. Such a shame, because it’s so delightful.
“Such a shame”, well said, I completely agree. It really is one of those rare movies that I can honestly say is above any normal category. Even to ‘just’ refer to it as a movie I feel is dumbing it down. There was an article on The Takeaway about rice omelettes a while back… and not one mention in the article about a whole scene dedicated to just that, in Tampopo :/
I spent a lot of time listening to the Talking Heads – a band I’d never really thought much of before, which is surprising since most of the music I love can draw a straight line back to them. But after finally promising to spend some serious time getting to know TH I finally get it. In fact it was at like 11pm one night this summer while I was listening to houses in motion that I think I audibly shouted “I get it! This band is incredible.” Anyway I’m glad I’m finally on the Talking Heads bandwagon.
Season 2 of The ExpanseAgnes Varda – holy shit are La Bonheur and Cleo 5 to 7 amazing.
I finally got around to watching Train to Busan and holy shit what a great movie.
really underappreciated, strange to say. Someone online says the Seoul Station animated zombie movie he released that same year is even better. He’s also making a sequel.
I described it as World War Z (minus any studio interference) combined with Runaway Train.
Started watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia this year because I heard one of the characters comes out… and years ago, someone (here on AV Club, holla!) had told me I would appreciate its humor. They were correct.
Watched the first run of Twin Peaks this year. Mostly pleased, I love Coop and Audrey and actually most of the very sincere melodramatic performances. The horror is so effective I think because everything else David Lynch does seems designed to lure you into a sense of eccentric comfort so that when it is breached it feels like a violation of trust, albeit one you signed up for.
I finally played Nier: Automata. Not just one of the best games of 2017, but in my top 5 games of all time. An instant classic.
Congratulations, @Danette Chavez. I wish I could go back and experience PUBERTY 2 for the first time again. The first time I heard the sax kick in on Happy I was gobsmacked.In other news, I finally got around to watching MAD MEN, most of which was binged over the last week. It was everything I had hoped it would be and more.By far the best albums I heard for the first time this year were HOMOGENIC and SOUND OF SILVER by Bjork and LCD Soundsystem. Both of those albums are just perfect and I can’t wait to listen to the rest of Bjork’s catalogue.
I’m going to take a lot of flak for this but I finally sat down to watch a full episode of The Office (US version) and… I couldn’t do it. It might have been simply because it was the first episode, and I’ve seen enough clips to be familiar with the characters, but I struggled. Is there a good spot to start watching? I tend to enjoy the clips I see of it which was why I wanted to actually get into it.
I watched it for the first time this year. It has the occasional moment, but I don’t think it’s a good show. You’ve seen/heard all the jokes already, and Jim and Pam are really unlikable. The highlight of the show is the Dinner Party episode, so watch that, but otherwise, meh.
Start with the episode with sensitivity training. It’s one of the first three or four.
Ill check it out thanks!
I think it got better in the 2nd season. Diversity Day is probably the funniest episode of the 1st season.
Someone mentioned the “sensitivity training episode”, is that the same one?
I think everyone’s sort of said it already, but the first few episodes of the US Office are pretty rough. I remember watching when they premiered on NBC, as a big fan of the British version, and was almost embarrassed by how lame it was; they’re basically trying to mimic the original, and it just doesn’t work. But it definitely clicks into gear by season 2. I’m not a huge stan for the show like a lot of VOMs (Very Online Millennials, which god I hope I just made up), but I’ve definitely watched and enjoyed enough of it to say it’s worth giving a shot.
I’d probably just go straight to season 2. The pilot episode is absolutely wretched and not characteristic of the show at all. They bizarrely used the same script as the first episode of the UK version and it doesn’t fit these characters or their tone at all. Episode 2 is the first original episode and is definitely better, but IIRC not as good as pretty much anything in season 2. The first season is only 6 episodes anyway, which is great, because they were able to course-correct for season 2 (which is a full-length season) much more quickly and efficiently than many sitcoms do.
Parks & Rec did the same thing — first season was mostly lame, but was only 6 episodes, and was significantly retooled for season 2, even more so than The Office, to the point where some of the characters changed a lot in season 2. (All sitcoms should do this! It takes a lot of them a while to gel. Have them all start in mid-season and just do a mini-season to start with! This probably wasn’t intentional, just due to being a late mid-season replacement on NBC, but it worked really well.)
Boosie is fucking sick.
Got into Movietone and Cindytalk in a big way:And a week or two ago, I saw “California Split” for the first time, and it was great!
Just yesterday someone recommended Of Montreal.
They’re pretty good.
mmmm shrimpies
Nice. Any favorite songs?
Hissing Fauna is my therapist.
I finally got round to watching The Babysitter and Million Yen Women. Also like most people on YouTube I really got around to listening to 1970s/1980s Japanese Funk/Disco ever since that weird time this year when YouTube went round the same phase and was like “Hey, listen to Mariya Takeuchi and whomever you coward.”
I saw Vertigo and Barry Lyndon at the Music Box. A long time ago, but still my favorite.I just can’t do fleetwood mac, that cover does it for some reason, and the guy has two balls things hanging down, ugh. the song Tusk is cool tho.Oh, I listened to Flower Boy and it was good.
Undertale… also this 1982 cartoon movie “The Last Unicorn”.
I watched “Her” for the first time recently for a philosophy class and really liked it. Some of the plot was what I expected which was part of why I didn’t feel an urgency to watch it, but it was well acted and then the ending was pretty interesting to me.
I’ve been watching Cheers. Some of the humour still holds up, some not so much, but man..Sam and Diane. Talk about a toxic dumpster fire of a TV couple.Nicolas Colasanto was absolutely adorable.
This year I got around to watching The Middleman, a fairly delightful cancelled-before-its-time show that aired on ABC Family, of all places. It’s always sad when you see a show hit its stride around episode five or six but you know that there’s only twelve episodes in total.It’s an odd little show that did a spy/superhero kind of thing back before the current superhero movie boom. The acting is shaky at times, but the plots and general production design are delightful. Most of all I loved its dedication to incredibly cheesy jokes and rapid-fire dialogue. I believe I found it from an AVC rec originally, but it had been on my too-watch list for so long that I can’t even remember.
Person of Interest: for years commenters on here, particularly ones whose opinions I respect like Evil Lincoln, have been telling me how great this show was. I sort of always meant to get around to it, but finally started this summer. I watch it with my mother, which means I haven’t gotten to binge it like I ordinarily would at home. I have to admit, everyone was right. It gets delightfully twisty and complex.
Enrico Colantoni’s performance as Elias has raced up the ranks to be one of my favorite villain performances of all time. And I’m a lifelong villain lover, so he has a lot of competition. I am in awe that the man who played one of my favorite good guys, Keith Mars, also plays one of my favorite villains. That’s something I can’t say about Antony Sher, Ron Cook, or even Louis Jourdan, though I do have some fondness for Gaston from Gigi.Another procedural I got around to this summer is Republic of Doyle. I have no idea why I never watched it on the CBC when it originally aired. It’s a fun little romp, but most importantly, every Canadian actor alive has guested on it. I’m always happy to see one of my Stratford favorites show up, but what makes me happiest is the fact that all the living members of CODCO appeared. And now I want to visit Newfoundland again.
My big pop culture achievement this year was finally getting off my ass and watching Citizen Kane. I’d share my thoughts, but what would be the point? I thought it was great, lived up to the hype, but really, it’s all been said by way smarter people than me. You win this round, 77 years of constant critical analysis.
Counter-argument (from a film academic):Citizen Kane is a brilliant achievement in cinematic technique. And a boring as shit story about which I give not a rat’s anus. All the technique in the world cannot save it from the dullness of the script. And every technique it invented or popularized was used more effectively in more interesting films that came shortly after. Interior framing? Cool! Watch Rear Window instead.
Ah, necgray, where have you been all my life?If I have to lionize Welles, I would prefer Touch Of Evil (the re-edited to his notes version, which made it even better, which I did not think was possible).
One thing I will say about Kane, though, comes from an extremely painful experience, literally a paper cut on my left eyeball. I was all but blinded for about a week, and Kane came on the PBS station, and I tried to watch it (blasted out of my mind on codeine as well), and couldn’t keep my eyes open as the pain cut through the opioid. So I listened to it.The best radio show, ever. The overlapping dialog, the sound effects: brilliant. In fact, I began to rethink “Altmanesque” dialog completely afterwards. (Listened to it again, later, when not tripping out on anything, same exact reaction.)
Thank. Not a film academic but I found Citizen Kane sooooo boring both times I watched it (the second time thinking maybe I was just too young the first time around). I’ll stick with the less brilliant yet far more entertaining My Man Godfrey or Auntie Mame any day of the week.
Katie Rife, dat egg tho.
I watched the first two episodes of Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apt. 23. It’s entertaining. I also recently watched the first two eps of Rick & Morty. I find it only OK so far. I am also re-discovering the first season of Venture Bros. and holy shit have I forgotten what a blast that show is.
I have this weird habit of not listening to Kanye’s albums until years after they’ve been released (cf. the fact that I spent a chunk of early 2013 obsessively listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), which continued this year when I finally sat down and listened to Yeezus and Life of Pablo. Liked the former more than the latter.
The Mass Effect games. I don’t really know why it took me a decade to play one but it did. And a few weird missteps aside, I really enjoyed the whole series (well, less so Andromeda, which is very different from the others).
I finally watched the 1981 film Possession. It was amazing. I’m seriously considering buying the limited edition Blu-ray.
For a while I’ve been tracking every movie I watch, and most of them weren’t from this year. So it only took a little work of deleting (and I might have missed some) to produce the following list. Since I imagine people will want me to single some out, I should note that I was not previously interested in what I read about the work of Yorgos Lanthimos’ but I found The Killing of a Sacred Deer surprisingly enjoyable. Horror is probably my favorite genre, so for that field I should note that Bone Tomahawk lived up to the hype (but I can strongly recommend not watching Asylum Blackout, which was merely written by Zahler). I don’t watch comedy that often, so I should give credit to the revived I Do Movies Podcast for getting me to watch some classics from Ealing Studios like Man in the White Suit and Kind Hearts & Coronets.
The Killer
Hard Boiled
Face/Off
The Lost City of Z
The Thirteenth Floor
A Scanner Darkly
Cold Souls
The Hustler
Cool Hand Luke
The Color of Money
The Arbalest
Mad (Putka’s)
The Ladykillers
I’m All Right Jack
Being There
A Ghost Story
Industrial Symphony No. 1
Lucifer Rising
The Neverending Story
Return to Oz
Alice (Svankmajer’s)
Buy it Now
Afterschool
Simon Killer
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Midnight Cowboy
Driving Miss Daisy
Field of Dreams
It Comes at Night
Bottle Rocket
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Grand Budapest Hotel
River of Grass
Old Joy
Wendy and Lucy
Fat Girl
Cleo from 5 to 7
Innocence
The Howling
Fright Night
The Lost Boys
Colossal
Punch-Drunk Love
Phantom Thread
Bug
Killer Joe
Lola
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The Young Girls of Rochefort
The Accursed Kings
Asylum Blackout aka The Incident
Bone Tomahawk
Brawl in Cell Block 99
Nights and Weekends
Frances Ha
Lady Bird
The Bad Batch
The Cowboys
Rooster Cogburn
The Shootist
The Iron Giant
My Neighbor Totoro
It’s Such a Beautiful Day
Late Spring
Early Summer
Tokyo Story
Cry Uncle
The Toxic Avenger
Terror Firmer
Akira
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
The Sky Crawlers
All the Money in the World
The Fountainhead
Stella Dallas (1937)
The Big Parade
Legends of the Fall
Slow West
The Keeping Room
Grease
Hairspray
Little Shop of Horrors
Hush
Before I Wake
Gerald’s Game
The Invitation
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore
Tommy
Cabaret
Happy Death Day
Nanook of the North
Grey Gardens
The War Room
Salesman
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
You Can Count on Me
Margaret
Manchester by the Sea
Rififi
Topkapi
Judex
Bad Boys
Blade 1 & 2
Shotgun Stories
Take Shelter
Mud
Logan Lucky
Mama
Goodnight Mommy
Under the Shadow
Ride With the Devil
The Good, the Bad, the Weird
The Revenant
Night and Fog
Hiroshima mon amour
Last Year at Marienbad
Highway 61
Hard Core Logo
Pontypool
The Odd Couple
The Goodbye Girl
The Heartbreak Kid
Pacific Rim
Crimson Peak
The Craft
John Carpenter’s Vampires
Perfect Blue
Sin Nombre
Jane Eyre
Beasts of No Nation
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
The Duke of Burgundy
Clouds of Sils Maria
Haxan
The Bat Whispers
White Zombie
Song at Midnight
The Uninvited
The Beast with Five Fingers
The Queen of Spades
Halloween II, III & H20
Friday the 13th
The Burning
The Final Girls
The American Scream
The Nightmare
Cropsey
Tales from the Hood
Three Extremes
Tales of Halloween
Salem’s Lot (TV miniseries)
The Void
The Devil’s Candy
A Dark Song
The Wailing
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Lady from Shanghai
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
It Happened One Night
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Atomic Blonde
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Whisky Galore
The Man in the White Suit
In the Fade
The Grand Illusion
The Human Beast
The Rules of the Game
Spotlight
First They Killed My Father
War Machine
Millions
Less Than Zero
3 Godfathers
Better Watch Out
Krampus
A Christmas Horror Story
Yea, but can you rank them?
Only chronologically (in terms of the order in which I saw them). I can add that the “new” bit of pop culture I enjoyed the most this year was Thoroughbreds.
cougar town! had seen episodes randomly on tv but finally sat down and watched. still going through it but after seeing new girl, happy endings, p&r, the office, etc countless times i wanted something hangout-y to watch. really enjoy it.
I still haven’t seen Die Hard. Every time Andy makes a reference to it on B99, I don’t understand the joke. This was the week I vowed to change that.Wow, it’s really unnecessarily difficult to watch Die Hard in 2018. Netflix doesn’t have it. Hulu doesn’t have it. Amazon Prime doesn’t have it (at least not without additional fees). None of the cable channels I get have it on demand, and it’s not showing this year on any station. According to Google the only outlet streaming Die Hard is something obscure and exclusive to DirectTV users.
So….tonight I’m watching a bootleg. Sorry, FBI.
And Die Hard is well-known. Imagine trying to watch less popular movies. I’m old school in that I was never a fan of the death of the video store, and I still sort of resent companies like Netflix for putting them under. I just don’t understand why we had to lose one to have the other. I’d happily put up with late fees if it meant, you know, things actually being available. When people talk about the “convenience” of streaming, “convenience” almost becomes a subjective term.
Embarassingly it took me until 2018 to appreciate the timeless American art of the Grateful Dead. When I listen to the Dead I am more convinced than ever that we Russians must redouble our efforts to help America live up to her great potential.
I feel like I robbed myself of five years of not having listened to electric lady by Janelle Monae, after finally devouring it this year. That and every switch game that came out before but was ported to it this year.
You heard her older stuff, right? Archandroid and Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) are just as awesome.
Indeed. And I listened to them all with no knowledge of dirty computer being on the way.Which is a shame when I listened to that and didn’t care for it. Didn’t hate it, but didn’t think it was instantly classic like Arch and Electric lady.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about Dirty Computer too. Alas it’s what artists do: branch out, try new things, and go for mass appeal.
Instagram. As with most non-Facebook social media platforms, I became exhausted within the first week. Even then it’s only because I was an early FB adopter that I’m still on *that* Russian recruitment/corporate cocksucker of a site.
I binged Over The Garden Wall on Netflix – just a perfect cartoon miniseries.Adored the warm autumn colors, the eclectic weirdos, and the ominous atmosphere. Not to mention the songs – the title theme and Langtree’s Lament are my personal favorites.
Breaking Bad. I caught the first season when it came out and the writer’s strike killed so many things I liked, and when when it shortned BB’s first I went “welp, this is gonna get canceled, it’s way too interesting an idea to survive this” since season 1 is so much setup/slow burn. Life got super hectic and by the time I realized it came back it was a case of “gotta catch up now” and then they pulled the same stunt AMC did with Mad Men (and now HBO’s pulling with GoT) of “hey, wait a longass time for the last few episodes!” so I figured I’d just wait to get the box set. By then the hype of how good it was made me afraid to watch it only to be let down. It lived up to said hype. Wish I had gotten thru it originally.
The Expanse, Gravity Falls, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and The Venture Bros.The Expanse surprised me, I went in expecting to not like it and came away angry that I didn’t watch it when it first released! xDAmos is my surprise favorite character on that show. 😀
yeah – that surprised me back when I read the books & he just got more likeable & much more interesting than it seemed like he would be at the outset…but I’m so very glad they managed to make Amos awesome on the show, too…
I always have a few as I make it a habit when entering garage sales, thrift shops and/or estate sales to pick up something catches my eye. A CD here, a DVD there, a novel or two. Whatever. Also, the occasional gift will be given.Regardless, life insists on being life, that great and wonderful mocker of plans made, so things will be set aside “for later,” rediscovered and then the moment of epiphany.The eldest son gave me a three-volume set of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter Of Mars novels, and am currently plowing my way though them, finishing off Princess and then Gods Of Mars, and what a grand, silly buckle-your-swashes tale it is. Someone really should make a movie!(Yes. I know. I actually enjoyed the silly thing. Then I read the books and just cannot bear to even try again.)The big one, though…The Jazz Soul Of Little StevieOMG WTF have I been missing. He was… 12? at the time. And yeah, it is all there, I have it on now while typing. It is deserving of a good, headphones on and ignore the world approach.
I finally got around to checking out Black Mirror. This was a situation where I kept hearing of the show, yet I really wouldn’t hear anything about the show. But it’s so awesome, and I have a lot of favorites. I liked the ‘Star Trek’ one. And the one where Bryce Dallas Howard needs likes. And the one with the robot bees! And the one with the robot husband! And the one where eyes work like video! And the other one where eyes work like video! And the Prime Minster one! And the Black Museum one! And the one that ends with “Heaven is a Place on Earth.” Great song.
Finally got around reading Brandon Sanderson’s (first) Mistborn triology.